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.