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The worldwide popularity of South Korean popular music has generated global consumer demand for variations of its grueling training regimen offered by talent recruitment agencies and dance studios. Using the case study of the South Korean popular music boot camps offered by the Australia-based agency, The Academy, this article seeks to frame these performative engagements along more cosmopolitan notions of choreographic co-creative labor. In contrast to the highly competitive South Korean popular music machinery, participation in these boot camps can be characterized as affective prosumer “free labor” from trainees from diverse backgrounds, abilities, and motivations. Through programs that enable trainees to “re-present,” “re-organize,” and “re-interpret” K-pop dance performances, studios like The Academy leverage on K-pop’s popularity and its training pedagogies so as to open new fields of creative labor. Accompanying such openings are the strengthening transnational connectivities in the activities of The Academy in intensifying existing multicultural networks in Australia. The studio is also part of a more cosmopolitan platform in orienting traditionally Eurocentric mainstream Australia culturally toward the Asia-Pacific region. By further democratizing the dance abilities of K-pop choreographies, initiatives like The Academy serve in enlarging creative labor in transnational rhythmic communities.

Using the 2000-2010 South Korean historical medical dramas Heo Jun (The Way of Medicine), Dae Jang Geum (Jewel in the Palace), and Jejoongwon (The Hospital) as case studies, this article examines televisual reimaginations of Korean medical modernity as (re)interpretative popular culture texts. Particularly in the areas of the anatomical sciences and surgery, modern medicine's emancipatory potentials in these productions are set semi-fictitiously in pre-modern Joseon historical contexts. Dramaturgically challenging entrenched social hierarchies and ossified cultural taboos of Institutionalized Confucianism, these dramas' progressive physician-protagonists emphasize the universality and impartiality of medical knowledge in what is herein termed as Generative Confucianism.

This paper explores episodes of provocative online articulations and the accompanying angry public reactions as part of the cultural politics of juvenile online resistance in contemporary Singapore. Rather than viewing such delinquency as ‘youth deficits’, this paper seeks a literary-culturalist standpoint in exploring the uninhibited audacity of these public online displays. We perceive such performances as reflecting the critical and socially unrestrained emotional subjectivities of ‘youth mirroring deficits’ of the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’. The authors propose to appropriate the colloquial Singaporean Chinese Hokkien term of Si Geena (brat), a label commonly used to describe these offending personalities, to frame the dynamics of youth resistance, and new media in Singapore. Si Geena are often un-social digital juvenile provocateurs baiting moral outrage and public indignation. In turn, societal responses to the Si Geena’s episodic resistance reveal the contradictions, insecurities, and volatility of Singapore’s reactive public.

This article will revisit the beginnings of the spread of Korean popular entertainment in China in the mid-1990s to early 2000s by examining the contents of previously untapped Chinese language popular entertainment magazines and public recollections on internet forums. Considered here as critical archival resources, the authors argue that these materials are instrumental in offering both new chronologies and insights to the circulatory process of the regionalization of Korean popular cultures or Hallyu. Korean popular music (hereafter K-pop) entered China after the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Instead of the often singularized, culturalist argument of “shared traditions,” this article offers a more dynamic historiography of the Korean Wave in China that is termed here as “Analog Hallyu.”

This paper examines the role of Singapore’s “national television” in engendering and contemporarizing a more autonomously hyphenated “Singaporean-Chinese” cultural identity through the local Chinese language popular music of Xinyao (新謠) from the early 1980s. As the genre is increasingly considered officially to be part of the republic’s intangible cultural heritage, the authors seek to revisit Xinyao’s evolution as part of the de-centering of Sinophone popular literature for a music that germinated autonomously from Mainland China. Leveraging from the Chinese language national media networks alongside with the official privileging of the Mandarin over “Chinese dialects,” Xinyao became a contemporary Sinophone enterprise in Singapore’s mediascape. Aside from the televised singing contests or “Chinese Talentimes” that engendered a new generation of performers and audiences among Singaporean youths, the theme songs of the popular locally produced Chinese language television dramas composed and sung by Xinyao artists have popularized the genre. Collectively, Xinyao served in Mandarinizing the sonic-linguistic cultural imaginations along the narratives of the nation-state in molding the National-Sinophone of the hyphenated “Singaporean-Chinese” cultural identity.

With Singapore serving as the subject of exploration, The Hard State, Soft City of Singapore explores the purview of imaginative representations of the city. Alongside the physical structures and associated practices that make up our lived environment, and conceptualized space engineered into material form by bureaucrats, experts and commercial interests, a perceptual layer of space is conjured out of people’s everyday life experiences. While such imaginative projections may not be as tangible as its functional designations, they are nonetheless equally vital and palpable. The richness of its inhabitants’ memories, aspirations and meaningful interpretations challenges the reduction of Singapore as a Generic City. Taking the imaginative field as the point of departure, the forms and modes of intellectual and creative articulations of Singapore’s urban condition probe the resilience of cities and the people who reside in them, through the images they convey or evoke as a means for collective expressions of human agency in placemaking.

This paper seeks to discuss the ecology of memories in contemporary Singapore as reflective of emerging tensions between the state and civil society in remembering the development of the nation-state for close to about five decades of independence. At the core of the tension are competing efforts to curate public memories through traditional and new media. As the state establishes a nostalgic community that sentimentalizes the dominant narrative of development in the Singapore Memory Project, alternative campaigns emerge to remember a more troubled past of arbitrary detention of political activists. Using the metaphors of ‘fumigating’ and ‘fuming’ to frame the staging of a more reified reminiscence of the past against the resurfacing a more traumatized history, the authors seek to position the recent contestations as the beginnings of a new chapter of communicating and personalizing history in the republic.

The Keretapi Tanah Melayu (KTM) Berhad railway line was a crucial mode of transport for goods and passengers moving between Singapore and its neighbouring country Malaysia. Tanjong Pagar railway station – the terminus of the KTM railway line in Singapore – ceased operation from 1 July 2011, and KTM railway tracks in Singapore were slated for removal, after the relocation of the terminus to a border station between the two countries. This event has led to various initiatives by the state and civil society to remember the KTM railway. This article explores how people utilize Web 2.0 technologies to archive and share railway memories in Singapore. The differences between state-initiated websites and grassroots efforts of remembering the KTM railway bring into question the nature of state–society relations in the practices of memory-making in the digital era. Once reliant on state-run museums, Singaporeans are now remembering the KTM railway tracks through volumes of still and moving images that they have captured themselves, enabled by digital cameras and social media tools. The use of digital media has shaped not only how the railway in Singapore is remembered, but also who participates in remembering.

I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we s...

This article seeks to demonstrate the significance of new media in reconfiguring and expanding the politics of conservation in the rapidly urbanizing postcolonial city state of Singapore. The critical role of new media is examined, in providing new access and connectivity to the efforts of non-governmental organizations, particularly heritage groups in the republic in advocating for the conservation of lands around the former Malayan Railway line and Bukit Brown Cemetery in Singapore. In two case studies, activists and enthusiasts of all ages are seen to quickly build up and share an organic knowledge and memory base in cyberspace, through postings on Facebook and sharing of digital photographs and videos, recorded with digital cameras and smartphones. These actions are significant as collectively staking cultural ownerships of heritage sites about to be lost. As new media are promptly adopted as tools for social mobilization with the ability to circulate events, news and debates through Google+ to Twitte...

Beneath the glittering new skyscrapers that define the island city-state has been decades of systematic framing and reframing by the Singapore officialdom of its cultural identity. Often articulate...

Since the early 1980s, Hong Kong cinema has been serving as a critical platform in articulating the deep seated cultural uncertainties arising from the formalization of the timeline for the handover of the British colonial outpost to the People's Republic of China. Although not being able to hold off the inevitability of transfer between empires, Hong Kong films have carefully resisted from enthusiastically sharing Beijing's nationalistic symbolization of the reclamation of the prosperous financial centre an humiliating era of Western imperialism and the beginning of an re-emerging unified China. Instead of following the linear and heroic trajectories of decolonization, the city's filmmakers have given more sympathetic identifications with British colonial governance that have provided a liberal and progressive seeding ground for the modernization and democratization of Chinese culture and society. Nonetheless, it is in the treatment of traditional martial arts through the highly skilled, righteous and pa...

The St John's Ambulance Brigade established itself in British Malaya in the 1930s, as part of efforts to mobilise and train the colony's subjects for civil defence as the geo-strategic climate in the Pacific deteriorated. This article demonstrates how the provision of emergency medical care was a gendered and racialised undertaking in the colonial context. Unlike the military, comprising mainly European and ‘trusted’ ethnic Indian soldiers, the realm of ‘passive defence’ was identified as a feminised undertaking for women and ethnic Chinese men who were considered to be either too vulnerable or too disloyal to bear arms. The rapid advance of Japan's military in south-east Asia violently shattered such social boundaries, as many women and non-European volunteers found themselves exposed by retreating Allied forces to the Japanese offensive and took up duties at posts from which their European supervisors had been forced to desert. Mainstream military historiography has often been highly gendered towards what is considered as the male-dominated public domain of the battlefield. In this respect, the involvement of the St John's Ambulance Brigade reveals the process in which colonial ethno-gender identities and hierarchies were being established, appropriated and subsequently subverted by the exigencies of the war in British Malaya.

Until the computerization of music making and the ‘napsterization’ of its consumption into downloadable soundtracks by the late 1990s, popular music flows had been largely determined by the corpora...

Once contained in personal diaries, family photo albums and scrapbooks of small groupings of friends, the private and intimate realms of memories have now made a huge jump into the public domain of...

Introduction: Korean Media in a Digital Cosmopolitan World Youna Kim Part I: Power and Politics of the Global 1. Soft Power and the Korean Wave Joseph Nye and Youna Kim 2. The Korean Wave as Method: Inter-Asian Referencing Koichi Iwabuchi 3. Reconfiguring Media and Empire Oliver Boyd-Barrett Part II: Popular Media and Digital Mobile Culture 4. Korean Wave Pop Culture in the Global Internet Age: Why Popular? Why Now? Youna Kim 5. For the Eyes of North Koreans? Politics of Money and Class in Boys Over Flowers Suk-Young Kim 6. K-pop Female Idols in the West: Racial Imaginations and Erotic Fantasies Eun-Young Jung 7. Negotiating Identity and Power in Transnational Cultural Consumption: Korean American Youths and the Korean Wave Jung-Sun Park 8. Digitization and Online Cultures of the Korean Wave: "East Asian" Virtual Community in Europe Sang-Yeon Sung 9. Hybridization of Korean Popular Culture: Films and Online Gaming Dal Yong Jin 10. K-pop Dance Trackers and Cover Dancers: Global Cosmopolitanization and Local Spatialization Liew Kai Khiun Part III: Perspectives Inside/Outside 11. Cultural Policy and the Korean Wave: From National Culture to Transnational Consumerism Hye-Kyung Lee 12. Re-Worlding Culture?: YouTube as a K-pop Interlocutor Kent A. Ono and Jungmin Kwon 13. The Korean Wave as a Cultural Epistemic Anandam Kavoori 14. The Korean Wave and "Global Culture" Yudhishthir Raj Isar

Introduction: Postcoloniality, Race and Multiculturalism - Daniel P.S. Goh and Philip Holden Part I: Postcolony and Cosmopolis 1. A literary history of race: reading Singapore literature in English in an historical frame - Philip Holden 2. Malaysian history textbooks and the discourse of ketuanan Melayu - Helen Ting 3. Eyes turned towards china: postcolonial mimicry, transcultural elitism and Singapore chineseness - Daniel P.S. Goh 4. Pick and mix for a global city: race and cosmopolitanism in Singapore - Angelia Poon 5. Makkal Sakti: The Hindraf Effect, Race and Postcolonial Democracy in Malaysia - Vijay Devadas Part II: Representing Race, Performing Multiculturalism 6. Reading the films of independent filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad: cosmopolitanism, Sufi Islam and Malay subjectivity - Gaik Cheng Khoo 7. Racial stereotypes in Singapore films: Commercial value and critical possibilities - Kenneth Paul Tan 8. The Singapore Indian woman: a symptom in the quest for Chinese Identity - Matilda Gabrielpillai 9. Deghettoizing subcultures: the multicultural evolution of Mat Rock in Singapore - Kelly Fu and Liew Kai Khuin 10. Bhangra and the reconstruction of 'Punjabi-ness' in Multiracial Singapore - Charanpal S. Bal 11. The art of race: rethinking Malaysian identity through the art of Wong Hoy Cheong - Michelle Antoinette Conclusion: Toward a critical multiculturalism - Daniel P.S. Goh.

This article explores the treatment of the issues of disability and healing in the films of Hong Kong’s independent filmmaker, Fruit Chan, between the years 1997 and 2004. These films include: Made in Hong Kong, Little Cheung, Longest Summer, Hollywood Hong-Kong, Durian Durian, Public Toilet and Dumplings. Distinguished by his efforts to forefront subaltern subjects in the city, Chan’s films highlight the complexities of the relationship between social marginality and disability, as well as the medical market and healing cultures. By contrasting diverse forms of healing in his highly hybridized and transnational vernacular medical marketplace, Chan’s films are instrumental in displaying the underlying tensions of bio-politics on screen. Accepted version

The evolution of moral panics is dependent on the particular social context and the ability of certain issues to trigger concern within society. In this paper, the authors have employed a cross-comparative study of the heavy metal music subcultures in Singapore and Malaysia to understand the differences in the issues that generate such panics based on the socio-political context of each country and its current concerns. Although the youth involved in both cases are marginalised male Malays, the framing of their alleged deviance and criminality permits, in the case of Singapore, only a limited possibility for moral panic creation given the conservative socio-political governance that limits allegations such as 'Satanism'. In the case of Malaysia, where a 'large-scale' moral panic involving black metal emerged in 2001, the recent trend towards Islamisation gave fodder for the condemnation of black metal based on the allegations of the anti-Islamic behaviour of Muslim youth involved in the black metal scene. In both cases, such groups were exploited by parties claiming to defend the social fabric of the moral majority, but in the latter case it took on grave implications due to the extent of the state and public response. This paper thus argues that the framing of these moral panics is an important component determining the relative 'success' of the panic or its ability to capture public and state imaginings. Accepted version

The AWARE saga: Civil society and public morality in Singapore Edited by TERENCE CHONG Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2011. Pp. 181. Bibliography, Index. The image of a subservient and obedient citizenry in Singapore has probably been derived from a seemingly authoritarian political culture determined largely by the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) that has been in power since the republic gained self-rule in 1959. Under the watchful and paternalistic gaze of its senior statesman Lee Kuan Yew, his son Lee Hsien Loong and their efficient Mandarins, there has been effectively little trace of active dissent in the republic. In reality, the coherence of the PAP-run state is an exception rather than the norm in contemporary Singapore where angry disagreements in country clubs, cultural associations and corporations often spill into the public arena in extra-general meetings (EGMs) reported enthusiastically by the government-controlled media seeking juicier local news than official exhortations and lectures at ribbon-cutting occasions. In 2009, the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE), which has been quietly promoting women's rights in Singapore, hogged significant attention in the republic's media. A sequence of sensationalised events within AWARE, beginning from a coup by a predominantly conservative Christian women's group orchestrated by a 'feminist mentor' to their unceremonious ejection by secular activists some two months later in a boisterous EGM, to the government's balancing act in keeping the church separate from politics within the next few months, revealed Singapore's undercurrents. In the end, while the prime minister chided the Christian Right openly for trying to use religion to lobby their cause, the government also simultaneously reaffirmed its conservatism by suspending AWARE from the Education Ministry's Sexuality Education programmes. Thinking that this saga deserved to be more rigorously reflected upon, sociologist Terence Chong brought together 11 observers in an edited volume, The AWARE saga: Civil society and public morality in Singapore. The contributors are a mix of academics from a range of disciplinary backgrounds--Chua Beng Huat, Gillian Koh, Eugene Tan, Theresa W. Devasahayam, Lai Ah Eng, Alex Tham and Vivienne Wee--as well as journalists and lay observers--Dominic Chua, James Koh, Loh Chee Kong and Jack Yong. In many ways, the AWARE saga has allowed the contributors to open up new perspectives on the changes surrounding a post-industrial Singapore where an increasingly educated and opinionated populace is contesting the moral economy of a neo-liberal landscape. As Chua and Chong argue, this landscape becomes embodied in the politics of sexuality given the transition towards a cultural economy of creative and entertainment industries, including casinos and gay bars, which has been seen by the Christian Right as legitimising the Babylonian sins of promiscuity and homosexuality in Singapore. …