“To thematize requires a project to select its objects, deploy them in a bounded field, and submit them to disciplined inquiry” (Guha, 1997, xv) Mainstream urban scholarship envisions urbanization as a global process that is best achieved via the worldwide application of the development mechanisms pioneered in the advanced capitalist countries—currently, those of neoliberal globalization. Yet the repeated failure of this vision to deliver on its promise of wealth for all and ecological sustainability compels urban scholars to rethink mainstream presumptions. By means of a ten-point manifesto, we argue that provincializing global urbanism creates space from which to challenge urban theories that treat “northern” urbanization as the norm, to incorporate the expertise and perspectives of urban majorities, and to imagine and enact alternative urban futures.

Urban Pulse-provincializing Global Urbanism: A Manifesto

Contemporary art is the object of inflated and widely divergent claims. But what kind of discourse can open it up effectively to critical analysis? Anywhere or Not at All is a major philosophical intervention in art theory that challenges the terms of established positions through a new approach at once philosophical, historical, social and art-critical. Developing the position that "contemporary art is postconceptual art," the book progresses through a dual series of conceptual constructions and interpretations of particular works to assess the art from a number of perspectives: contemporaneity and its global context; art against aesthetic; the Romantic pre-history of conceptual art; the multiplicity of modernisms; transcategoriality; conceptual abstraction; photographic ontology; digitalization; and the institutional and existential complexities of art-space and art-time. Anywhere or Not at All maps out the conceptual space for an art that is both critical and contemporary in the era of global capitalism.

Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art

Reflecting a broader postmodern shift to unmask the cultural politics of research and knowledge-making in academia, tourism studies as a field is demonstrating a notable ‘critical turn’—a shift in thought that serves to provide and legitimize a space for more interpretative and critical modes of tourism inquiry. In response to this critical turn, this paper addresses the central issue of ‘reflexivity’ which, while alive in other disciplines and fields, has received rather limited attention within tourism studies. By drawing on our own personal academic/research experiences working at the crossroads of this turn in thought, we identify a range of ‘entanglements’ that influence and constrain our research choices, textual strategies and ability to pursue reflexive knowledge. These entanglements centre around four broad, but interlinking, themes: ‘ideologies and legitimacies’; ‘research accountability’; ‘positionality’, and ‘intersectionality with the researched’. In writing this paper, we aim to uncloak the ...

Getting ‘Entangled’: Reflexivity and the ‘Critical Turn’ in Tourism Studies

This essay reflects on recent debates around planetary urbanization, many of which have been articulated through dismissive caricatures of the core epistemological orientations, conceptual proposal...

Debating planetary urbanization: For an engaged pluralism:

In the wake of the "war on terrorism," feminist analyses of international relations must broaden the concept of security to consider forms of violence beyond the statist security framework of realpolitik. This article argues that U.S. representations of the burqa rhetorically construct the women of Afghanistan as gendered slaves in need of "saving" by the West, increasing women's insecurity by promoting various forms of neocolonial violence. In negotiating a middle ground between poststructuralist and materialist methods, this essay also argues for a feminist postcolonial criticism that will provide a more nuanced understanding of the nature of gender insecurity in the post-cold war world.

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Securing Afghan Women: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil

Starting with questioning Gayatri Spivak's controversial book Death of a Discipline, the present article tries to argue that unlike the case in the United States, comparative literature in China is still very energetic playing a leading role in Chinese-Western cultural and academic exchange and communication. Although, to the author, comparative literature in China did not become an independent discipline until the 1980s, it has been developing so rapidly that it was soon involved in international comparative literature scholarship and has become an important member of the International Comparative Literature Association. Since comparative literature became an independent discipline in mainland China in the 1980s, it has been both combined with “area studies” with its focus on Chinese-Western comparative studies and with the strategy of “crossing borders” and more topics from other disciplines or branches of learning. Even in the age of globalization when many of the other disciplines of the humanities are severely challenged, comparative literature studies in China is still flourishing as it is closely related to or even combined with world literature into one discipline, with many of the internationally discussed theoretic topics “globalized” in the Chinese context.

Death of a Discipline

In the present era of globalization, discussing the relations between man and nature as well as the environment has become a cutting-edge theoretical topic for almost all humanities scholars. In this respect, the rise of eco-criticism in the English-speaking world takes the initiative of intervening from a literary critical perspective. Partly due to introduction and translation from the West, and partly from China’s own ecological resources, eco-criticism has also risen in China and quickly flourished. Actually, the relation between man and nature has long been a theme not only in Western literature but also in Chinese literature, and Tao Yuanming’s creation of the “Peach Blossom Spring” as a Chinese version of Utopia serves as a particularly notable example. The present article, after some critical review and reflection of the positive aspects of eco-criticism, tries to deconstruct from a postmodern eco-critical perspective the exclusiveness of the “people-oriented” ethics dominated in current Chinese ideology, and at the same time, questions the nature-earth-centric mode of thinking advocated by the eco-critics. To the author, it is necessary to construct a sort of postmodern environmental ethics characterized by harmoniousness with differences reserved in the present era rather than raise another binary opposition between man and nature.

Toward a literary environmental ethics: a reflection on eco-criticism

The essay first traces the origin of globalization before offering some positive and practical strategy toward its challenge. To the author, globalization in culture is stubbornly resisted by the other strong force: localization and various types of ethnicism or nationalism. In the face of the current strong impact of economic globalization, consumer culture has become one of the hot topics confronting scholars of both literary and cultural studies. Through some analyses of various phenomena in contemporary Chinese culture, the author tries to offer some practical strategy: China does not prevent economic globalization from coming into the country, for it might well help stimulate the rapid development of Chinese economy; but culturally, it does try to prevent its culture from being “globalized” or “homogenized”. Actually the globalization in culture does not merely lie in the “homogenization” of culture but also in the “pluralization” of different cultures and literatures as well. Globalization has also influenced the establishment of China"s national and cultural identity. Although cultural globalization might easily blur the cultural identity of an individual national culture, it could also bring about something positive. It has actually brought people of the Third World with both positive and negative effects: If we face the challenge in a critical way and make full use of the opportunity to develop our national culture in a broad international context, we will most probably highlight the Chinese national and cultural identity and make the essence of Chinese culture and literature known to the world. In doing literary and cultural studies, we should take neither the attitude of the (imperialist) global nor the (nationalistic) local. A sort of “glocal” transcendental attitude might well prevent literary and cultural studies from falling in another crisis.

Globalization and Culture: the Chinese Cultural and Intellectual Strategy

Since Henrik Ibsen has a wide international reputation and influence and his plays are read and performed across cultures, translation has played an important role in “establishing” multiple productions of his plays. It is true that Ibsen has been translated in different languages and cultures, and there are actually metamorphosed “Ibsens”, or varying (unalike) versions of his works. According to Walter Benjamin, “since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life” or a sort of “afterlife”. Inspired by Benjamin’s reflections on translation and Damrosch’s emphasis on the role played by translation in constructing world literature, the author lays particular emphasis on the translation of Ibsen’s plays in the Chinese context and deals with different productions of Ibsen’s plays in 21st-century China. The contention here is that such translations and retranslations endow Ibsen and his plays with a “continued” life or “afterlife”, enabling him to remain one of the best-known Western writers, without which he might have become “marginalized” like many of his Scandinavian peers in the Chinese cultural and literary context(s). And it is through such translations and retranslations, both interlingual and intercultural—and even intersemiotic, that there have appeared a multiplicity of Ibsens and variegated productions of his plays in China.

Ibsen metamorphosed: textual re-appropriations in the Chinese context

Globalization has indeed exerted strong influence on China’s literary and cultural studies. The present essay first of all deals with the controversial issue of globalization with the author’s reconstruction of it from a Chinese perspective on the basis of his previous observations. Then it discusses cultural studies, including studies of elite culture and its products challenged by popular culture, in China. It lays particular emphasis on the currently prevailing Cultural Studies introduced from the West into China at the beginning of the 1990s. The author addresses the following issues: how Cultural Studies is introduced into the Chinese context, how it is integrated with domestic elite culture studies and literary studies, how it is institutionalized in the Chinese context, and how it is developing into the phase of carrying on equal dialogues with the Western scholarship in the age of globalization. To the author, Cultural Studies has a lot in common with literary studies, especially in the Chinese context, so these two branches of learning should not necessarily be opposed to one another. A sort of dialogue and complement rather than opposition between literary and cultural studies could be realized. Even in the age of globalization, when many of the other disciplines of the humanities are severely challenged, comparative literature, merging with cultural studies, is still flourishing as it is closely related to the debate on the issue of globalization. Although both the two disciplines are closely related to the advent of globalization and have travelled from the West to China, they have after all been “glocalized” in the Chinese context with certain Chinese characteristics. That is why they still survive the age of globalization.

Ning Wang

Papers

Death of a Discipline

Toward a literary environmental ethics: a reflection on eco-criticism

Globalization and Culture: the Chinese Cultural and Intellectual Strategy

Ibsen metamorphosed: textual re-appropriations in the Chinese context

Toward “Glocalized” orientations: Current literary and cultural studies in China