Workshop

 

The workshop, held in June, was a great success from our point of view and we will be adding our comments to this site as soon as we have been able to organize them.

 

 

 Photo by Rajeev Patke

 

 

 

Project Description

 

Aims

The project aims to explore those aspects of urbanism and urbanization that are connected with postcoloniality in South East Asia.  The editors, who have each already done extensive work in the field, have created an opportunity to pool resources and ideas and to invite other interested scholars in the field to contribute to the project, which combines a range of methods and procedures with the aim of engaging adequately with the complexity of the situation under study.  A clear signal that there is a need for a collection of this kind can be found in the editors’ “Introduction” to the new edition of the prestigious The City Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000).  The editors make the following observation:

This is an international anthology.  In an increasingly global world, students must learn from writers beyond the borders of their country of origin.  In addition to writers from the United States, the second edition now contains writings by scholars from Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Greece, Scotland and Spain.  Some of the writers included are world citizens whose countries of birth, academic training, and current residence are all different and whose perspective is truly global.  Space limitations preclude including material whose primary focus is on African, Asian or South American cities, but many of the urban realities and urban processes are applicable everywhere precisely because they have become internationalized. (xvi).

There are two striking assumptions in this statement: the first is that global urbanism can be regarded as a uniform or homogeneous outgrowth from Europe and America, belatedly affecting Africa, Asia and South America; and the second is that cities in Africa, Asia or South America can be understood on the model of cities in Europe, Australia or the United States.  These assumptions implicitly carry over into the notion of what it is to be “truly global,” suggesting that world citizenship erases essential differences between residents of, say, Hong Kong and New York.  The project, in providing a forum that allows experts in the field to address the specificity of urbanism in South East Asia, will contest assumptions of this kind.  In doing so the project will therefore reflect critically on the limits and applicability of theoretical paradigms generally and provoke new types of response to urban realities and urban processes wherever they occur.  In fact it is just because urbanism tends to be regarded as international that radical differences between urban sites need to be addressed when considering the nature of any urban reality or process whatever.      

The project will explore the intrinsic complexity both of processes of globalization and of urbanism through the study of regionally specific urban sites.  It will thus serve two distinct needs within current urban and postcolonial scholarship.  First, despite the fact that the South East Asian region has been heavily colonized in the past, it has with a few outstanding exceptions been largely neglected in postcolonial theory and in discussions of global urbanism.  The project will definitively address this situation.  Secondly the project will make significant contributions to the fields of urban and postcolonial scholarship by drawing attention to aspects of these areas, as well as of globalization, that still need serious critical reflection.  So not only do we resist the notion that South East Asian urban sites can be studied on the basis of established knowledge about urbanization processes generally (i.e. as just more of the same) but we also claim that the conditions that resist this supplementary status have implications for the study of urban processes everywhere.

Two very basic assumptions form the grounds for the project’s theoretical framework.  The first accepts that processes such as urbanization, internationalization and modernization should be grasped in terms of complex and often conflicting historical conditions, which, in this region especially, are tied up with various different manifestations of the transition from colonial to postcolonial rule.  The differences between Bangkok’s, Kuala Lumpur’s, Jakarta’s, Manila’s, Ho Chi Minh City’s, Phnom Penh’s and Vientiane’s urbanism, for instance, indicate diverse relationships to disparate histories.  Bangkok’s past and current relations with the US, France and England, Kuala Lumpur’s with Britain, Jakarta’s with Holland, and Manila’s with the US, begin to intimate something of this diversity.  Ho Chi Minh City, Phnom Penh and Vientiane each also manifest a complex Eurasian historicity.  When we add similar relations with countries such as China, Japan and India, including their diaspora, the region emerges in even more profound complexity.  Further, South East Asia has often served as the conduit, or the space between, the pulls of Europe/North America and Asia writ large.  Much of the project’s work will consist in excavating the patterns of historicity that characterize given urban sites. 

The second assumption recognizes the importance of conflicting interests and trends in contemporary geopolitical relations and rapid tele-technological developments.  While the rhetoric of globalization, tele-technological developments and economic commodity diversification claims to have rendered the tensions of these histories irrelevant, if not obsolete, studies in the region reveal that the rhetoric is not grounded in a rigorous understanding of the situation.  Furthermore, the geopolitical situation, which for more than two hundred years has been subject to drastic changes resulting from developments in mass rapid transit and communications media, can now no longer be considered independently of the effects of real time electronic technology.  Much of the region’s financial success, for instance, must be understood in terms of the intensification of vastly unequal distribution of wealth across geographically very proximal territories, made possible by patterns of exclusion and inclusion largely manifested if not produced electronically.  

The project takes its initial focus from these two assumptions, which in shorthand we have designated “the empirial” and “stereoscopy.”

 

The Empirial

In his article on Singapore’s urban space, John Phillips introduced the notion of “the empirial” as a conceptual resource for constructing paradigms that can account for the complex historicity of urbanism in a South East Asian context.  The notion was developed to help account for what remains of the multiple histories that can be read back into cities like Singapore, some of which are more insistent, more seemingly permanent, than others.  The South East Asian city emerges out of a number of different heritages.  The empirial has no single source but is the upshot of a series of tensions, struggles and formations of compromise.  While emerging in a dispersed and often quite discrete way, it has a consistency that characterizes its many forms.  The following is a schematic account of this phenomenon. 1) In part it is derived from imperialism, the form of centralized government common to the great empires of the east, the forbidden cities of the powerful Chinese dynasties, as well as the great Roman Empire preceding and inspiring European imperialism and its colonial fulfillment.   The imperial in each case serves the interests of a centralized state power, its military supremacy and the maintenance of economic monopoly. 2) A second aspect is derived from empiricism, its focus on the sensible object and, its correlate, the subject of experience, the figure par excellence of early modern urbanism with its democratic pretensions and its developing technology.  The need to link these two tendencies (imperialism and empiricism) emerges in the attempt to understand the various forces that over-determine South East Asian cities like Singapore and Bangkok.  The first thing to note is that the tension indicated by these two tendencies cannot be reduced to the simple opposition between West and East, but that while much of Western modernity can be grasped in terms of the productive tension between state imperialism and urban or civic expansion, the long term historical situation in Asia shows a powerful resistance by imperial powers against any other kind of political organization that might have arisen as a viable or powerful alternative.  In other words while empires come and go, the imperial mode of government remains the only viable system. 

The result in the West of the tension between civic and imperial modes of organization leads, as has been well documented, to an economic mode of production—fully mobilized by western states—based on the expansion of capital.  With the development of capitalist multinationals occupying transnational economic spaces within expanding urban global networks not reducible to nation states, global diversification knows no bounds.  In the South East Asian context, where many of the earliest experiments in modern urbanism were made, the relative weakness or even absence of a critical or democratic tradition drastically alters the development and the structure of urban space.  Controlled much more severely by imperial styled bureaucracies, South East Asian cities must welcome the fruits of global capitalism but within spaces sharply controlled by state interests.  This is the broad political situation designated by the term empirial.  Matters become more complex when we begin to consider, as we must, the range of conditions that together over-determine phenomenal aspects, which include the institutional, historical, cultural, imaginary and emotive forces that at any time structure experience.              

So the empirial is not the culmination of a historical progress or development but the result of specific patterns that manifest compromised economies, in so far as global exchange serves functions indifferent to the specific interests of national organizations, despite the fact that these operate within the same systems of exchange.  If we take the example of Singapore, in which radical capitalism co-exists with a rigid governmentality, the need to operate a fully free market economy (the success of the city depends upon its function as a nodal point facilitating financial exchange, electronic media as well as cultural and geographical paths between other cities) cannot be separated from the need to maintain an actually very rigid bureaucratic administration.  If, as has been often noted, the two needs complement each other perfectly in terms of selective economic success, then this is in spite of considerable if not always visible tension at the social level, because both needs run counter to each other.  That is, global capitalism surpasses the economic interests of the nation, traditionally conceived, unless nation is refigured—as is entirely possible—along the lines of international business, with the citizen re-construed on the model of the global employee.  In this sense the imperial pattern works in support of tendencies within global urbanism that subordinate national identity—even under the sign of the most strident nationalism—to international economic interests.  The first need opens Singapore as a nodal point in the network of international cities, facilitating if only blandly social, cultural, cosmopolitan, religious and financial exchange—a fully translatable currency.  The second imposes the need for rigid rules, regulations, and laws, as the manifestation of a quasi-legalist, neo-Confucian control in the hands of a decision-making governmental elite.  Singapore, while maintaining the legal structures of democracy and simultaneously negating complementary democratic institutions, presents itself as a democracy without democracy.  This conflicting but synchronous set of issues provides a minor proof of the possibility of abstracting aspects of both egalitarianism and imperialism as functions of the empirial, and is just one exemplification.  We have encouraged our contributors to respond to the notion—deliberately broad as it is—in the light of their own work on urban space in the region so we may maintain a theoretical focus on a range of phenomena that nonetheless differ widely in their details.

 

Stereoscopy

Our second starting point is the phenomenon of stereoscopy, the simultaneity of virtual and real environments.  Taking Paul Virilio’s attempt to cast our contemporary moment as bounded by two global networks, the geopolitical and the electromagnetic, we observe that many of us, especially those in postcolonial urban sites, spend our day-to-day lives between these two networks.  The rapid increase in, for instance, real time tele-technologies can be situated as a development within traditions of modern urbanization, which have always had a powerful effect on social experience in its production of urban subjects.  To the familiar technology of telephony and television, we must now add opto-electronic, electro-acoustic and even tele-tactile technologies to the list of profoundly influential conditions of modern urban life.  The role of the independent geopolitical realm is severely weakened in this respect, as the two networks do not correspond isometrically.  One cannot understand the electromagnetic realm as having been superimposed upon geographical space, as if a virtual super-structure had been built upon a real base.  The virtual impacts actual conditions of both experience and political economy no less than geopolitical conditions do, leaving us radically divided between two powerful yet relatively heterogeneous worlds.

These networks are simultaneously a part of us and apart from us, phenomena we respond to and react against.  This betweenness, as physical and intellectual space, provides an area of inquiry that repays careful study as it brings to light the very conditions that help to determine our experience of the shapes and manifestations of a specifically postcolonial urbanism.  The role of tele-technologies, in this respect, is as potent when it concerns those excluded from their reach as it is when it concerns those who have been entirely taken up into the communication networks they govern.

Virilio has described the situation as a stereoscopy, where the human being is increasingly caught between two worlds, stuck simultaneously in the “real” space of an increasingly limited environment (Straits Times headline: “Be Prepared for Smaller Homes”) and real time relations at a distance, to the extent that the human experience of the world and of the world’s horizon is becoming, in Virilio’s terms, irretrievably polluted (provocatively, perhaps, he argues that this pollution by the electromagnetic sphere is every bit as devastating as the more commonly documented forms of ecological pollution).  If this is a consequence of the electromagnetic sweep of global networks, then the postcolonial city can be taken as a cutting edge exemplar of a worldwide phenomenon, because at the same time much of the region is apparently untouched by the most advanced electronic media.  The borders between the urban and its others are perhaps sharper in South East Asia than anywhere else in the globe, as whole populations are exiled to its immediate outside—often within the city itself—but nonetheless inescapably shaped by it, regulated by it, watched over by it in a way neatly encapsulated by the flickering screens that appear with increasing frequency on the outsides of high buildings, sending their silent messages across miles of cityscape.  

Further, and more importantly, this betweenness reveals the essential need for a range of methods and approaches.  We have secured the participation of scholars from Literary Theory, Cultural Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Technology Studies, Sociology, History, Geography, Policy Studies, South East Asian Studies, Gender Studies, Architecture, and Urban Planning, and the range of approaches is appropriately varied.  The contributors are used to working across disciplines and alongside scholars from different disciplines.  They have all responded to our initial proposal, which was designed, with its strong focus but with liberally organized and deliberately provocative ideas, to encourage a wide range of approaches to a relatively constrained set of concerns.

 

Book Titles and Contents

 

Two book projects have arisen from the project.  The title of the first book, Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and global Processes, indicates its topicality and focus as well as its general concerns.  By focusing on cities in Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam the book will certainly fulfill the need for an in depth geographically specific study of urbanism in the region.  However it will also fulfill another urgently felt need in urban and postcolonial scholarship, that is, to address the development and structures of global urbanism generally.  The perpetuation of cities, understood in its industrial and post-industrial incarnations, was always linked to the spread of urban capitalism, which largely determined the unprecedented growth, rebuilding, reconstruction and reconfiguration of cities around the globe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  It has become increasingly necessary to emphasize the global nature of this growth and to stress the international and nearly contemporaneous development of cities as truly diverse as Glasgow, Manchester,  Chicago, Buenos Aires, Melbourne, Calcutta, Hong Kong and Singapore alongside New York,  London, Paris, and Vienna.  The city as such is so diversified a phenomenon that commentators are often constrained to use the terms urban and/or suburban where the notion of the city no longer applies.  Urban processes, then, are perpetuated by a number of forces underpinned by the fundamentally economic ones that govern modern existence, the locus of which is always the city, where labor, ownership and government co-exist often uneasily and where goods and services circulate in systems that are rarely if ever wholly visible.  Similarly, the cities in the region of South East Asia exist uneasily within current global urbanism studies and are rarely visible, as is the region, in postcolonial studies.  The cities in the region have a unique relation to each area of inquiry in so far as they went from being colonial cities serving the material, bureaucratic, technical, ideological and imaginative needs of distant and varied cosmopolitan sites to explicitly modern, international cities in a matter of years, with the national playing an important, but oddly peripheral, role in city development, self-imaging, and structuring.  The two foci of this book, global urbanism and postcolonialism, therefore, are concomitant phenomena that require simultaneous study.  The second book focuses on Singapore and is entitled, Beyond Description: Space Historicity Singapore.

 

Delegates and Papers

 

1.  Anthony King (Art and Sociology, SUNY, Binghamton): ‘Postcolonial Geographies: Material and Symbolic’

 

2.  Brenda Yeoh (Dept. Geography and Director of CAS, NUS): ‘Possibilities and Limits of Cosmopolitanism in Singapore’

 

3.  Greg Clancey (Dept. History, NUS): ‘The City as Target, Perpetuation and Death’

 

4.  John Armitage (Politics and New Media, University of Northumbria at Newcastle): ‘The Hypermodern City: Total Mobilization in Manila’

 

5.  Robbie Goh (Dept. English Language and Literature, NUS): ‘Evangelical Economies and Abjected Spaces: Cultural Territorialization in Singapore’

 

6.  Goh Beng Lan (Dept. South-East Asian Studies, NUS): ‘City, Nation and Malaysian Modernity: Locating Identity, Domination and Empowerment at the Everyday Level’

 

7.  George Marcus (Dept. of Anthropology, Rice University): ‘Contemporary Predicaments of Governance of Postcolonial Cities Occasioned by Advances and Spread of IT’

 

8.  Steve Pile (Open University, UK): To be Announced

 

9.  Peter Jackson (Centre for South East Asian Studies, Australian National University): ‘Global Gay Debates: Queer Cultures in Bangkok and New York’

 

10.  Richard Derderian (Dept. History, NUS): ‘French Urban Imaginaries: From the Imperial Past to the Postcolonial Present

 

11.  Jim Rosenau (International Affairs, George Washington University) / Diane Wildsmith (architect, Jakarta): ‘Jakarta in the Zone of Fragmegration’

 

12.  Stephen Tyler (Dept. Anthropology, Rice University): ‘The Pluralization of Discourse and the Decline of General Persuasion’

 

13.  Shirley Geok-Lin Lim (University of Hong Kong and University of California): ‘Regionalism and English Narrative in the Age of Globalization’

 

14.  Phil Holden (University Scholars Program, NUS): ‘At Home in the Worlds: Community and Consumption in Singapore’

 

15.  Bobby Wong (Dept. Architecture and Design, NUS): ‘Projection and Perpetuation as Forms of Critique of Postcolonial Discourse’

 

16.  Rajeev Patke (Dept. English Language and Literature, NUS): ‘Benjamin’s perpetuum mobile: the Arcades Project’  

 

17.  Trent Smith (independent scholar who works in electronic money management and investment, Singapore): ‘Becoming Nihilism’

 

18.  Yeo Wei Wei (Dept. English Language and Literature, NUS): ‘In A State of Distraction: Audiences at Plays about City Life’

 

19.  Kathleen Adams (Loyola University, Chicago), ‘Global Cities, Terror, Tourism’

 

20.  Srilata Ravi (Centre for European Studies, NUS): ‘Literary Representations of Saigon’

 

21.  Ban Kah Choon (Dept. English Language and Literature, NUS): Title to be announced

 

22.  William Lim (architect, Singapore): Postmodern Urbanism

 

23.  Michael Fischer (Director, Science, Technology and Society Program, MIT): To be announced

 

24.  Carole Faucher (Dept. Sociology, NUS): To be announced

 

 

E-mail to

Ryan Bishop (ASC) or John Phillips (ELL)