The prostitute

Migrant domestic workers rarely take part in — let alone organize — public protests in the countries where they work. Public protests are virtually unheard of among migrant domestic workers in Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, and especially in the Middle East and the Gulf States. Over the past decade and a half, however, migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong — mostly Filipinas and Indonesian women — have become highly active, organizing and participating in political protests. Hong Kong's migrant domestic workers protest in a place where they are guest workers and temporary migrants, denied the opportunity of becoming legal citizens or permanent residents. Increasingly, these workers, their grassroots activist organizations, and the nongovernmental organizations with which they are affiliated frame their concerns in terms of global, transnational, and human rights, not merely local migrant worker rights. This article takes the “Consulate Hopping Protest and Hall of Shame Awards” event — part of the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Hong Kong in 2005 — as an ethnographic example of domestic worker protest and as an entrée through which to ask what it is about Hong Kong and about the position of women migrant workers — whose mobility and voice is both a product and a symptom of globalization — that literally permits public protests and shapes their form and content. The article illustrates how migrant workers’ protests and activism have been shaped by domestic worker subjectivities, by the dynamics of inter-ethnic worker affiliations, and by the sociohistorical context of Hong Kong as a post-colonial “global city” and a “neoliberal space of exception.”     

Whistleblowing Around the World Law,Culture & Practice

International humanitarian law (IHL) is a field in constant evolution and the International Committee of the Red Cross works closely with states to assist them in complying with their international treaty obligations. The present update provides an overview of the main developments that have taken place in IHL, with a particular focus on Commonwealth states.     

重庆市“打黑除恶”公众认同调研报告

重庆市“打黑除恶”专项斗争格外受人关注。从调研所反映的数据来看,公众高度支持本次“打黑除恶”行动,关注重点主要是政府“打黑”的决心。民众希望“打黑除恶”行动能深入彻底并长期坚持,同时政府必须加强“打黑”工作的组织领导,发挥群众在“打黑”中的积极作用,加强舆论宣传和引导工作,坚持“打黑”与反腐同时进行的策略,强化依法“打黑”的观念。而在构建防止黑恶势力滋生蔓延的机制方面,政府应该创造更多的就业机会,缩小城乡差异,堵住黑社会性质组织犯罪成员的来源;规范市场秩序并加强对官员的监督和教育。     

The collaboration of ‘ghostwriting’ and literature – the case of Kawabata Yasunari

Abstract: Kawabata Yasunari is Japan's first Nobel Prize recipient for literature and thus an emblem of the modern Japanese writer, but as this essay demonstrates, this writer's career, like that of so many throughout Japan's premodern and modern history, is spanned by the curious practice of ghostwriting. Taking up the specific case of Kawabata, the article exposes a wider conflict between the modern West's notion of the original artist, underwritten by its idea of individualized creativity, and modern Japan's persistent adherence to ghostwriting's more collaborative premodern concept of creativity. Subjecting fine-grained literary historical analysis to its far-reaching theoretical consequences for the modernness of modern literature, Japanese and otherwise, this essay shows how the spectre of Kawabata's ghostwriting haunts our contemporary, and therefore possibly anachronistic, understanding of ‘modern’ literary practice.