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

Notes

Introduction 1. Jeffrey Kipnis has published essays on postmodern and deconstructivist architecture and teaches in the School of Architecture at Ohio State University. 2. I borrow Raymond Williams’s phrase from his discussion of the changing physical shape of London as a result of the Industrial Revolution:“But it was only late in the century that a physical contrast, which had been long developing, became generally available as an interpretive image. By the s everyone, it seemed, could see the East End and the West End, and in the contrast between them see the dramatic shape of the new society that had been quite nationally and generally created” (Country, ). 3. Testifying to the“Speed and Dominance”described by Kipnis is the fact that many of the recent tallest buildings in the world have been in Asian cities: the Petronas twin towers in Kuala Lumpur, which was superseded by a Taipei skyscraper , “Taiwan ,” itself competing with the Shanghai World Finance Center. All are overtaken, however, by the  completion of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. 4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has recently noted the influence of Singapore’s urban development on five major cities in India: “The Indian vision of the megacity was . . . the city-state of Singapore” (Other Asias, ). 5. The discipline of postcolonial studies,having taken root primarily in English departments, has emphasized European—and specifically British and French— imperialism, colonies, and languages. This has resulted in the relative oversight of non-English-language postcolonial texts, as well as the non-Western colonizer Japan, which, according to Duus, by the s boasted some  million subjects and colonial territories three-quarters the size of the British empire’s (xii). I am not, however, interested in merely righting an imbalance within the field, but rather am interested in how examining these locations opens up new questions and paradigms for postcolonial thinking.  Notes  Notes to Introduction 6. For more details on the separation of Singapore and Malaysia,see Kim Wah Yeo and Albert Lau. 7. Tani E. Barlow further maintains that most postcolonial theorizations are insufficient when dealing with the case of partial or“semicolonization”of China by multiple European powers and Japan (). 8. Paik describes this as “certainly a legacy of colonial rule and even more a direct product of neocolonial intervention ...that has taken on a systematic nature of its own with self-reproducing antidemocratic structures on both sides of the dividing line” (“Nations and Literatures,” ). See also his important discussion on the division system and modernity in “Coloniality in Korea.” 9. Although Singapore has English alongside Malay (designated the national language), Mandarin Chinese, and Tamil, neither Korea nor Taiwan has retained the Japanese language. 10. See Frübel, Heinrichs, and Kreye. 11. Wade’s broad argument is that the standard neoliberal,free-market explanation of successful third world economies must be rethought when considering East Asian newly industrializing countries. Acknowledging the postcolonial dimension of this development, he shows how they exhibit “governed markets” consisting of strong state intervention in industry,selected exposure to international competition, and corporatist authoritarianism (). Crucial to his analysis is the role of Japan as both former colonial power for Taiwan and Korea and as regional economic leader and model in the postwar period (–), as well as the key role of the United States in guiding investment.Other factors include the strategic use of import substitution policies alongside export promotion; the nurturing of technocrats; anticommunism ; and the militarization of society.Like this study,Wade also considers Hong Kong“too special to be put alongside the others as an equivalent unit”(), because its industrialization was built up by “British-linked trading companies” and “lifetime expatriates who largely run the government” (). 12. Similarly,in Terry Eagleton’s account of the career of“culture”in the humanities ,he notes the relatively new correlation between justice for political minorities and culture (). 13. Even the project of destabilizing or problematizing cultures and identities, best exemplified by Homi Bhabha’s work on hybridity, still leaves the critical focus and object of study as culture and identity.As Pheng Cheah has recently suggested, Bhabha’s emphasis on linguistic freedom and ambivalence“exaggerates the role of signification and cultural representation in the functioning of sociopolitical life and its institutions” (Inhuman Conditions, ). 14. For a detailed account of the vicissitudes of Pacific Rim discourse, see also Christopher Connery’s “Pacific Rim Discourse.” Here, he ruminates not only on the way such discourses are overdetermined by Orientalism...