The New Asian City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form

TRANSITION: Roads, Railways, and Bridges: Arteries of the Nation

As the last section has shown, the rise of the much-applauded Asia Pacific miracle economies cannot be understood without acknowledging the ways they reorganized their productive systems through urbanization and the effects this had on laboring and gendered subjectivities. Moving away from the question of individual reconciliation with the spatial logic of tabula rasa development,the next three chapters consider the developmental state as the site of the deliberate expansion of the images, values, and logic of cold war–defined, export-led capitalism in terms of a national project. In this brief introduction to part , “Industrializing Landscapes,” I suggest we need to adjust well-known postcolonial theorizations of national culture for the New Asian City context and think through developmentalism as a contested expression of nationalist desires. In the era initiating the international flow of goods and capital we now call globalization, we will see how highly orchestrated and nationalized images of anticommunism and material wealth shaped the political and spatial forms of postcolonial Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea. At the same time, we must ask, what are the implications of this emphasis on material progress for postcolonial theory, which has developed more often in response to the lack of such development? In particular, I investigate how the production of a modernized national space—arguably the preoccupation of these postcolonial developmental regimes—is narrated as the country’s future path  transition Roads, Railways, and Bridges Arteries of the Nation The objective of national liberation is, therefore, to reclaim the right, usurped by imperialist domination, namely: the liberation of the process of development of national productive forces. —amilcar cabral,“National Liberation and Culture”  Roads, Railways, and Bridges to freedom.In this Transition,then,my objects of study include the official national discourses of political speeches and government policies as well as the refiguring and imagining of the nation in various cultural texts. The topic of emphasis throughout is the concrete and metaphoric road, railway ,or bridge—infrastructure that simultaneously turns national space into a free passage for goods,materials,labor,and commodities,and symbolizes the way chosen by the countries’ leaders toward successful development. I argue that nationalist sentiment in these three sites—at the level of official discourse, to begin with—turns on the question of economic nationalism . While conventional thought may see the essence of the nation in opposition to material progress (see my discussion of Chatterjee in the previous chapter),postcolonial Marxist-oriented thinkers have not opposed the two categories as such.African liberationist Amilcar Cabral, for example ,writes of the armed revolution against colonialism creating“a veritable forced march along the road to cultural progress”(); he assumes cultural progress to be a corollary of militarized struggle and the material development this requires. With a slight rewriting of this formula, we might think of certain Pacific Rim postcolonies as evincing a developmental revolution creating a forced march along the road to material progress, positing a statist version of Cabral’s goal of national liberation as the“liberation of the process of development of national productive forces” (). In the New Asian City context, physical infrastructural improvements and export levels themselves become the very terms of the national project: to produce or perish.This final section of the book interrogates the nature of this forced march—undertheorized as simply the Asian economic miracle— and its role in constructions of the nation. It is necessary,then,to consider the remarkable physical form that political power has taken in the modernizing regimes of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, the Republic of China’s Chiang Kai-shek, and South Korea’s Park Chung Hee, in comparison with each other and with other postcolonies. The physical trappings of political power associated with grand architectural monuments were not (with some exception for Chiang Kai-shek) the goal of these postcolonial leaders. Lee remarks how he and his colleagues had no intention of memorializing their power in the usual manner of “renaming streets or buildings or putting our faces on postage stamps or currency notes” (From Third World, ). Rather, political power Roads, Railways, and Bridges  attains the more far-reaching physical imprint in the roads, highways, industrial zones, bridges, and airports built by these regimes. In terms of the differentiation across third world sites alluded to in the first Transition, the obsession with infrastructure may be one way of understanding certain Asian versus African postcolonial...