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CONCLUSION: Too Late, Too Soon: Globalization and New Asian Cities
- University of Minnesota Press
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The year saw the first democratic elections in South Korea, paving the way for the election of the first civilian president Kim Young-Sam in . In Taiwan, the island’s first nonmainlander leader, Lee Teng-hui, was elected president in , a year after the end of nearly forty years of martial law,and in the first non-Kuomintang leader,Chen Shui-bian,was elected. Lee Kuan Yew’s long tenure as Singaporean prime minister finally came to an end in . Although the People’s Action Party has remained in power since to this day, and the South Korean and Taiwanese governments are still locked in various struggles with North Korea and China, respectively, the era of cold war authoritarian rule in the three nations appears to be over. Economically, the stellar rise engineered by this earlier generation of leaders came to an resounding halt in when, starting with the collapse of Thailand’s baht, the Asian financial crisis swept through most of East and Southeast Asia: South Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Indonesia were the hardest hit. The crisis ushered in an era of IMF- and World Bank–imposed fiscal measures and—after a decade of disintegrating socialist regimes—seemed to confirm the shift to a fundamentally new,globalized system of interlinked national economies.In the same period, globally consumed cultural productions from the Asia Pacific were on the rise, including the new generation of Hong Kong auteur films (Wong Kar Wai,Ann Hui); the now well-recognized Taiwanese New Cinema directors Hou Hsiao-hsien,Edward Yang,and Tsai Ming-liang and conclusion Too Late, Too Soon Globalization and New Asian Cities Asia is not a place, yet the name is laden with history and cultural politics. —gayatri chakravorty spivak, Other Asias Conclusion blockbuster-producingAng Lee;theAsia-wide phenomenon of Korean film and television dramas (the Korean Wave, or halyu) broadcast to audiences from Beijing to Hanoi; and developments in Singaporean theater and art that have challenged stereotypes of the country’s cultural desert. It would seem, then, that across the political, economic, and cultural spheres, a definitive break occurred around –, from which moment the paradigm of globalization has been the predominant lens through which we see this part of the world. Many literary and cultural studies, both from within and outside Asia, have been absorbed by this post- period and the transnational cultural flows correlating with our current globalized age. In contrast to these assumptions, however, this book has argued for a longer memory in examining cultural production from this region. In order to understand the present, we need to revisit the cultural texts and urban spaces of an earlier moment, a period when the Asian Tigers were celebrated only—if misguidedly—for their manufactured goods and incredible rates of productivity. From the field of American studies, critic Michael Denning has studied the three decades prior to in Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, in which he describes how this period is defined retroactively by globalization as the“name of the end ...of the historical moment of the age of three worlds”().The“established tale”of this age—recalling Amin’s account in the first Transition—that Denning both relies on and challenges follows: The long boom of U.S.,Japanese,and German Keynesian capital that created a global Fordist mass culture characterized by sex,drugs and rock and roll; the long and uneven struggle between the Stalinist bureaucracy and the forces of “thaw” and glasnost in the apparently separate world of centrally-planned people’s democracies; and the rapid decolonization of the Third World followed by various forms of state-led development and modernization, whether through capitalist import-substitution or Soviet-style central planning .What the three worlds, and these three stories, shared, Eric Hobsbawm has argued, was a commitment to secularism, planning, equal rights, education and modernization. () Denning’s project recovers a transnational history of the period and demands a more complicated view of contemporary globalization than simply [3.80.24.244] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:47 GMT) Conclusion the atrophying of nation-states and homogenization of culture; in short,he attempts a prehistory of globalized culture.At stake in acknowledging the inherited structures of today’s empire is the question of unequal access to, and uneven development of, forms of modernity across the globe. Denning’s project is a bold attempt at an interlinked history of what he calls “the asymmetrical three—West, East, and South . . . [before] the East...