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It is widely recognised that the 21st century is seeing a geopolitical shift in global power relations towards Asia, particularly China. This has led Australia to officially embrace Asia as its regional home. But the neoliberal economic logic underpinning this embrace leads to a narrowly transactional conception of Australia’s relationship to Asia, governed by an opportunity/threat dichotomy. By contrast, this article describes Sydney’s Chinatown today as an increasingly hybrid, porous and transnational space of uneven and mixed-up, embodied Asian-Australianness. Juxtaposing the dynamic on-the-ground reality of this contemporary Chinatown with government discourse on Australia’s relationship to Asia, as exemplified by the 2012 White Paper Australia in the Asian Century, illuminates that Australia is not yet at home in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a critical analysis of the Hungarian government’s ‘Asian’ political discourse. It argues that in the wake of the economic recession, Hungary became more radical in its turn towards Asia, promoting a discourse that goes beyond economic relations and touches on sentiments of national identity and belonging. Via a discourse-historical analysis of three interrelated discursive events, the article shows how economic, cultural and racial discourses are reinforcing one another in building on the myth of cultural and racial affinity with Inner Asia and the Far East. This process is similar to the Eurasianist discourse in Russia and other ex-Soviet republics, and may have serious social and geopolitical repercussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strong presence of migrant workers and the emergence of transnational mixed families from the region in Singapore and other Asian capital cities is one of the undercurrents of inter-Asia globalization. The term ‘inter-Asian globalization’ here refers to various forms and daily realities of transnational exchanges within the region, as Southeast Asian workers migrate following the flow of capital, meet other workers in the region, make families, and find and make their home. Contrasting the perspectives of middle-class mixed Filipino-Indonesian families of professionals residing in Singapore and returning female migrant domestic workers, this article reflects on the meaning of home, citizenship and sense of belonging in a time of heightened mobility. The article contends that, while Asian globalization creates the context for making ‘in-transit’ hybrid cultural homes, the migrant’s cosmopolitan experience still hinges precariously on their status, gender and class in the hierarchy created by capital, and the interests and politics of sending and host countries concerning citizenship, economic development and space-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the authors of this introduction, home is not always or only sweet home. For us, it is constructed with contradictions, ruptures and anxieties. Indeed, the world never fails to present us with ‘real’ people with ‘real’ issues of home. After ‘rescuing’ the idea of home from its two assumed arch-enemies ‘mobility’ and ‘urbanization’, we will proceed to formulate our appeal to reconceptualize ‘home’ and explicate why and how to do so. We have cited instances from Hong Kong, Beijing and Asia at large, not only because the empirical core of this special issue is on Asia, but, more fundamentally, also because we want to take issue with the Eurocentric bias in the debates on home hitherto. We conclude by making a modest plea – or more accurately, to configure various trajectories of thinking on ‘home’ into a plea – to bracket home as (making) place, (not) belonging and (flexible) citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the early findings of a research project examining the role of lifestyle television in Asia. Life-advice programming in East Asia includes a range of ‘popular factual’ formats from cooking and health shows to makeover and consumer advice shows. A growing body of Anglo-American scholarship emphasizes the cultural importance of lifestyle programming, suggesting that the explosion of lifestyle formats at this particular cultural-historical moment connects to broader transformations in western neoliberal states, especially the rise of individualized, consumer-based models of identity and citizenship. Focusing on Singapore, China and Taiwan, this article offers a discussion of the potential of such arguments in these contexts, in light of our findings about the forms of life-advice programming prevalent in these three television industries. In particular, it explores the relevance (or not) of Anglo-American theories of neoliberal selfhood in these sites as read through the lens of lifestyle television. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]