Book reviews

CHINA

MELISSA SCHRIFT. Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge: the Creation and Mass Consumption of a Personality Cult. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001. 214 pp. Bibliography, index. US$52.00, hardcover; US$20.00, paper.

WM. THEODORE DE BARY and TU WEIMING (eds). Confucianism and Human Rights. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 327 pp. US$20.50, paper.

MICHAEL B. McELROY, CHRIS P. NIELSEN AND PETER LYDON (eds). Energizing China: reconciling Environmental Protection and Economic Growth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. xvii, 719 pp. Tables, figures, biographical notes, index. US$25.00, paper.

SHUMEI SHIH. The Lure of the Modern: writing Modernism in Semicolonial China 1917–1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xiii, 427 pp. US$60.00, hardcover; US$24.95, paper.

SUSAN MANN and YU‐YIN CHENG (eds). Under Confucian Eyes: writings on Gender in Chinese History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 323 pp. Illustrations. US$50.00, hardcover; US$19.95, paper.

SOUTH, WEST & CENTRAL ASIA

ARUN AGRAWAL and K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN (eds). Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representation, and Rule in India. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000. 316 pp. Foreword by James Scott, introduction, tables, endnotes, bibliography, index. US$59.95, hardcover; US$19.95, paper.

K. J. JOSEPH. Industry under Economic Liberalization: the Case of Indian Electronics. New Delhi: Sage, 1997. 242 pp. Rs450/US$21.00, hardcover.

PETER P. MOLLINGA (ed). Water for Food and Rural Development: approaches and Initiatives in South Asia. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000. 377 pp. Rs 495, hardcover.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

M. RAMESH with MUKUL G. ASHER. Welfare Capitalism in Southeast Asia: social Security, Health and Education Policies. London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000. xii, 217 pp. £50.00, hardcover.

DAVID M. AYRES. Anatomy of a Crisis: education, Development and the State in Cambodia, 1953–1998. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. 256 pp. US$52.00, hardcover.

MARTIN STUART‐FOX. Historical Dictionary of Laos , second edition. Lanham, Maryland and London: Scarecrow Press, 2001. 527 pp. US$75.00, hardcover.

SINITH SITTIRAK. The Daughters of Development: women in a Changing Environment. London and New York: Zed Books, 1998. ix, 153 pp. Bibliography, index. ISBN 1–876756‐00–4. A$39.95, paper.     

Towards transnational feminist queer methodologies

This article introduces the possibilities of transnational feminist queer research as seeking to conceptualise the transnational as a methodology composed of a series of flows that can augment feminist and queer research. Transnational feminist queer methodologies can contest long-standing configurations of power between researcher and researched, subject and object, academics and activists across places, typically those which are embedded in the hierarchies of the Global North/Global South. Beginning with charting our roots in, and routes through, the diverse arenas of transnational, feminist, participatory and queer methodologies, the article uses a transcribed and edited conversation between members of the Liveable Lives research team in Kolkata and Brighton, to start an exploration of transnational feminist queer methodologies. Understanding the difficult, yet constructive moments of collaborative work and dialogue, we argue for engagements with the multiplicities of ‘many-many’ lives that recognise local specificities, and the complexities of lives within transnational research, avoiding creating a currency of comparison between places. We seek to work toward methodologies that take seriously the politics of place, namely by creating research that answers the same question in different places, using methods that are created in context and may not be ‘comparable’. Using a dialogue across the boundaries of activism/academia, as well as across geographical locations, the article contends that there are potentials, as well as challenges, in thinking ourselves through transnational research praxis. This seeks complexities and spatial nuances within as well as between places.     

The monuments of Kings Cross: a visit to the new ruins of London

In his 1967 photo essay “The monuments of Passaic” the American land artist Robert Smithson presented a New York suburb as a seedbed of urban entropy. His research methods, publication strategies and reflections on decline provided a touchstone for the generation of cultural mappers that followed. But have theoretical expectations of metropolitan space perhaps shifted? Is it not in the city centre, rather than periphery, that decay is thought to set in? In which case, what forms – material, cultural, political – does it assume? And what, meanwhile, has become of the suburbs? In an inversion of the Passaic essay, this narrative takes the reader, first by train and then on foot in search of new ruins at the heart of a metropolis. The city is London and the destination Kings Cross, the largest building site in Europe and marketed as tomorrow’s neighbourhood of leisure and information. By way of an art practice, and through the lens of an art and architectural history, the paper reports on the site – its structures and objects, as well as the acts and interventions that the Kings Cross marketing machine has failed to sublimate.     

Conveyor‐Belt Justice: Precarity,Access to Justice,and Uneven Geographies of Legal Aid in UK Asylum Appeals

Ongoing government funding cuts to British legal aid have resulted in the formation of legal deserts and uneven geographies of access to advice and legal representation. Asylum seekers, particularly those subjected to no‐choice dispersal throughout the UK for housing, are enduring the impact of these cuts directly. This paper explores the spatial and legal marginalisation of asylum seekers, drawing upon the findings of a three‐year study of the asylum appeals process. Already precarious, we analyse the manifold spatial marginalisation of dispersed asylum seekers from sources of legal advice and representation. We identify the frames of luck, uncertainty and dislocation as ways to further a spatially cognisant understanding of precarity, alongside identifying strategies employed to counter precarious positionalities.     

A Right-of-Centre Triumph: The 2004 Australian Half-Senate Election

The Australian Senate is a significant part of the Australian parliamentary system and the electoral contest for the Senate results in representational outcomes that will influence the way the Senate will perform. This paper argues that the 2004 half-Senate election result was significant because it resulted in the Liberal–National Coalition obtaining a majority in the upper house. It accounts for this outcome by examining the contest by way of inter- and intra-party bloc contests. It finds that a particularly strong Right-of-Centre performance in Queensland, to which voters voting for Ms Pauline Hanson made a major contribution, delivered the Senate majority to the Howard government. The significance of the result also lies in the way it confounded previously held views that the combination of proportional representation used for the Senate with the need to elect six senators from each State would make it unlikely for either Labor or the Liberal and National Parties to ever win an upper house majority in the future.