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Individual Papers: Global Cultural and Capital Exchanges, South and Southeast Asia
Organizer: Nancy J. Smith-Hefner, Boston University
Chair: Susan Rodgers, College of the Holly Cross
Language, Ethnicity and Transnational Motherhood: A comparative Study of Chinese and Indonesian Female Migrant Spouses in Taiwan
Yi-Hsuan Kuo, Columbia University
This study looks at Taiwan’s female migrant spouses’ involvement in their children’s education, as children born to female migrant spouses (FMS) have made up an increasingly large number in many countries as result of international hypergamy. In the literature of immigration there is a notable lack of studies on female migrant spouses’ involvement in their children’s education. This study addresses the knowledge gap of current literature in the two following ways. First, in order to address the difference between the FMS and the traditional immigrant as I look at the context of reception, I propose to take the family as the primary unit of analysis and examining the key role of FMS. Given that the fundamental fact distinguishing the FMS from the traditional immigrant is that she is the only immigrant in the family she has “married into,” this family must be treated as the most basic context of reception, if I am to show where it departs from the framework depicted in traditional immigrant studies. Second, this study explore the how capital of immigrants able to compensate and interact with the various context of reception by selecting families from various locations – Taipei (urban) and Shingang (rural), and various background – Chinese and Indonesian. Two primary data-collection methods used in this study will be the in-depth interview and participant observation. Findings of the comparison between the Chinese and Indonesian participants in various context of reception will be presented.
The Eccentric Communication Networks of Overseas Filipino Workers in Asia
Fernando Paragas, University of the Philippines
Contemporary Philippine labor migration--the most extensive in Asia by destinations, and the volume of people and remittances--traces its roots to West Asia and continues to expand to East Asia. In the process, overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) and their support organizations have created and evolved formal and informal communication networks to promote socialization, improve their plight, and address their concerns within and beyond their host countries. This study explores the nature of these Asian networks as practiced by OFWs at the interpersonal, organizational, and mass mediated levels using survey data from 160 respondents in eight countries in East and West Asia. It discovers that OFWs mainly network within expatriate, and often occupationally-defined, bubbles that are tethered to the Philippines. However, the utility, exclusivity, and primacy of these bubbles differ across communication channels, and attributes such as gender, age, parental status, destinations, work, and income. Thus, OFWs appear to comprise multiple communication systems, rather than one monolithic network. On the one hand are the majority of OFWs for whom nation-states continue to be primary, even if their daily networks straddle territorial spaces. On the other hand, however, is an emergent section of younger, higher-income, and professional OFWs that transcends the traditional Philippine-host country conceptualization of OFW networks. The study thus indicates how organizations which work with and for OFWs can harness the OFWs' nuanced communication systems in their delivery of products and services.
Buffalo Boy: Surviving the Flood of Globalization in Viet Nam
Kim Worthy, Wagner College
Much recent scholarly work has appeared on the shaping of Vietnamese national identity through the state’s promoting particular roles for modern Vietnamese women within the family, through images in films. My paper builds on that scholarship to analyze “masculine character” in the first transnationally-funded film that is truly Vietnamese in everything from production design to crew. The vision of masculinity generated by the story and style of Buffalo Boy (Muoa len trau, 2004) promotes ways of preserving “Vietnamese values” despite economic transformation, through resolving anxieties familiar to Asia in the present era: between tradition and modernity, “national character” and individual expression.
The film follows a Mekong Delta boy’s passage to adulthood in 1940, but presents itself as timeless. Because the film foregrounds the inevitability of humankind’s dependence on the cycles of the elements, it breaks out of the ghetto of “the war picture” into which Vietnamese cinema has been stuck for three decades.
This is not to say the film is apolitical. Buffalo Boy reflects and shapes changing Vietnamese gender roles, forging a hybrid post-socialist national identity, by reworking the conventions of the Western movie and melodrama, and adapting the aesthetic traditions of French painting. It thereby inscribes a changing view of national heroism, from the fighter of the past to the more pliant leader needed today, and establishes an ideology of compromise, overwriting onto present-day Vietnamese culture a view in relation to the past that promotes the multicultural, hybridizing side of globalization and suppresses the corporate.
The Best Laid Plans: The Transformation of Urban Planning in Mumbai, India
Liza Weinstein, University of Chicago
This paper traces the history of centralized urban planning in Indian cities, focusing in particular on Mumbai. Once a core feature of the rational bureaucratic state, master plans drafted at the central, state, metropolitan, and municipal levels today remain largely unimplemented, despite the public resources devoted to their drafting. Meanwhile, private consultants are being invited to submit alternate plans for transportation, housing, and infrastructure based on comparative analyses and promises of making Indian cities more internationally competitive. The paper analyzes the parallel processes of declining confidence in state planning and increased authority shifted to private, often international consultants. Putting the rise of the consultant in the context of neoliberal politics and inter-urban competition, the paper examines how consultants act as diffusers of particular modes of urban planning and spatial design, and thereby undermine the credibility and efficacy of state institutions. After documenting the history of comprehensive planning in India, contextualizing its rise within the broader project of state-building, the paper describes three recent plans for Mumbai drafted by private, non-local consulting firms. It examines the process by which the plans were drafted and ultimately accepted by the state. It also identifies some of the challenges of implementing plans drafted outside of public sector institutions. Recognizing that private planning consultants are not an altogether new phenomenon in Indian cities, the paper argues that the increased authority they have garnered reflects state reorganization in response to the pressures of economic liberalization, political devolution and globalization.
Clashing Frames: Differing Visions of the Hindi Film Through the Cameras of Raj Kapoor, Mehboob Khan, Bimal Roy and Guru Dutt
Bulbul Tiwari, University of Chicago
This paper explores the Hindi films made by four very different, and widely influential mainstream Indian directors in the ‘40s and ‘50s. These decades of Indian film history are usually read as the “classical era” of Hindi popular film, an age of innocence, idealism and purity. I challenge these notions as well as the false binary constructed by critics to differentiate ‘popular’ Hindi film from ‘art’ film. Kapoor, Khan, Roy and Dutt employ various tactics, techniques and templates to both entertain and educate their viewers. I argue that each director—to varying degrees—explores and explodes the art/ popular binary. Each director comes up with an alternate model, or “formula” film. Khan is the master of spectacle and mise-en-scene, and conversely Dutt explores interiority and melancholy. Kapoor combines both these extremes into a harmonious whole, while Roy blends the novel/text and cinema/image. I end by arguing that Khan’s cinema has been the most enduring model in Hindi popular cinema, triumphing over Kapoor, Roy and Dutt.
The Role of Donors and Responses of Bangladesh: Good Governance, Poverty Reduction and Development
Syeda Naushin Parnini, University of Tsukuba
This paper will present an assessment of the World Mank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) approach to development of Bangladesh in the context of current good governance agenda and also recent changes in economic thought. This paper will consider the role of World Bank and IMF in the economic growth and development of Bnagladesh and what impact it has had on aid and poverty reduction strategies. With the World Bank, IMF effectively dominates much of the behavior of donor community, and , together, these two financial institutions are the most influential source of all development-related aid in Bangladesh. This paper intends to assess whether financial flows with conditionalities from these two institutions have achieved their stated objectives in ensuring good governance and also examine what kind of responses should be there for a recipient country such as Bangladesh.