[csaa-forum] Seminar: Imagining a Metropolitan East Asian 'Us'?

[Sufern Hoe]

Seminar by visiting scholar C. J. W.-L. Wee
(Associate Professor of English, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

Imagining a Metropolitan East Asian "Us"?
Notes on High and Mass Culture

Tuesday 23 May, 2006 4.15-5.45

ARTS CENTRE BUILDING (Crn. Grattan & Swanston),
UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE ROOM 218

How is a rapidly developing region in which
there are intra-regional flows of capital and
cultural products aesthetically imagined by
those who live within that region? The "East
Asian Miracle" years of the 1980s-90s saw a new
spatialized or cartographic imaginary emerging,
one in which Southeast Asia became regarded as
no longer part of Southern Asia but, instead, as
part of a larger rapidly (and almost cliched
idea of a) "globalizing East Asia." Is the
epithet "East Asian" an imaginary meaningful
enough to apply to the mass-cultural creations
circulating in the region? The imaginative
process seems to imagine not only an urban but a
metropolitan East Asian "Us," though it must be
problematized, given entrenched regional
politico-historical differences. However, the
object of analysis, while a material phenomenon,
is also a de-objectified impulse, displaying
culture's evasiveness, even as it is being
invoked. The metropolitan modern-urban nexus
also has purchase in the high-cultural realm, in
the visual arts primarily and, to a lesser
extent, in the regional theater scene. The
achievements (or otherwise) of East Asian states
trying to create "global cities" competitive
with the Western metropole have a place in the
curatorial practices that have helped imagine
into existence an entity now called
"Contemporary Asian Art."
This presentation reflects upon some of the
connections/disconnections in the aesthetic
imaginings of a putative regional urban
modernity. It takes into account the presence of
what I call the "global West" in the region at
large and the sort of metropolitan modernity
that must develop if "we" are to be a
significant cultural counter-player to the West
already in our midst, even as increased regional
wealth means looking "inside" the imagined
region for markets and cultural validation
becomes more possible.


C. J. Wan-ling Wee is an associate professor of
English at the Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore, and took his Ph.D. from the
University of Chicago. He was previously a
Fellow in  the Regional Social and Cultural
Studies programme at the Institute of Southeast
Asian Studies, Singapore, and is now in
Australia as a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities
Research Centre, Australian National University.
Wee is the author of Culture, Empire, and the
Question of Being Modern (2003), the editor of
Local Cultures and the 'New Asia': The State,
Culture, and Capitalism in Southeast Asia (2002)
and the co-editor of Two Plays by Kuo Pao Kun
(2002). He is  completing a project presently
titled Revealing Distortion: Culture and an
'Asian Modern' in Singapore. Apart from the
project he will be working on at ANU, entitled
'Creating 'Asian' Art: Modernity and Cultural
Production in "Globalised" Singapore', he is
also currently co-editing a collection of essays
that addresses the development of cultural
performance research tentatively titled
Contesting Performance.

Presented by Theatre Studies, School of Creative
Arts & Cultural Studies, Department of English

Inquiries: Peter Eckersall
eckersal at unimelb.edu.au, 8344 8627, Audrey Yue
aisy at unimelb.edu.au

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