Dear Colleagues:
We are looking for 1-2 papers on South-Asian countries, as requested by the
journal. Pls circulate among those who might have interest.
This is for a special issue on City, Culture, Society, and the theme
is: *Subcultures
in Worlding Asian Cities. *
*The SI proposal is below:*
*Subcultures in Worlding Asian Cities: Strategies, Prospects, Outcomes*
June Wang (City University of Hong Kong)
T.C. Chang (National University of Singapore)
Justin O’Conner (Monash University)
*Background *
Asian cities are fertile sites, not for following established pathway or
master blueprint, but for a plethora of situated experiments that reinvent
what urban norms now count as ‘global’ (Ong, 2011: 2)
The presence of subcultures is increasingly being recognized, popularized
and even commercialized in many Asian cities. From Singapore to Lishui,
Taipei to Malacca, a new verbal virtue of subculture-chic is in the making,
prized by mayors, corporates, entrepreneurs and consumers with an appetite
for the new chic in town. This evolving trend is bringing formerly unknown
practitioners of subculture into whirlpools of urban activities and
development plans. Two issues merit further examination in the context of
subcultures in cities. The first is the process of subcultural evolution
and change shaped by multiple and intertwined forces of subversive power,
marginal identity construction, and taste-driven consumer-capitalism.
Scholarship on subcultures and cultural hybridity has progressed from the
early Chicago School to the University of Birmingham’s Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) and today, an increasing collection of
post-subculture theses (Thornton, 1995; Gelder, 2007). In Asian cities, the
role of state intervention entailing political surveillance, repression and
more recently, subcultural embracement is particularly noteworthy.
Secondly, subcultures are mobile and always in the process of becoming,
feeding into but also being fed by the process of urban change. What
constitutes the new subcultural chic in Asian cities, ranging from
graffiti, hip-hop music, trade-painting, hacker-maker movements to peasant
theatre, are born from multiple sources and influences in local and
trans-local settings. While some cultural forms are evidently imported from
the West, others are disembodied from their rural terrains and projected
onto the national and international stage. Mutations emerge from encounters
between subcultures in their homeland and situational forces in new host
locales that are unavoidably inscribed with local political, cultural and
economic influences. The mutability of subcultures is what we hope to
unravel through the theoretical approach of ‘worlding’.
Worlding has been debated by scholars in post-structuralist and
post-colonial schools. Following Gayatri Spivak, scholars concur that
worlding may be read as an art of emergence, an art of being in the world
through which former marginalized, less-civilized agents, from peripheries
of third world countries to subordinated social groups and subaltern
individuals, challenge universalist world systems. For scholars like Hardt,
Negri (2017) and Wilson (2007) etc., worlding is the agency of the
multitude, the collective action of which serves as a counter global
capitalist force that has the potential to rewrite the rules of urbanism
and urbanization. Ong and Roy’s (2011) reading of worlding focuses on
body-environment interaction to explore how cities are converted to a field
of intervention through three types of worlding. First, worlding may be
interpreted as the action of modelling, so as to establish and affirm
authority of a given locale for the subsequent hard-sell of its image and
know-hows to prospective investors, visitors and skilled talent; second,
worlding may be citing actions that mobilise and channel the flow of ideas
and knowledge between two destinations; third, worlding might also take the
form of a shared vision of what a modern city should and can be, forged by
a wide range of actors including the state, local elites, the middle class
and even the poor and disenfranchised.
The third form of worlding, what Ong and Roy called “new solidarity” or
“civil governmentality”, transforms various social groups to
self-disciplining subjects through social law of aesthetics. As such, the
third form of worlding demonstrates a different effect of worlding, which
disciplines subjects by consensus consolidation. This is in contrast to the
account of worlding by Hardt, Negri and Wilson, which pictures the
potential of bottom-up biopower in the immaterial labour. Therefore, we
must note the ambivalence of our time, in which many traditional wisdoms
are to be revisited/retaken to allow two-sided readings concurrently.
Subculture is not an exception. Serving as the utopia for political,
social, cultural minorities and/or dissenters over the past decades,
subcultures have evolved as hybrid complexes that feature both subversive
and elitist elements, and political and hedonic characteristics, in an
on-going process of remaking (Daskalaki & Mould, 2013). When we take
subcultures as a subject that moves across different territories
(discursive and/or material), we also pay attention to the fine line
between the potential alternatives and the disciplinary effects that
subcultures might engender.
*Proposed Special Issue and Objectives*
In this proposed Special Issue on subcultures in Asian cities, the papers
do not necessarily aspire to a sense of unity on worlding and the
subculturalization process. Instead the goal is to to mine the situated
encounters and circumstances of each subculture and the variety of
experiences and change under urban worlding conditions. In worlding, moving
ideas and knowledge are never a closed entity, but are always subject to
addition, reduction and alteration. Power play is crucial in this process
of encounters, change and subsequent outputs. Situating subcultures in
their encounter with popular practices of “creative city” policies in Asian
cities, this Special Issue aims to interrogate:
1. the hybridity of sub-cultural communities and their shifting roles,
as experts and/or subjects, as rulers and/or subversive forces, enfolded
and unfolding in the play of urban politics;
2. the spatial strategies deployed and territorial politics enacted on
multiple scales, from the body, neighbourhood, city to the trans-local, in
the process of subcultural change; and
3. the resultant socio-spatial outcomes of subcultures and subcultural
strategies on Asian cities, urban branding and relations between different
agents living/working within the urban environment (state, artists, NGOs,
local communities etc.).
*Proposed Timeline for Preparation and Submission of Special Issue*
· *Mid-October 2017*: Submission of proposal for Special Issue on
‘Subcultures in Worlding Asian Cities: Strategies, Prospects, Outcomes’ to
Editor/Editorial Board of *City, Culture and Society*
· *End-February 2018*: submission of individual manuscripts to Special
Issue guest co-editors (for the two papers on South Asia, extension will be
considered)
(6,000 words per article)
· *March 2018*: In house review and revisions.
· *End-March 2018*: submission of SI manuscripts to the journal of *City,
Culture and Society*
*References*
Daskalaki, M. and Mould, O. (2013). Beyond urban subcultures: urban
subversions as rhizomatic social formations. *International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research*, 37(1), 1-18.
Gelder, K. (2007). *Subcultures. Cultural histories and social practice*.
London and New York: Routledge.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2017). *Assembly.* Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press.
Roy, A. and Ong, A. (2011). *Worlding cities: Asian experiments and the art
of being global*. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.
Thornton, S. (1995). Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital:
Polity Press.
Wilson, R., & Connery, C. L. (2007). *The worlding project: Doing cultural
studies in the era of globalization*: North Atlantic Books.
Best, June
June Wang: Assistant Professor: Department of Public Policy: City
University of Hong Kong
New publications:
(online) Relational Heritage Sovereignty: Authorisation, Territorialisation
and the Making of the Silk Roads
<http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21622671.2017.1323004> (Territory,
Politics, Governance)
(online) Guerrilla warfare, flagship project: the spatial politics of
Chinese Rock in Shenzhen's post-political making of cultural city
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.04.014> (Geoforum)
(2017) State Territorialisation, Neoliberal Governmentality: the Remaking
of Dafen Oil Painting Village, Shenzhen
<http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02723638.2016.1139409> (Urban
Geography)
(2016) Making Cultural Cities in Asia: Mobility, Assemblage, and the
Politics of Aspirational Urbanism
<https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138848726> (Routledge)
