Abstract
Two German graffiti artists are sentenced to caning in Singapore, as a group of prisoners dance to ‘Gangnam Style’ in the Philippines. Members of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement create new DIY artworks as a form of grassroots resistance, as Taiwanese Sunflower protesters occupy the central parliament. Documentaries exposing corruption and state crime are suppressed in Cambodia and Indonesia, as Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei flits in and out of surveillance in China. Welcome to Crime, Media, and Culture: Asia-style.
The twenty-first century has been termed the ‘Asian century’. Asia holds some four billion of the world’s population, and hosts four out of ten of the world’s largest economies – China, Japan, India and Russia – and a number of smaller nations with growing economic weight. The growth of China, in particular, has become a defining feature of the world’s political landscape. Images of Asia in Western popular culture tend to support this vision of progress and attainment – the futuristic cityscapes of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo suffuse Hollywood, from Bladerunner to Ghost in the Shell. This outward projection of success, however, masks striking examples of inequality, exploitation and control. From the historical erasure of mass killings in Indonesia to the ‘bargained authoritarianism’ of political protest in China, Asia is littered with examples of suppression and control, bolstered by what are often state-controlled media outlets. It is within this space that the study of crime, media and culture can make a vital contribution.
To date, however, Foucault’s depiction of criminology as an ‘elaborate alibi to justify the exercise of power’ (Cohen 1998: 5) is perhaps a more appropriate characterisation. As others have demonstrated (Lee and Laidler 2013), criminology in Asia is overwhelmingly administrative, concerned with the correct categorisation of crime and its response; often allied with the law, social work and administration of government rather than as an independent field of social science. As a result, the cultural, critical and sociological roots that animate much criminological scholarship in the United States and Europe have thus far struggled to find fertile soil. In this Special Issue we make the case for an alternative way of ‘doing criminology’ in Asia, as we showcase research studies within the strong critical tradition in media and cultural studies, sociology and film studies, that deal specifically with themes of power, politics, criminalisation and postcolonialism.
While in recent years there has been a firm recognition among criminologists, sociologists and media scholars for the need to move beyond knowledge created in the global North, production of this apparently ‘global’ knowledge remains clustered in a relatively narrow range of geographical sites. In this Special Issue we contribute to a broader research agenda focused on ‘criminology of the periphery’ (Lee and Laidler 2013; Laidler and Lee 2016) and ‘Southern criminology’ (Carrington et al 2016) that seeks to challenge and disrupt these hierarchies of knowledge-production, unsettling both geographical and disciplinary boundaries. Featuring contributions from a range of scholars grounded in different geographical, disciplinary and cultural contexts – often outside of criminology but inside of Asia – this Special Issue seeks to construct a space for dialogue on the potentialities within a critical approach to crime, media and culture in Asia. In this brief introduction, we reflect on these varying contributions, and their implications for future scholarship.
The countries that make up the Asian region are broad and diverse, overlaid with a tapestry of economic power-relations, political relationships, and cultural histories. Accordingly, the papers in the issue cover a sweep of national contexts and transnational issues, coupled with a disciplinary heterogeneity. While some papers focus on specific national contexts - for example Indonesia, India, and China - at every turn the interconnected economic and political histories of the continent are brought into play; whether it be the patterned similarities between Singapore and Malaysia, or the cultural connections between Hong Kong and Japan. Strikingly, the majority of contributions come from scholars working within disciplinary contexts outside of criminology, be it archaeology, cultural studies, film, sociology, youth studies, subcultural studies, philosophy, and communications. This disciplinary divergence is united less by a focus on crime and criminology per se and more by an attentiveness to questions of power, control and criminalisation. We see this as one of the key strengths of this Special Issue, as we go beyond the narrow confines of the official ‘crime’ problem in administrative criminology. Reading across these contributions, a number of themes emerge.
Criminalising culture. Several papers focus on forms of behaviour that would be legal, and therefore an unlikely object in criminology, in Anglo-European contexts. From feminist activism in China to public kissing in India, punk haircuts in Singapore to political dissent in Indonesia, contributions examine the boundaries between power, criminalisation and culture as they emerge in varying national contexts. Often, the transgression and punitive responses take place within the context of conservative, religious or authoritarian regimes in which the boundaries of criminalisation reflect highly ideological and moralistic bases.
Memory and memorialisation. Several of the countries examined in the Special Issue have complex, contested and violent histories that current governments wish to airbrush from history. From the events of Tiananmen Square in China in 1989 to the mass killings in Indonesia in 1965, and from the ‘stain’ of Kowloon Walled City on colonial Hong Kong to the disappearance of political protesters, cultural memory is a keenly delineated battleground in a number of Asian societies. Across the papers, we see the multiple and various ways in which these struggles for history are played out.
Contesting representations. Across the contributions, however, authors consistently highlight the ways in which these efforts toward suppression and criminalisation are subverted, diverted or otherwise resisted. From public ’kiss-ins’ in India to documentary film-making contesting ‘official’ history in Indonesia, the contributions demonstrate the ways in which the boundaries of crime and culture are debated, and the role of digital media as part of the continuum of control, counter-narrative and culture of contestation.
Movement and flow. While these forms of contest take place at national and local levels, they are inevitably shaped by regional and transnational issues. A final theme across the contributions, therefore, is that of movement and flow – of people, commodities, cultural symbols and intellectual exchanges – within Asia, and beyond. From young Muslim women in Singapore adopting fashionable ‘hijabster’ styles blending American and Malaysian style to the flow of Japanese pop culture to Hong Kong (and back again); and from the movement of migrant workers to the flow of illicit antiques from China to Europe (and back again), time and again we see the ways in which national and disciplinary borders are rendered problematic and porous.
The first paper, by Karen Joe Laidler, Maggy Lee and Gary Wong, offers both expert introduction and panoptic overview of the crime-media nexus in Asia. Engaging with and responding to recent arguments pertaining to the parochialism, positivism and lack of interdisciplinarity in media criminology in the global North, the paper dovetails a literature review of existing work on crime and media in Asia with an innovative cultural analysis of film and documentary. Covering studies of societal reaction and response, critical accounts of media, and cultural analyses, the paper issues a rallying call for a decentring of criminological knowledge and the need to ‘read from the periphery’. The paper positions current media scholarship in opposition to administrative approaches to crime in Asia, and the potential within other fields of inquiry – gender studies, cultural sociology, ethnography – to challenge the constraints of knowledge-production. The first ‘note from the field’ demonstrates one way in which this form of decentring can operate in practice. The piece, by the Indonesian scholar Oki Rahadianto Sutopo, engages with the two documentary films The Act of Killing and Look of Silence, which brought knowledge of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965 to a global audience. Critiquing the portrayals of the film in the media of the global North, Sutopo draws critical attention to the range of Indonesian cultural products that engage with and reflect the events of 1965 yet make little headway in the global mediascape. The paper demonstrates both the hierarchies of global knowledge-production and the cultural and scholarly ways in which these boundaries can be disrupted, as well as the deeply contested nature of memorialisation in relation to politically-charged events.
The next cluster of three papers demonstrate the diversity of meanings of crime and contestation across different Asian contexts, and the need for interdisciplinary perspectives in attending to their complexities. The first of this grouping, by Denise Tang, trains attention on the experimental documentary film ‘We are Alive’, co-created by independent film-maker and cultural studies scholar Yau Ching and young people incarcerated in ‘correctional facilities’ in Japan, Hong Kong and Macau. The films playfully reflect and subvert experiences of punishment and confinement, opening up space for discussion of sexualities, freedom and friendship. Through a cultural reading of the films in the context of inter-Asian cultural studies, Tang captures fragile but essential truths pertaining to crime and culture in Asian societies. The second, by Tan Jia, focuses on the online and offline activism of the so-called ‘Feminist Five’ in China – a feminist movement that uses online activism to subvert authoritarian responses to sexual violence. Responding to governmental efforts to block and censor social media, Chinese ’netizens’ use playful images and powerful messages to construct a counter-narrative that is simultaneously local and transnational; tapping into ‘Western’ ideas of feminism alongside Chinese cultural traditions. The third, by Nishant Shah, traces similar but different ground in exploring the ‘Kiss of Love’ protests in India. Initially prompted by crackdowns on public affection, an online-offline protest movement gathered pace and was led by young people. The paper uses this example to prompt an excursus on the complex relationships between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ in contemporary society, drawing attention to the complex ‘cyborg realities’ and counter-cultures that are emerging in the human-technology interface. For Shah, these are not simply examples of ‘keyboard warriors’ or ‘clicktivism’, but rather a form of protest that swells up online and spills out onto the streets, through a process of ‘overflow’.
The next cluster of papers deals with issues of movement, flow and global-local connectivity. The first, by J. Patrick Williams and Kamaludeen Nasir, explores the youth cultural phenomena of ‘hijabsta’ and ‘hijabster’ in Singapore – namely the ways in which the hijab is converted into hip forms of consumerism among fashion-conscious young Muslim women. Drawing on a range of empirical examples, Williams and Nasir critique the Western notion of ‘subculture’ as one that fails to reflect the complex meanings associated with these items – simultaneously perceived as resistant to religious norms yet deeply wedded to the consumer marketplace. Tracing the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ behaviour in Singaporean society alongside the ‘localisation’ of global brands such as H&M to produce a range of ‘modest-wear’, the paper shines a sharp spotlight on the limitations of the domain assumptions of criminology. The second research note, by Simon Mackenzie, Donna Yates and Emiline Smith, reflects similarly on the relationship between crime and culture in Asia and Europe. Rather than cross-cultural flow in fashion and industry, however, Mackenzie and colleagues focus on the trade in illicit antiquities – archaeological artefacts extracted from sites in China and ‘laundered’ through transit portals such as Hong Kong before making their way into the transnational art market. Mirroring broader patterns of economic trade, the authors document the ways in which these flows – traditionally from China to Europe – have in recent years reversed, as cultural property becomes a source of capital among new Chinese elites. These changing flows underscore the need for an Asian criminology that is sensitised to the exigencies of the current era, in terms of ‘both earthly material and the metaphysics of social power’.
The final paper, by Alistair Fraser and Eva Li, brings together several of these themes – memory and memorialisation, cultural flow, global-local relations, and inter-Asian connectivity – through the tracing of the ’second life’ of a quixotic site in Hong Kong’s history across a range of physical and virtual reconstructions. Kowloon Walled City, a small patch of Chinese territory in British Hong Kong, was both famous and notorious as a site of ‘anarchic urbanism’ and makeshift politics. Since its demolition, however, the site has taken on a range of new meanings, as contested local history, ‘virtual-real’ site of pirate utopia, and inspiration for cultural flows between Hong Kong and Japan. The paper seeks to trace the ‘social life’ of Kowloon Walled City to envisage the fragile and tensile connections between issues of crime, media and cultural memory in contemporary Asian societies, and the need for an interdisciplinary lens through which to explore these internecine spaces.
This final paper exemplifies a final central theme in the Special Issue: methodological pluralism. Many of the papers in the Special Issue go beyond social scientific traditions of investigation - from film and documentary to non-English literatures, visual methods and oral history to archaeological fieldwork - and images and fieldnotes are used alongside film scenes and cultural analysis. This creative and DIY approach to method in many ways mirrors the evanescent forms of contest and critique examined in the papers. Academic researchers in Asia operate within the same regimes - be they authoritarian, conservative or paternalistic - as the groups and events they seek to document, and there is a clear parallel between the use of ’microblogging’ to evade censorship in China and the ways in which the scholars in the Special Issue seek to subvert administrative scholarship through creative means. Taken together, the collection of papers highlights the importance of going beyond the narrow confines of crime concerns in administrative criminology and drawing on the rich theoretical terrain of interdisciplinary studies as a launch-pad for a new criminological imagination from the periphery.