Lisa Law

Beyond Heroes and Victims: Filipina Contract Migrants, Economic Activism and Class Transformations

This article employs anti-essentialist Marxist analysis to shed light on the diverse economic activities that Filipina contract migrants are engaged in at home and overseas. We point to the limitations of dominant representations of these women as heroes of national development or victims of a global capitalist economy, which tend to foreclose a discussion of multiple class processes engendered by transnational labour migration. In drawing on a fluid theory of class, we investigate how contract domestic workers are involved in multiple class processes that allow them to produce, appropriate and distribute surplus labour in innovative ways. We also discuss the activities of the Asian Migrant Centre, a non-governmental organization working with domestic workers in Hong Kong, whose efforts to inspire the entrepreneurial aspirations of these women reflect the importance of recognizing migrant workers multiple economic identities. This analysis has implications for how we imagine the agency of contract workers, as well as the performativity of research and advocacy work.

Home cooking: Filipino women and geographies of the senses in Hong Kong

This paper considers how migrant women become embodied subjects in foreign cities. It draws on the experiences of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong, and their active creation of places in the city that emulate a ‘sense’ of home (through sights, sounds, tastes, aromas and so on). Rather than explicate extreme forms of bodily experience some women mediate in their working lives - such as physical containment, hunger or violence - I interrogate unconventional forms of body politics that take place outside Hong Kong homes. In examining spaces of the city where Filipinas engage in mass leisure activities, I shed light on the relationship between space, bodies and sensory experience. The senses are not merely an intrinsic property of the body - they are a situated practice that connects the body to overlapping spaces of power in the cultural economy of labour migration. By linking sensory experience to urban culture and power relations in the city, I offer alternative maps of people and places that tell us something different about diasporic experience and the political importance of geographies of the senses.

Defying Disappearance: Cosmopolitan Public Spaces in Hong Kong

This paper explores the relationship between public space and cultural politics in Hong Kong. There is a tendency to assert that public space is disappearing in the city, whether through overt control of the public sphere or the commodification of landscape. While similar views have been expressed in relation to many cities around the world, in Hong Kong these concerns are difficult to disentangle from post-colonial politics. This paper therefore situates anxieties about public space within an historical geography of the Central district. This contextual strategy is deployed to frame a contemporary case study of the imaged powerful and powerless in the city: Hong Kong Land, Central leading landlord and Filipino domestic workers who gather in Central on Sundays to enjoy their day off. It is suggested that this gathering and the political rallies it hosts disrupt normative understandings of public space by introducing a transnational element that helps us to see Hong Kongs public spaces as contested. The paper concludes by pointing to the possibilities opened up by conceiving the public space of Central as a cultural landscape and as a cosmopolitan space reflective of Hong Kongs possible futures.

The Beach, the gaze and film tourism

Based on the book by Alex Garland, Twentieth Century Foxs movie, The Beach, proffers critical views on the effects of traveller tourism in Thailand. Yet the movie is itself bound up with tourist practices in a variety of ways. In this article, we are concerned with how such intertwining extends beyond `film tourism, conventionally conceived. In particular, we seek to elaborate the modification of the Maya Bay set(ting) for The Beach as part a broader process whereby `tropical environments are staged in line with the `tourist gaze. In this way, film viewing itself may be understood as a form of tourism — a kind of tropical flânerie which both reflects and constitutes a range of tourist practices in Thailand. Yet these practices extend beyond the western film viewer or would-be tourist, and include Thai environmental activists, Japanese Di Caprio fans and researchers such as ourselves. Including these groups helps us displace normative constructions of the gaze, and situates The Beach within an interpretive field that considers networks of influence rather than unidirectional representation.

Transnational cyberpublics: new political spaces for labour migrants in Asia

This article offers a cultural interpretation of transnational solidarities that Asian political activists are generating through electronic telecommunications networks. Its focus is on the experiences of the Migrant Forum in Asia [MFA], a network of non-government organizations that question issues of human rights, citizenship and working conditions of labour migrants in the Asian region. MFAs networking activities are being transformed as email enables daily conversations across multiple national borders, and new imagined communities of political action have emerged. English has been chosen as the language of solidarity, and photographs have become important in communicating activities and ideas. These media are innovative modes of transnational communication and shape political spaces that exist in symbiotic relation to the real. Attention to these practices, spaces and the symbolic meanings activists attach to these communities helps to illuminate a cultural politics of transnational activism in this region.

Re-mapping the politics of aid: the changing structures and networks of humanitarian assistance in post-tsunami Thailand

The 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami caused massive human and economic destruction. In this paper we argue that the international response to the tsunami exemplifies a shift in the way humanitarian aid is sourced and delivered, and tease out a framework for understanding the continuities and discontinuities that led to differential distribution across a range of sites in southern Thailand. On the one hand we examine the degree to which we can understand differential aid distribution in terms of persistent characteristics in the political economy, such as lack of transparency and corruption . We also consider the importance of ‘traditional’ structures, networks and resiliences and their role in influencing aid distribution. But these sorts of explanations must be nuanced in light of the emergence of new aid linkages and networks, particularly the move from formal organizations to individualized and direct donations. We suggest these patterns reflect new abilities of communities to mobilize trans-national networks, a more participatory approach to aid donation and an opportunity to re-map the multi-scalar politics of aid.

Social and Cultural Geographies of South East Asia

It makes little sense to talk of a South-East Asian region of social and cultural geography. At least two factors inhibit this kind of generalization. First, critical analyses of area studies emphasize how colonial histories and cold war geopolitics have constructed South-East Asia as an object of knowledge for Western academics and policy makers (see e.g. Anderson 1998; Emerson 1984). Any investigation that uses South-East Asia as a heuristic ndevice must therefore take seriously the production of area knowledge as part of the analysis, as well as the partiality and situatedness of that knowledge. Second, geographies of ‘regional’ difference obscure ‘internal’ ndiversity and complexity, including differences between—but also within—nations. If South-East Asia emerged more in relation to Anglo-American power and interests than to some nindigenously defined and experienced regionalism (Anderson 1998: 3), then how can we generalize across these diverse national contexts? We might also query the extent to which a national agenda is able to envision different spatial configurations such as ‘cross-cutting areas, the worldwide honeycomb of borderlands, or the process geographies of transnational flows’ (van Schendel 2002: 647) that constitute social and cultural life in South-East Asia. These too may be productive sites of knowledge production in the fields of social and cultural geography. We proceed to write despite these caveats, and despite the original ninvitation by editors of this journal to write about social and cultural geographies of individual countries. We do so in the hope that our insights might serve as catalysts for ndebate both within South-East Asia and beyond and, more pointedly, in the hope that using this heuristic device allows us to foreground the situatedness and partiality, nthe complexity and embeddedness of knowledge.

Capacities in Facing Natural Hazards: A Small Island Perspective

Isolated communities on small islands are often characterized as vulnerable and marginalized. We studied the recent history of Laingpatehi, a village on Ruang Island off the north coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia to show that the marginalization-vulnerability nexus can be offset by capacity and social cohesion to enable sustainable livelihoods. The island has been impacted by volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and competition for marine resources from mainland-based fishermen. The community has shown a remarkable ability to cope and prosper in the face of a series of external hazards. We used a sustainable livelihoods approach to identify the assets that enabled the villagers to cope. Strong social cohesion was central to the ability to organize the community and confront hazards. A diversified livelihood strategy drawing on the small island environment and its coastal and marine resources, income generating activities in a distant satellite village, and significant remittances from employment in other parts of Indonesia underpinned people’s capacities to face hazards. Government assistance played a supporting role. The case of Laingpatehi demonstrates how remoteness, rather than being a source of vulnerability, can provide access to existing resources and facilitate innovation. Disaster risk reduction strategies should focus more on reinforcing these existing capacities to deal with hazards and less on physical protection and postdisaster responses.

The ghosts of White Australia: Excavating the past(s) of Rusty's Market in tropical Cairns

This paper tracks the history of Rustys Market in Cairns, Queensland, a site once home to Chinatown from the late nineteenth century and now an important tourist site owned and managed by Gilligans Backpacker Hotel and Resort. I depict the site as a palimpsest that has simultaneously borne witness to, but also helped to shape, the more general development of cosmopolitan Cairns. My intention in rendering Rustys in this way is twofold. First, I show how the contemporary experience of cosmopolitan food shopping/eating is always and already layered over faded cosmopolitan pasts. The site has been home to Chinese, Japanese, and Southeast Asian vendors for well over a century; their presence in the current market is continuity as much as change. Second, I recover the older meanings of Chinatown that lay buried underneath the market floor. Retrieving these overwritten meanings reveals a culture of ‘forgetting’ in Cairns, of the role the Chinese played in early economic and cultural life but also of the White Australia policies that helped bring about Chinatowns ultimate demise. This paper intervenes in the forgetting by narrating/performing a layered interpretation of the site, offering a more contested sense of cosmopolitan belonging.

An advanced framework for food trail performance

The development of food trails is regularly touted as a key economic diversification strategy for struggling areas in rural Australia. Academics and consultants alike offer many strategies for their successful development; however, none present a comprehensive consideration of food trail quality. This article reports on a study exploring two food trails in regional Australia, based on a framework developed from success factors identified in the literature. While one trail was considered ‘successful’ and the other ‘unsuccessful’, the longevity of both trails was in jeopardy, raising questions of whether the success factors identified in the literature adequately address the real issues facing food trails. Drawing on the experiences of the case studies, a more critical and user-friendly framework for food trail performance is proposed with the aim of providing a tool for enquiry for rural areas considering diversification into food tourism through trails.