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This paper builds on assemblage theory to propose a new theoretical understanding of modernity. While the conceptual framing is meant for modernity at large, this paper locates its conceptual discussion in the context of tourism in Macao and illustrates how plasmatic thinking, the new conceptual framework proposed, advances analysis of aspiration, exploitation and freedom of its tour guides. Plasmatic thinking helps examinations of tourism labour to engage with the fragile and fluid nature of the sociomaterial environments. Instead of structures, networks or fluidities, plasmatic thinking sees the world as composed of 'plasmas' – 'charged' sociomaterial clustering of objects, humans and the processes between them. Plasmas are a form of charged matter falling outside solid, liquid and gaseous states and metaphorises the fragility and impermanence of sociomaterial situations for plasmas disintegrates when discharged. The attention to charges and fragility of plasmas helps describes both pandemic levels shocks and everyday disruptions. Through a plasmatic analysis of the falling apart and coming together of such plasmas and how they bring about significant consequences to Macao's tourism, I showcase plasmatic thinking as a theoretical approach which vividly uncovers the fragility and fluidity of modernity and the workings of power in our sociomaterial worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proposed construction of the controversial Amazon African headquarters at the River Club site in Cape Town encompasses several issues related to modern heritage, colonial practices, sustainable development, the nature‐culture divide, and the Anthropocene. Although approved by the City of Cape Town and the provincial government of the Western Cape, with plans for residential and business units, activists, researchers, environmental organizations, workers' unions, and social justice coalitions associated with indigenous Khoe and San groups oppose the development on the grounds of the symbolic and historical importance of the site earmarked for development. The paper aims to explore the significance of the site, analyze the ensuing confrontations and contestations and examine how the site represents spaces of public history, urban spatial construction, and memory. The focus of the paper will be the complex interplay between social, cultural, ethical, and political forces, and their intersection with legal and institutional policy processes at different levels of the state and the local. Ultimately, the paper challenges the claim of the City of Cape Town, the provincial government, and the developers that their version of historical progress is equitable and fair, and raises a broader question about Eurocentric ideas of emancipation, aesthetics and notions of history, heritage and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Tropicality" has historically been used as an epistemological tool by colonial settlers and thereafter local rulers to naturalize and espouse Western rationality and modernity. Singapore is no exception to this lingering Western framing, which continues to define state narratives of success and heritage. "Tropicality" as a hegemonic force manifests in infrastructures of large physical networks, institutionalized knowledges, and media representations. This paper dissects three chronological dominant modes of "tropicality"—the colonial, the nation‐building, and the contemporary neoliberal mode—alongside their corresponding subaltern lived worlds that speak of an alternative "tropicality" often unnoticed (Figure 1). These diametric strands are studied through hegemonic infrastructure and everyday acts that resist, appropriate, or hybridize these power‐laden spaces. A heterogenous methodology was adopted, capturing the epistemologies and metis employed in dominant and alternative tropicalities, respectively. Maps, charts, and archives are used to study the former; ethnographic observation, family memory, and affective experiences elucidate the latter. In this paper, I focus on the nation‐building mode of "tropicality", which shaped Singapore's rapid urbanization in the 1960s. Modernist public housing schemes borrowed from the Tropical Architecture movement are situated within a larger infrastructural field that de‐skilled, cleansed, and civilized an "unruly" population, conflating natural and social order. However, these attempts at creating modern subjects were thwarted by everyday resistance performed at a critical mass, in which displaced populations tapped upon past metis, habitus, and ecological aesthetics to appropriate alienating modern infrastructure. Through these ad hoc infrastructural reconfigurations, a hybrid modern "tropicality" was negotiated. It is through deprivileging infrastructures of "tropicality" and drawing out alternative "infra‐structures" of multiple, lived tropical worlds that we may move toward post‐tropicality—a mentality built on an expanded understanding of how our modern environment is and has been shaped equally by dominant, neocolonial forces and also forsaken memories, practices, and everyday acts of resistance, which hold the key to alternative futures beyond the limited scope delineated by our inherited "tropical modernity". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene draws from a critical selection of the 54 papers presented at the second International MoHoA conference Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene, (October 26–28, 2022), hosted by The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, in partnership with the University of Liverpool's School of Architecture. The conference expanded MoHoA's aim of encouraging equitable approaches to modern heritage as an urgent and essential response to an age of planetary crises whose roots are entangled with centuries‐old culture of extraction, exploitation, and domination. Building on the lessons learned from the first MoHoA conference, Modern Heritage of Africa (2021), hosted by the University of Cape Town and the subject of an earlier special edition of Curator (65/July 3, 2022), this second conference emphasized the interconnection between these cultures and the dawn of the Anthropocene. Participants were asked to reflect on reconceptualized formulations of modern heritage and its entangled relationship with the planetary crises experienced, albeit unevenly and unequally, by all living and nonliving things. This paper assembles and reflects on the contributions of 18 peer‐reviewed papers that collectively demonstrate the range and depth of topics presented. In the spirit of equity, diversity, and inclusivity and in line with MoHoA's decentering, decolonizing, and reframing agenda, these have also been chosen to reflect the different contributors' experiences, from senior academics to young and early career professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early Soviet society featured clear nutrition guidelines and a robust plan for streamlined logistics in food processing, distribution, and consumption, all of which was aimed at building a stronger state through a virtuous transformation of calories into labor power. Such rhetoric appeared even in children's illustrated books, such as Vladimir Maiakovskii and Nikolai Kupreianov's Story of Petia, Fat Boy, and of Sima, Who is Skinny (1926). This paper shows how in the 1920s authors such as Viktor Shklovskii and Iurii Olesha turned that rhetoric on its head and pushed back against the early Soviet obsession with planning and mastering nature and the human body by employing metaphors of food, digestion, and agriculture. In Shklovskii's memoirs A Sentimental Journey (1923) and Knight's Move (1923) and Olesha's novel Envy (1927), the October Revolution itself emerges as a metabolic process on a vast scale: prerevolutionary aesthetic threads, motifs, and concepts are broken down and processed, reassembled, and repurposed into a seemingly new society and worldview, in which the individual original components are still recognizable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to contribute to global social theory by contextualizing modernity/coloniality in East Asia. It begins with a reconstruction and evaluation of three sociological accounts of East Asian modernity, namely Kazuko Tsurumi's theory of endogenous development, Sun Liping's theory of communist civilization, and Chang Kyung Sup's theory of compressed modernity. Despite their insights, these theorists fail to transcend the Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism implicit in the paradigm of latecomer modernization. These problems can be better addressed by anti‐colonial perspectives, including Tani Barlow's colonial modernity, Chen Kuan‐Hsing's inter‐Asia, Xie Lizhong's post‐Western sociology, and Wang Mingming's civilizational anthropology. Yet European hegemony continues to define the spatiotemporal frame of these perspectives. To overcome the lingering problem of Eurocentrism, Laura Doyle's notion of inter‐imperiality is employed to highlight the power‐laden interaction and interdependence among imperial powers in the global and regional history of East Asia. This alternative approach, I argue, can shed new light on East Asian modernity and delineate its dialectical formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]