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East Asia Cities as Laboratories for Modernity: Seoul, Tianjin and Ho Chi Minh City
Organizer and Chair: Erik Harms, Duke University
Discussant: Tsai Weipin, University of Bristol
In this panel we explore how different political, economic, and historical contexts have altered the meaning of “modernity” and “civilization” in East and Southeast Asia past and present. Comparing similar discourses in three very different places that cross both cultural and temporal borders, this panel explores how discourses of modernity and civilization mean different things to different people, produce different effects in different contexts, and become integrated into local discourse in different ways.
The first paper examines the Italian conception of Tianjin as a "laboratory of modernity" and highlights the notion of shaping the Italian concession into a miniature site of "Italian character." While this recalls the civilizing mission of other Western colonial powers in Asia, Italian socio-political domination in China never reached the intensity experienced elsewhere. How does the idea of introducing “Italianita” in one city differ from the propagation of colonial ambitions under full-scale colonialism?
A second paper describes Seoul at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, where discourses of shamans were used both to resist and to legitimize foreign intervention into local affairs. The paper details Korean discussions around the unhygienic and unscientific 'mudang' (female shaman) from 1895-1910 and shows how ideas of civilization and modernity take on multiple meanings.
A final paper looks at present day Ho Chi Minh City, where discourses of modernity and civilization seem to replicate older colonial forms. Yet these Vietnamese notions of modernity and civilization are self-imposed and cannot be linked to classic theories of colonial domination.
Sanitized Tianjin: Multiple Representations of the Italian Concession (1901-1947)
Maurizio Marinelli, University of Bristol
This paper focuses on the sole Italian concession in China, which was located in the Hebei district of the modern municipality of Tianjin. I am particularly interested in comparing and contrasting the theoretical bases underlying the different narratives produced by observers, diplomats, and scholars in China, Europe, and the United States. This focus implies the necessity of investigating the problem of historical, cultural, and political contingencies that have shaped different modes of colonial knowledge production and postcolonial derivative discourses.
Through a comparative analysis of the sources, I investigate the historical reasons behind the emphasis placed, in different representations, on specific socio-economic, institutional, and cultural aspects of the Italian concession. I discuss, in particular, two major themes: 1. the history of the concession, its acquisition, and socio-spatial reorganization as a “laboratory of modernity”; and 2. the notion of shaping the Italian concession as an Italian-style neighborhood, a miniature, Disneyland-style venue of “Italian character”, especially in terms of spatial re-presentation and cultural superimposition.
With this paper I shed light on the following questions: To what degree the representations of the Italian concession in “hyper-colonial” Tianjin were influenced by the sense of national pride, the legacy of an imperial past, and the colonial project of the time? How much were (and perhaps still are) they informed by the search for a new identity both for Italy and China? And finally, what are the narrative presuppositions which generate the “imagined communities” of the Italian concession in Tianjin in the past and also in the present?
Feminized Hinterland: Urban Discourses on Shamanism in Korea (1895-1900)
Merose Hwang, University of Toronto
I am interested in discussions around the unhygienic and unscientific 'mudang' (female shaman) in the years leading up to Japanese colonialism (1895-1910). This was a seminal period for Korea as it witnessed the first official break from tributary ties to China and the state pursued a radical modernization reform project that triggered popular resentment against the state. The first set of sources that I will review are newspapers printed by Korean intellectuals in the capitol city of Seoul at this time and how they viewed mudang. This narrative was internal/political/statist and dealt primarily with surveillance and policing aberrant women in the capitol city. The second set of materials were writings by Western travel writers on 'shamans' within and outside of urban centres throughout Korea. This type of narrative was external/cultural/imperialistic and was concerned with the Christian burden to physically and spiritually sanitize the hinterland savage.
This moment when the Western import of ‘shamanism’ became the indigenous equivalent of ‘mudang’ reveals a silent and invisible process by which a subject is naturalized as the ‘Other.’ Both of these narratives were involved in racial ideologies of Korean-ness to measure the fate of the nascent nation. Both described the mudang as a social tyrant who robbed the nation of its resources, created havoc in public spaces and endangered public health. But ultimately, the domestic discourse signalled an attempt to mobilize an urban public towards a capitalist modernity that would catapult the nation away from the strictures of impending Japanese and European imperialism while the foreign discourse provided impetus and justification to universalize Western imperialistic expansionism.
Urban Civilization and the Convergence of State and Popular Discourses in Ho Chi Minh City
Erik L Harms, Duke University
Once used to legitimize French colonial rule in Indochina, key ideological components of the “mission civilisatrice” have returned to contemporary Vietnam. The authors are new, but a similar scientific discourse of urban governance has been revived in the name of “building an urban civilization”. Reviving methods of the French colonial urbanists long since deposed, Vietnamese city planners, propagandists, and urban governments have recently focused their efforts on establishing urban order through a concerted campaign to improve urban “hygiene”, “security”, and “planning”. While this scientific civilizing discourse appears to operate as an insidious mechanism of top-down control, “the people” seem to agree with state policies. Ethnographic research in contemporary Ho Chi Minh City forces scholars to rethink simplistic critiques of socialist governance that pose it in binary terms of “top-down” and “bottom-up”. For example, there are very clear points of convergence between discourses of strong state governance and the demands of families who increasingly seek to protect their own interests through intensified forms of governance and surveillance designed to discipline “the people”. In the process, “the people” are increasingly construes as “them” (nguoi ta) rather than “us” (chung ta). The discourse of urban civilization cannot be simply described as an assertion of the Party’s will over the people, but must be understood as a set of dynamic relations between multiple interest groups with competing demands. An analysis of these competing demands shows the emergence of new social interests that cross-cut classic Party versus People dichotomies.