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The New Asian City

Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form

2011
•
Author:

Jini Kim Watson

The New Asian City

Cultural productions reveal a darker side to development in emblematic Asian Tiger cities

In The New Asian City, Jini Kim Watson provides an innovative approach to how we might better understand the gleaming Asian Tiger metropolises of Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore. In doing so, Watson demonstrates how reading cultural production in conjunction with built environments can enrich our knowledge of the lived consequences of rapid economic and urban development.

The New Asian City is capacious, probing, and exciting as it cuts across Asian global fields: Jini Kim Watson makes the Pacific Rim urban space boom, transform, and resonate with life force, social knowledge, and urban creativity.

—

Rob Wilson, author of Reimagining the American Pacific: From ‘South Pacific’ to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond

Under Jini Kim Watson’s scrutiny, the Asian Tiger metropolises of Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore reveal a surprising residue of the colonial environment. Drawing on a wide array of literary, filmic, and political works, and juxtaposing close readings of the built environment, Watson demonstrates how processes of migration and construction in the hypergrowth urbanscapes of the Pacific Rim crystallize the psychic and political dramas of their colonized past and globalized present.

Tracing the way newly constructed spaces—including expressways, high-rises, factory zones, and department stores—become figured within cultural texts, The New Asian City explores how urban transformations were rationalized, perceived, and fictionalized. Watson shows how literature, film, and poetry have described and challenged contemporary Asian metropolises, especially around the formation of gendered and laboring subjects in these new spaces. She suggests that by embracing the postwar growth-at-any-cost imperative, they have buttressed the nationalist enterprise along neocolonial lines.

The New Asian City provides an innovative approach to how we might better understand the gleaming metropolises of the Pacific Rim. In doing so, it demonstrates how reading cultural production in conjunction with built environments can enrich our knowledge of the lived consequences of rapid economic and urban development.

The New Asian City

Jini Kim Watson is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at New York University.

The New Asian City

The New Asian City is capacious, probing, and exciting as it cuts across Asian global fields: Jini Kim Watson makes the Pacific Rim urban space boom, transform, and resonate with life force, social knowledge, and urban creativity.

—

Rob Wilson, author of Reimagining the American Pacific: From ‘South Pacific’ to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond

This is an unusually interesting book. It is remarkable not because The New Asian City is analyzed in terms of the latest urban theory available, but because it demonstrates how much farther urban theory has to go to catch up with the Asian city.

—

Ackbar Abbas, author of Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance

The New Asian City

Contents

Note on Romanization
Introduction: The Production of Space in Singapore, Seoul, and Taipei

Part I. Colonial Cities
1. Imagining the Colonial City
2. Orphans of Asia: Modernity and Colonial Literature

Export Production and the Blank Slate

Part II. Postwar Urbanism
3. Narratives of Human Growth versus Urban Renewal
4. The Disappearing Woman, Interiority, and Private Space

Roads, Railways, and Bridges: Arteries of the Nation

Part III. Industrializing Landscapes
5. The Way Ahead: The Politics and Poetics of Singapore’s Developmental Landscape
6. Mobility and Migration in Taiwanese New Cinema
7. The Redemptive Realism of Korean Minjung Literature

Conclusion. Too Late, Too Soon: Globalization and New Asian Cities
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index