MCLC: The New Asian City review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: The New Asian City review
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Source: Reviews in Cultural Theory 5.1 (May 2014):
http://www.reviewsinculture.com/?r=135

The City Space of Asian Literature
by CHERYL NARUMI NARUSE5

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Jini Kim Watson. The New Asian City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space
and Urban Form. University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 311 pp.
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Jini Kim Watson’s The New Asian City is an exciting study of the dynamics
between literary/cultural production and developing urban spaces in the
context of East and Southeast Asia. Watson examines literary, filmic, and
political representations of the capital cities of Singapore, South Korea,
and Taiwan—three of the “Four Asian Tigers,” as the “Newly Industrializing
Countries” (NICs) of East Asia are popularly known—that emerge in the
1960s to 1980s, in the periods following independence (excepting Hong
Kong, which is not independent nation). The historical period of the 1960s
to 80s is notable, as Watson points out, in the degree of urban
development that took place in Singapore, Seoul, and Taipei and the roles
that these cities played in the depictions of their respective nations as
hyperdeveloped economic successes. Besides drawing necessary critical
attention to geo-political contexts that are conspicuously absent in
existing postcolonial studies and reminding us that postcolonialisms exist
in the plural, Watson astutely demonstrates the importance of space for
understanding postcolonial historical development as well as the
significance of “New Asian City literature and film” for understandings of
the relationship between (post)colonialism and globalization. Readers from
a variety of audiences will find something of interest in Watson’s study.
Besides the fields the author identifies as central to her
transdisciplinary method—literary, architectural, urban, and film
studies—those from Asian studies, gender studies, comparative studies, and
critical international relations will also find various chapters inThe New
Asian City compelling.

Throughout the monograph, Watson studies the “logic and form of
developmental spaces—accessed through the fictional text—rather than the
sites or buildings themselves as empirical objects in space” (5, original
emphasis) in Singaporean, Korean, and Taiwanese literature and film.
Rather than taking literature as a “vehicle of transparent expression” (6)
however, The New Asian City examines what literature can tell us about the
“unevenly productive role of spatial relationships” (7) and “traces
broader homologies between narrative form and urban environment” (11). For
Watson, attention to the ways space and built environment are represented
productively keeps in tension the textual and the material. As Stuart Hall
reminds us, the paradox that “culture will always work through its
textualities” and yet “that textuality is never enough” must be maintained
in order to not lose sight of “intellectual practice as a politics” (272).
These examples of the “New Asian City,” a term that Watson borrows from
architectural critic Jeffrey Kipnis, exemplify a new model of development
in which the city is a productive site of capital, labor, and national
subjectivity (2) and intervene into the manner in which postcolonial
culture and experience has been theorized by accounting for the spatial
configurations that accompanied the economic development of these
postcolonial nations (8). Watson rightfully reminds us that the
postcolonial condition is not just about anticolonial liberation or the
reclaiming of indigenous perspectives, but also about the “effort of
postindependent states to transform their political economies under the
newly minted banners of nationalism” (89). Perhaps most importantly, in
the face of the more typical explanations of these so-called “Asian
Miracles,” Watson’s study refuses a triumphantalist or exceptionalist
account of these New Asian Cities and instead situates Singapore, Seoul,
and Taipei as “the profound product of the age of three worlds” rather
than an exception to it or as “winners” of globalization (253).

Watson’s monograph is divided into three chronologically ordered
parts—“Colonial Cities,” “Postwar Urbanism,” and “Industrializing
Landscapes”—and the author provides transition chapters at the ends of
Part I and Part II to explain the necessary context and rationale behind
the conceptual moves that are made. The opening chapter “Imagining the
Colonial City” highlights the centrality of the colonial city in the
production of localized social relations between colonizer and colonized,
as well as the colonial city’s role in making territorial distinctions
within a world system. For those unfamiliar with spatial analysis and its
relation the production of colonial power, Chapter One is a useful primer.
Chapter Two, “Orphans of Asia: Modernity and Colonial Literature,” draws
on Edward Said’s notion of the “discrepant” as a means of revealing the
“everyday level existential contradictions of modernity that in turn put
new demands on literary forms” (54). Watson accomplishes this though a
comparative reading of Korean author Yŏm Sang-sŏp’s 1924 novel Mansejŏn,
Taiwanese writer Wu Zhouliu’s 1945 novel Orphan of Asia, and Korean
writer’s Yi Sang’s 1936 novella The Wings, texts that offer
representations of modernizing and colonial urban spaces.

Part II centers on a historical period in which these NICs begin to
differentiate from other postcolonies by “exploit[ing] . . . the
neocolonial arrangement of global capital” (93). Watson asks what the
literature of this postwar period theorizes about this shift and the ways
that subjectivity is imagined within this new global arrangement. Chapter
Three, “Narratives of Human Growth versus Urban Renewal” examines fiction
that, in different ways, adopts the bildungsroman form: Korean writer Cho
Se-hŭi’s short story “A Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf” (1978),
Singaporean novelist Goh Poh Seng’s If We Dream Too Long(1972), and
Taiwanese Huan Chunming’s story “The Two Sign Painters” (1974). Watson’s
choice to focus on developmental narratives during a historical period
characterized by urban growth poignantly draws out “tensions between youth
and stability, individual and world, but . . . against a wholly different
notion of growth” (100). Chapter Four looks at a seeming paradox that the
postcolonial New Asian City woman faces: that despite modernization and
industrialization, gender relations appear to remain largely unaltered
(137). Through readings of Kang Sŏk-kyŏng’s novella “A Room in the Woods”
(1985), Su Weizhen’s short story “Missing” (1988), and Su-chen Christine
Lim’s novel Rice Bowl(1984), Waston argues that although it may appear
that gender relations have not changed, a closer attention to “new spatial
arrangements of public and private space” (137) suggests the way that
gender hierarchy is recomposed and that the New Asian Woman does not
experience the same industrialized feminist consciousness as with the
Euro-American context (134). Throughout, Watson’s readings make intriguing
connections among the hyperdeveloping contexts in which these texts were
written. Her analyses reveal a depth to the literature that indeed
challenges “the monolithic logic of the production-orientated New Asian
City” (95).

Part III, “Industrializing Landscapes,” examines the significance and
effects of modernizing built forms that were hailed as necessary to secure
the nation’s future (175). Unlike with the previous two parts, the
chapters in Part III each deal with a separate national context, but
Watson maintains her comparative focus by making links throughout her
analyses. Each chapter looks at speeches and writings by former heads of
state as well as literary and filmic texts that highlight “roads,
planning, and infrastructure of national modernization programs” to very
different, if not often competing, ends (175). Using Lee Kuan Yew’s
memoir, The Singapore Story, as a point of departure, Chapter Five “The
Way Ahead: The Politics and Poetics of Singapore’s Developmental
Landscape” looks at the effects of Lee’s nationalized project of urban
development as they are reflected in the poetics of Edwin Thumboo and
Arthur Yap. Watson contends that the distinction between the two poets as
propagandist and ironist oversimplifies their writings, suggesting instead
that the difference between the two can be better explained in terms of
the significance of Singapore’s developmental landscape (187). Chapter Six
“Mobility and Migration in Taiwanese Cinema” reads the early films of Hou
Hsiao-Hsien against speeches and writings of Chiang Kai-shek that extoll
the benefits of urbanization and the Kuomintang’s emphasis on
infrastructural development. Watson proposes that Hou’s films, with all
their long shots that define characters by spatial location rather than
individuality or personal agency, reflect what she calls a “sideliner
aesthetic” (221). Though this aesthetic is a reflection of a particular
social condition, the concept is a useful one that extends beyond the New
Asian City context. Chapter 7, “The Redemptive Realism of Korean
MinjungLiterature,” compares former Korean president Park Chung Hee’s
speeches on the modernization of houses and roads, which he believed
essential for a prosperous future, and his general belief in the
importance of material development with Hwang Sŏk-yŏng’s “The Road to
Sampo.” In her reading, Watson shows how national consciousness arises
throughprocesses of modernization and infrastructure (239). She proposes
that Hwang’s fiction reflects a “redemptive realism” that highlights how
“new environments encrypt a social process that then is the ground for
shared experiences and eventually solidarity” (245,  original emphasis).
Such a term invites us to think about the ways that the development of New
Asian Cities such as Seoul can act as a generative rather than repressive
force.

There are many strengths to The New Asian City, but two aspects are
particularly striking. The first is Watson’s aesthetic analysis which is,
at all times, attentive to political, historical, and cultural context.
For those working in postcolonial studies, Watson’s attention to and
naming of different aesthetic forms that emerged from the rise of the New
Asian City may be particular intriguing, especially in light of a recently
published interview with Robert Young who argues “the aesthetic qualities
of postcolonial literature tend to be sidelined” (Noske 5). Watson’s
thoughtful close readings draw our attention to the craft of postcolonial
expressions. At the same time, Watson never loses sight of the political
significance of these texts how they index momentous changes both in the
world and in their national settings. The second aspect of the monograph
worth further comment is Watson’s comparative method. The level of
analytical depth that Watson is able to perform on the basis of her
comparison of three sites is impressive. She certainly makes a convincing
case for the New Asian City as a productive analytical category that
allows us to better understand the effects of developmentalism. Moreover,
Watson applies a meticulous attention to detail to each of the different
contexts. Certainly the study is an ambitious one for its wide coverage of
national contexts and genres, but Watson does not disappoint. The New
Asian City a great contribution that demonstrates new directions in
cultural theory and it is exemplary for its rigorous reading, theorizing,
and historicizing.

 
Works Cited:

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies.” Stuart
Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing,
eds. London: Routledge, 1996. 262-275. Print.

Noske, Catherine. “A Postcolonial Aesthetic? An Interview with Robert
Young.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing. 12 Nov 2013. Web. 9 Dec 2013.

Cheryl Narumi Naruse is an Assistant Professor of English at the
University of Dayton, where she teaches classes in postcolonial literature
and literary theory.