Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2182939
Shu-yi Wang
ABSTRACT The establishment of the Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park (HSIP) in 1980 created a site for high-tech success in Taiwan and increased the political, cultural and economic significance of the city of Hsinchu. In the intervening four decades, Hsinchu City has moved between the identities of being an historic city and a science city. While most research on HSIP focuses on its economic benefits, the resulting social and economic segregation between the natives of Hsinchu and newcomers to the city has evolved. Although current city development often causes the alienation of old timers and indifference by newcomers, the center of Hsinchu remains the locus in which to transform the dichotic city into a place to be enjoyed by everyday residents. This paper uses an ethnographic approach to examine the value of historic sites interpreted by both groups. The discussion focuses on how opinions held by preservationists/officials/elites (re)shape the value of historic environments yet create conflicts among stakeholders with different interests, and how narratives of “city as archive” (re)shape the connections between people, place, and the past.
{"title":"Urban stratification: Hsinchu city as an inclusive archive","authors":"Shu-yi Wang","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2182939","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2182939","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The establishment of the Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park (HSIP) in 1980 created a site for high-tech success in Taiwan and increased the political, cultural and economic significance of the city of Hsinchu. In the intervening four decades, Hsinchu City has moved between the identities of being an historic city and a science city. While most research on HSIP focuses on its economic benefits, the resulting social and economic segregation between the natives of Hsinchu and newcomers to the city has evolved. Although current city development often causes the alienation of old timers and indifference by newcomers, the center of Hsinchu remains the locus in which to transform the dichotic city into a place to be enjoyed by everyday residents. This paper uses an ethnographic approach to examine the value of historic sites interpreted by both groups. The discussion focuses on how opinions held by preservationists/officials/elites (re)shape the value of historic environments yet create conflicts among stakeholders with different interests, and how narratives of “city as archive” (re)shape the connections between people, place, and the past.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"253 - 268"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43455485","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2182943
Md Reza Habib
ABSTRACT More than a million Rohingya have fled Myanmar to live in Bangladesh, mostly in Cox’s Bazar district. The government has been praised worldwide for sheltering them, but this enormous influx has strained its limited resources. As the host communities struggle with the Rohingya for control over and access to the scarce natural resources they depend on for their livelihood — land, water, agriculture, and forests — tension and conflict arise. The host community members perceive that the government and aid agencies prioritize the Rohingya over the host communities in allocating resources, exacerbating their resentment. I argue that although both the locals and the Rohingya are poor and marginalized, as citizens, the locals have a stronger claim to environmental citizenship and rights to state resources. Any ecological policies taken towards the safeguarding of resource usage rights of the Rohingyas should also be inclusive and should give equal consideration to the local host community members.
{"title":"The right to ecology: Rohingya refugees and citizens contest over natural resources in Bangladesh","authors":"Md Reza Habib","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2182943","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2182943","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT More than a million Rohingya have fled Myanmar to live in Bangladesh, mostly in Cox’s Bazar district. The government has been praised worldwide for sheltering them, but this enormous influx has strained its limited resources. As the host communities struggle with the Rohingya for control over and access to the scarce natural resources they depend on for their livelihood — land, water, agriculture, and forests — tension and conflict arise. The host community members perceive that the government and aid agencies prioritize the Rohingya over the host communities in allocating resources, exacerbating their resentment. I argue that although both the locals and the Rohingya are poor and marginalized, as citizens, the locals have a stronger claim to environmental citizenship and rights to state resources. Any ecological policies taken towards the safeguarding of resource usage rights of the Rohingyas should also be inclusive and should give equal consideration to the local host community members.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"311 - 328"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46324010","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2182945
Fen Dai
ABSTRACT The infamous GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) bribery case of 2013 led to the emergence of compliance management as a local strategic response to ensuring compliance with regulations in the transnational pharmaceutical corporations within China. However, China's pharmaceutical industry has a long history of practicing the corrupt customs of “drug-incentivizing medicine” (yiyao buyi) and “guanxi-based sales” (guanxi xiaoshou), which are, obviously, at odds with the highest ethical standards for compliance management as well as the principle of the anti-corruption campaign of the current Chinese administration. Based upon an in-depth ethnographic work from China's pharmaceutical industry, this article proposes a new framework to examine the complicated dynamics of interaction between the state's anti-corruption policy, corrupt long-standing customary industrial practices, local cultural practice, and global compliance management norms in post-socialist spaces. Different from some studies that focus on the resistance to global norms by local forces, this study suggests a reverse direction and focuses on the positive reconstruction of the old socialist ideals and corrupt practices by modern disciplinary institutions with the capitalist work ethic in the Chinese workplace.
{"title":"The new dynamics between the state, local ideals, and (anti-)corruption: an ethnographic study of the ethical practices of China's pharmaceutical industry","authors":"Fen Dai","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2182945","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2182945","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The infamous GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) bribery case of 2013 led to the emergence of compliance management as a local strategic response to ensuring compliance with regulations in the transnational pharmaceutical corporations within China. However, China's pharmaceutical industry has a long history of practicing the corrupt customs of “drug-incentivizing medicine” (yiyao buyi) and “guanxi-based sales” (guanxi xiaoshou), which are, obviously, at odds with the highest ethical standards for compliance management as well as the principle of the anti-corruption campaign of the current Chinese administration. Based upon an in-depth ethnographic work from China's pharmaceutical industry, this article proposes a new framework to examine the complicated dynamics of interaction between the state's anti-corruption policy, corrupt long-standing customary industrial practices, local cultural practice, and global compliance management norms in post-socialist spaces. Different from some studies that focus on the resistance to global norms by local forces, this study suggests a reverse direction and focuses on the positive reconstruction of the old socialist ideals and corrupt practices by modern disciplinary institutions with the capitalist work ethic in the Chinese workplace.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"349 - 365"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42902497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2182940
Ya-chung Chuang
ABSTRACT This article examines alley life in three Taiwanese cities, demonstrating that the investigation and interpretation of those mundane everyday practices and events in these alley-places lead us to think about the ethics of everyday dwelling. This ethics, though mostly forgotten now in the Taiwanese public realm, was actually the center of attention in the 1990s when a concept was proposed about urban environmentalism that is significantly different from the current public perception of it. This form of environmentalism related to a new momentum for placemaking that was happening at that time nearly three decades ago and propagated across the island and into its alleys during the new millennium. Delving into alley places, this article shows how ordinary landscapes of proximity have turned into extraordinary lifeworlds for dwelling. To materialize this dwelling imaginary, this paper first addresses theories that seek to spatialize culture in order to identify these unexpected lifeworlds in their ordinary urban settings. Theorizing those tiny little places, often hidden in plain sight, brings back to the attention of researchers what I call dwelling ethics that characterizes quotidian judgments, choices, decisions, as well as its consequences. This paper concludes that conceptualizing dwelling ethics in the contemporary circumstance of urban explosion provides a baseline for the idea of environmentalism of life through which a critique of everyday life becomes possible.
{"title":"Much ado about nothing: alley life, dwelling ethics, and environmentalism of life in Taiwan","authors":"Ya-chung Chuang","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2182940","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2182940","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines alley life in three Taiwanese cities, demonstrating that the investigation and interpretation of those mundane everyday practices and events in these alley-places lead us to think about the ethics of everyday dwelling. This ethics, though mostly forgotten now in the Taiwanese public realm, was actually the center of attention in the 1990s when a concept was proposed about urban environmentalism that is significantly different from the current public perception of it. This form of environmentalism related to a new momentum for placemaking that was happening at that time nearly three decades ago and propagated across the island and into its alleys during the new millennium. Delving into alley places, this article shows how ordinary landscapes of proximity have turned into extraordinary lifeworlds for dwelling. To materialize this dwelling imaginary, this paper first addresses theories that seek to spatialize culture in order to identify these unexpected lifeworlds in their ordinary urban settings. Theorizing those tiny little places, often hidden in plain sight, brings back to the attention of researchers what I call dwelling ethics that characterizes quotidian judgments, choices, decisions, as well as its consequences. This paper concludes that conceptualizing dwelling ethics in the contemporary circumstance of urban explosion provides a baseline for the idea of environmentalism of life through which a critique of everyday life becomes possible.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"269 - 283"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47038568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2182938
Chaoming Long
ABSTRACT Hong Kong’s tumultuous political history over the last decade has continuously shed some light on the city’s complicated relationship with the Chinese mainland. At its core, this relationship is manifested in a nexus of power struggles between three contending ideologies—localism, Chinese nationalism and Western imperialism—that has prevailed all through Hong Kong’s colonial rule. This paper attempts to offer an alternative conceptual framework under which Hong Kong’s coloniality and its connection to the mainland are viewed with more nuances. Centering on the Hong Kong native writer Dung Kai-cheung’s 2005 novel Works and Creation: Vivid and Lifelike, this paper examines the ways in which Works interrogates the shifting paradigms of knowledge production on Hong Kong identity alongside the historical development of the city. In particular, my analysis focuses on how the narrator purposefully sets up a parallel between the creation of self and that of modern artifacts, leading eventually to a parallel between fiction writing and existing discourses of history and identity. Such a way of presenting Hong Kong’s history draws attention not only to the deficiencies in existing discourses on identity as embedded in the above-mentioned power structure, but also to the danger of imagining Hong Kong’s future in a perpetually dichotomized manner. Despite being written in the opening years of the twenty-first century, Works proves to be an insightful contribution—as this paper ultimately seeks to demonstrate—to Hong Kong’s ongoing political struggles.
{"title":"Writing the Hong Kong self: fiction, artifacts and the making of history in Dung Kai-cheung’s Works and Creation: Vivid and Lifelike","authors":"Chaoming Long","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2182938","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2182938","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Hong Kong’s tumultuous political history over the last decade has continuously shed some light on the city’s complicated relationship with the Chinese mainland. At its core, this relationship is manifested in a nexus of power struggles between three contending ideologies—localism, Chinese nationalism and Western imperialism—that has prevailed all through Hong Kong’s colonial rule. This paper attempts to offer an alternative conceptual framework under which Hong Kong’s coloniality and its connection to the mainland are viewed with more nuances. Centering on the Hong Kong native writer Dung Kai-cheung’s 2005 novel Works and Creation: Vivid and Lifelike, this paper examines the ways in which Works interrogates the shifting paradigms of knowledge production on Hong Kong identity alongside the historical development of the city. In particular, my analysis focuses on how the narrator purposefully sets up a parallel between the creation of self and that of modern artifacts, leading eventually to a parallel between fiction writing and existing discourses of history and identity. Such a way of presenting Hong Kong’s history draws attention not only to the deficiencies in existing discourses on identity as embedded in the above-mentioned power structure, but also to the danger of imagining Hong Kong’s future in a perpetually dichotomized manner. Despite being written in the opening years of the twenty-first century, Works proves to be an insightful contribution—as this paper ultimately seeks to demonstrate—to Hong Kong’s ongoing political struggles.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"238 - 252"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47985343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2182942
Šarūnas Paunksnis
ABSTRACT This article critically engages with the rationale of Digital India, a flagship programme of the Government of India, launched in 2015. It argues that this programme has been instrumental for the state and the corporate sector in order to steadily create a system of surveillance capitalism which collects the users’ behavioural data. The article analyses these problems by looking at the rise of platform economy throughout the second decade of twenty-first century, the demonetization of 2016 and the subsequent rise of power of digitality in the everyday life in India. The article problematizes our relationship with technology and demonstrates that India's digitalization is a project by the state and the corporate sector aimed at controlling the population by using the behavioural data, which is extracted when a person engages with any platform as a digital labourer. Moreover, the article emphasizes a complex relationship between the human and non-human agencies that emerges out of the digitalization of everyday life, and how this relationship, through the control mechanisms put into place by the state and corporate actors, enslaves the population and deprives it of liberty and independent selfhood.
{"title":"India digitalized: surveillance, platformization, and digital labour in India","authors":"Šarūnas Paunksnis","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2182942","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2182942","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article critically engages with the rationale of Digital India, a flagship programme of the Government of India, launched in 2015. It argues that this programme has been instrumental for the state and the corporate sector in order to steadily create a system of surveillance capitalism which collects the users’ behavioural data. The article analyses these problems by looking at the rise of platform economy throughout the second decade of twenty-first century, the demonetization of 2016 and the subsequent rise of power of digitality in the everyday life in India. The article problematizes our relationship with technology and demonstrates that India's digitalization is a project by the state and the corporate sector aimed at controlling the population by using the behavioural data, which is extracted when a person engages with any platform as a digital labourer. Moreover, the article emphasizes a complex relationship between the human and non-human agencies that emerges out of the digitalization of everyday life, and how this relationship, through the control mechanisms put into place by the state and corporate actors, enslaves the population and deprives it of liberty and independent selfhood.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"297 - 310"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44858846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2182936
Hyun Kyung Lee
ABSTRACT Working within the framework of the “city-as-archive,” this article investigates recent place-making processes that have occurred in Seoul, South Korea—debates over the function and symbolism of Gwanghwamun Square. The nature of the dynamics in who archives a city is determined by which actors hold power in place-making. In turn, archiving a city is a vigorously political process. In order to understand how the actors of Gwanghwamun Square’s place-making affect the visualization and formation of shared city stories and memories, three significant stages of development at Gwangwmun Square will be examined: 1) the construction of a historical site that archives political ambition and nation-building, 2) the creation of an icon for global brand-building, and 3) as the archival site of conflicts between political leaders’ ambitions and their citizens’ priorities. By analyzing three phases of re-development, it becomes clear how power shifts, and how the scope of stakeholders expands and changes. It reveals the city as an archive, how a public space has been (re)collected, revised, retrieved, and erased by different stakeholders during different political contexts.
{"title":"Who archives the city? place-making at Gwanghwamun square: power struggles between political authority and civil power","authors":"Hyun Kyung Lee","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2182936","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2182936","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Working within the framework of the “city-as-archive,” this article investigates recent place-making processes that have occurred in Seoul, South Korea—debates over the function and symbolism of Gwanghwamun Square. The nature of the dynamics in who archives a city is determined by which actors hold power in place-making. In turn, archiving a city is a vigorously political process. In order to understand how the actors of Gwanghwamun Square’s place-making affect the visualization and formation of shared city stories and memories, three significant stages of development at Gwangwmun Square will be examined: 1) the construction of a historical site that archives political ambition and nation-building, 2) the creation of an icon for global brand-building, and 3) as the archival site of conflicts between political leaders’ ambitions and their citizens’ priorities. By analyzing three phases of re-development, it becomes clear how power shifts, and how the scope of stakeholders expands and changes. It reveals the city as an archive, how a public space has been (re)collected, revised, retrieved, and erased by different stakeholders during different political contexts.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"208 - 222"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46947998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2182934
Hyunju Lee
The city, as a mediated, spontaneous, and evolving entity, relives and replicates itself through its own structures and codes. This is so because the city continuously regenerates multiple forms of embodied acts and gestures—which, as they reconstitute themselves, transmit and record collective memories, knowledge, trauma, and stories. As an amalgamation of numerous gestures, the city becomes a mesmerizing theater that resides on the cusp of fiction and reality. Its disparate constituents of the city—architectures, edifices, streets, alleys, people and their stories—have power to “turn the city into an immense memory where many poetics proliferate” (de Certeau, Giard, and Mayol 1998, 170). Archiving Asian cities amidst time in motion is a special issue project that explores modalities of remembering and recording the highly developed urban locales of the so-called Asian Tigers: Seoul, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Hsinchu, and Yuanlin. These places still hover around the remnants of colonization, Cold War structures, and varied aftermaths of rapid industrialization. Between the 1960s and 1990s, the economies of South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have experienced rapid industrial development and by the early 2000s, these countries have developed into high-income economies. Rather than looking at these locations primarily through the lens of monetary growth, as leading international financial centers or model sites of technological innovation, this project aims to explore happenings on the other side of the city surface, possibly hidden or distorted beneath the glory of accelerated economic transition. In ways varying yet similar, the urban centers of these hyper-developed Asian Tigers have not only undergone massive alterations; they have evolved through constant deconstructions followed by reconstructions. The early period of urbanization of South Korea during the 1960s and1970s, for example, can be characterized as a series of vicious destructions of anything old. Only recently has the process of urban development in Seoul began to reclaim or excavate the value of traditional culture. Nonetheless, the current drive to “rehabilitate national heritage” may merely foment the formation of State-driven nationalist projects. It may even simply promote gentrification or commercialized tourist venues instead of encouraging the truly spontaneous, organic revival of civic communities. Viewed from this perspective, urban developments in these Asian cities over the past few decades have once again altered them, on a scale comparable to that of colonial occupation and even war. As most of the residents in these locales dwell simultaneously in various temporal states and unresolved moments in history, one of the aims of this project is to allow one to see how these urban spaces reactivate the past and produce the new “real” in our present. By and large, contributors to this special issue agree that “our perception of the past is determined by the p
{"title":"Editorial: archiving Asian cities amidst time in motion","authors":"Hyunju Lee","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2182934","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2182934","url":null,"abstract":"The city, as a mediated, spontaneous, and evolving entity, relives and replicates itself through its own structures and codes. This is so because the city continuously regenerates multiple forms of embodied acts and gestures—which, as they reconstitute themselves, transmit and record collective memories, knowledge, trauma, and stories. As an amalgamation of numerous gestures, the city becomes a mesmerizing theater that resides on the cusp of fiction and reality. Its disparate constituents of the city—architectures, edifices, streets, alleys, people and their stories—have power to “turn the city into an immense memory where many poetics proliferate” (de Certeau, Giard, and Mayol 1998, 170). Archiving Asian cities amidst time in motion is a special issue project that explores modalities of remembering and recording the highly developed urban locales of the so-called Asian Tigers: Seoul, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Hsinchu, and Yuanlin. These places still hover around the remnants of colonization, Cold War structures, and varied aftermaths of rapid industrialization. Between the 1960s and 1990s, the economies of South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have experienced rapid industrial development and by the early 2000s, these countries have developed into high-income economies. Rather than looking at these locations primarily through the lens of monetary growth, as leading international financial centers or model sites of technological innovation, this project aims to explore happenings on the other side of the city surface, possibly hidden or distorted beneath the glory of accelerated economic transition. In ways varying yet similar, the urban centers of these hyper-developed Asian Tigers have not only undergone massive alterations; they have evolved through constant deconstructions followed by reconstructions. The early period of urbanization of South Korea during the 1960s and1970s, for example, can be characterized as a series of vicious destructions of anything old. Only recently has the process of urban development in Seoul began to reclaim or excavate the value of traditional culture. Nonetheless, the current drive to “rehabilitate national heritage” may merely foment the formation of State-driven nationalist projects. It may even simply promote gentrification or commercialized tourist venues instead of encouraging the truly spontaneous, organic revival of civic communities. Viewed from this perspective, urban developments in these Asian cities over the past few decades have once again altered them, on a scale comparable to that of colonial occupation and even war. As most of the residents in these locales dwell simultaneously in various temporal states and unresolved moments in history, one of the aims of this project is to allow one to see how these urban spaces reactivate the past and produce the new “real” in our present. By and large, contributors to this special issue agree that “our perception of the past is determined by the p","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"183 - 186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43336907","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2182935
Hyunju Lee
ABSTRACT The old Seoul Station was established in 1925 as part of the Japanese effort to expand into Manchuria through the Korean Peninsula. The colonial-era edifice (then called Gyeongseong Station) served as a major gateway for this ambition. During South Korea’s rapid industrialization in the 1960s and 1970s, the station became a major entry point for a massive rural population who migrated to the capital city to realize their “Seoul dream.” The building ceased to be used as a train station in 2004 and fell into some disrepair, but was restored in 2011 as a multi-genre cultural site, Culture Station 284 [Munhwayok 284]. A variety of exhibitions, performances, workshops, and talks are still held there. The old Seoul Station both symbolized and enabled mobility, migration, modernization, and urbanization; today, its space operates amidst complex layers of time and history, at the center of conflicting desires. Culture Station 284 remains a symbol of colonial exploitations and expansions and also provides a real artistic and intellectual portal into the world of today. In this article, I examine how this historic architecture departs from and complicates the notion of an archive. Regarding the building as a performative, fluid space allows it to be reiterated, reborn, and regenerated into various strands of narrative and also allows it agency within the processes of structuring and transmitting disparate forms of identities and desires. I argue that such a performative reading allows us to view the architectural space as always moving between past and present, fiction and reality.
{"title":"The old Seoul Station as a performative space: undoing the archive in the city","authors":"Hyunju Lee","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2182935","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2182935","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The old Seoul Station was established in 1925 as part of the Japanese effort to expand into Manchuria through the Korean Peninsula. The colonial-era edifice (then called Gyeongseong Station) served as a major gateway for this ambition. During South Korea’s rapid industrialization in the 1960s and 1970s, the station became a major entry point for a massive rural population who migrated to the capital city to realize their “Seoul dream.” The building ceased to be used as a train station in 2004 and fell into some disrepair, but was restored in 2011 as a multi-genre cultural site, Culture Station 284 [Munhwayok 284]. A variety of exhibitions, performances, workshops, and talks are still held there. The old Seoul Station both symbolized and enabled mobility, migration, modernization, and urbanization; today, its space operates amidst complex layers of time and history, at the center of conflicting desires. Culture Station 284 remains a symbol of colonial exploitations and expansions and also provides a real artistic and intellectual portal into the world of today. In this article, I examine how this historic architecture departs from and complicates the notion of an archive. Regarding the building as a performative, fluid space allows it to be reiterated, reborn, and regenerated into various strands of narrative and also allows it agency within the processes of structuring and transmitting disparate forms of identities and desires. I argue that such a performative reading allows us to view the architectural space as always moving between past and present, fiction and reality.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"187 - 207"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48373518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2182944
K. Hu
ABSTRACT This paper examines how three Taiwanese women married to Japanese men and living in Japan became microcelebrities by producing social media content aimed primarily at Taiwanese audiences. It argues that the emergence of the three should be contextualized within the complicated historical, political, and cultural relations between Taiwan and Japan. Their self-branding strategies emphasize the authenticity of their transnational lived experiences, which they use to mobilize microcelebrity intimacy with online fans. Their cross-cultural romances and marriages in Japan have become capital to be maximized, turning personal stories and emotions into online portrayals of cross-cultural romance and promotional work for Japan’s local government and tourist industry. The typical East Asian prescriptions for femininity that emphasize perseverance and diligence have been remodeled in their neoliberal identities in terms of abilities, resilience and strength realized through work and family. Furthermore, they have played the role of grassroots intermediaries in the post-3.11 friendship between Taiwan and Japan that flowered as a consequence of Taiwan’s substantial donations to recovery efforts following Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami. This study also indicates that the economic, social and symbolic empowerment they have accrued as microcelebrities remains precarious as it is heavily dependent on their curated biographies fitting with the commercial logic of social media appealing to online audiences. This study of Taiwanese female microcelebrities aims to offer a look at how new mediascapes have been reshaped by transnational mobility/networks, social media, and the post-3.11 Taiwan-Japan dynamic.
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