ABSTRACT Unlike liberal feminism, which critiques how liberal democracies exclude women on numerous fronts, neoliberal feminism denies gender differences even as it calls for women to craft their own work-family balance. Drawing upon ethnographic data gathered from professional women in Beijing, this paper argues that these women expend considerable emotional labor to suppress negative emotions and keep their jobs. In doing so, they embody “emergent femininity,” a local expression of neoliberal feminism centered on self-confidence, a willingness to articulate and satisfy personal desires, and heavy use of social media. Yet, pro-work attitudes affect these professional women’s family lives. However, insofar as emergent femininity and neoliberal feminism focus only on individual accomplishments, they cannot provide systemic betterment for women, regardless of personal achievements.

ABSTRACT In multi-ethnic Singapore, the immigration bureaucracy calibrates Permanent Resident (PR) intake to maintain racial proportions in the Chinese-majority country. Transnational migrants like Filipino Chinese, therefore, possess a higher chance of attaining PR status than other foreigners. But the written documents that Filipino Chinese submit to Singapore authorities can call their self-identification into question. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic engagement with Filipino Chinese in Singapore, this paper describes this phenomenon as an example of bureaucratic racialization, a process in which written documents—as the central element and tool of bureaucracy—produce meaning to construct migrant racial identity for the state. This paper conceives of bureaucratic racialization as a state-driven act of translation—a semiotic process that effaces contexts behind the written signifiers in documents to establish migrant racial identities. Ultimately, this paper shows that the anthropological study of documents enables scholars to make better sense of the racial politics central to transnational migration.

ABSTRACT Police interrogation, as a means of criminal investigation, is based on discursive interactions and serves the purpose of truth-seeking and information gathering. In China’s criminal justice system, many police officers believe that confessions are more persuasive than other forms of incriminating evidence and can help increase the success rate of criminal prosecutions. As such, when interviewing suspects, officers do not always seek information but rather aim to obtain confessions. Using transcripts from police interrogations as data, this research examines the accusatorial interrogation model in China. It focuses on language to explore the dynamics of power in police interrogations and police culture in China.

ABSTRACT This essay uses a microhistory of Chinese comfort women during the Asia-Pacific War to illuminate the gendered dynamics of violence and the contrasting emotions experienced by both sexually abused women and their Japanese perpetrators, forming a perpetrator-victim dyad. The essay employs the concept of intersectional emotions within a micro-historical framework to demonstrate that this violence against Chinese women, marked by racialization, constitutes one of the many facets of wartime violence. This violence manifests in two contrasting emotional responses that characterize the dyadic interactions against the backdrop of widespread violence during the Asia-Pacific War. This analysis is highly relevant in contexts of power-saturated sites defined by multi-layered violence that is racial, gendered, and imperial. By investigating the dichotomy of emotive dimensions of violence, this essay contributes to a nuanced understanding of the complex interplay among emotions, violence, gender, race, and imperialism. This examination reveals insights into the emotional framework governing the dynamics of violence and challenges the prevailing assumption of uniformity in studies of violence against victim-survivors.

ABSTRACT Over the last sixty ears, Singapore has expanded its land footprint over twenty-five percent by reclaiming land from the sea. Its outsized demand for sand to resource these projects has rendered regional sand markets precarious, and successive countries have banned sand exports to Singapore. Nevertheless, the Singapore government has committed to spending $SG one billion (US$ 767 million) a year until 2100 to mitigate sea level rise. While this includes a range of strategies, from improving drainage infrastructure to exploring adaptive solutions, in the main this involves reclaiming vast amounts of land from the sea to act as a bulwark against rising tides. These plans for resilience will be examined through the spectre of Long Island, a proposed project that will act as a barrier against sea level rise and incorporate nature-based solutions that are emblematic of resilience fetishism, all the while obscuring the more foundational element of this resilience, which is sand that will be obtained through granular arbitrage.

ABSTRACT Scholars have often assumed that a decolonial agenda would empower emancipatory and anti-racist movements. Nevertheless, there is also increasing recognition by scholars that the language of decolonization has been co-opted to support right-wing ideologies and majoritarian agendas, most prominently in India and Turkey. Similarly, in Malaysia, right-wing actors use decolonial rhetoric to criticize ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual minorities and silence their demands for equal rights. These actors have justified their intolerance by labelling any perceived threats to heteronormative Malay Muslim identity as examples of “Western imperialism” or “Chinese colonialism.” This article illustrates how decolonial vocabulary has been transformed into Sinophobia and homophobia by a right-wing Islamist group in Malaysia. It shows how revisionist nativist historiography, racism, and conspiracy theories can be integrated with moralistic calls for decolonization. Tracing developments over the past decade, the paper demonstrates how persistent dissemination, intellectual laundering, and innovative marketing strategies have helped mainstream a nativist Islamist decolonial agenda in Malaysia.

ABSTRACT This study examines online propaganda against fifty-seven former employees of the Indonesian Corruption Eradication Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi, KPK). This propaganda, which centered on false allegations that these employees were radical Muslims similar to the Taliban, was used as a pretext to fire them after they had failed a controversial compulsory civics test. Using Gramscian concepts of civil society and the political economy of communication, this study argues that the rise of computational propaganda in Indonesia reflects fundamental conflicts over state power and economic resources within the spheres of civil and political society. The campaign to portray KPK employees as Taliban members was the digital corollary of a political struggle among oligarchic elites over control of the anti-corruption agency as an instrument to advance their political aims. This article showcases how intra-oligarchic struggles have shaped the formation of public opinion about the KPK, a key aspect of reform, and examines their longstanding attempt to enforce oligarchic hegemony. It challenges existing studies on computational propaganda that foreground the nature of the state, or regime type, and the state’s adaptability to information technology.