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The Asian Modern
How does one comprehend the phenomenon of the modernization of an Asian society in a globalized East Asian context? With this opening question, the author proceeds to give an account of how the modernization processes for postcolonial societies in Asia, such as those of India, Malaysia, and Singapore, are fraught with collaborations and conflicts between different socio-political, historical, economic, and cultural agents. Such ambivalent dynamics contribute to what Wee argues as a 'revealing distortion' of the extant models of Western modernity, which is nonetheless rooted in the politics of worldwide capitalism. Wee's narrative refuses to accept the uncritical interpretation of the moderni...
Local Cultures and the New Asia
Southeast Asia, until the Asian economic crisis of 1997-2000, was a high economic growth area. However, despite the neo-liberal and globalizing logic of capitalism, local conditions and cultures determine that capitalism will spread in ways not entirely consonant with its Western origins. Capitalism is not a free-floating entity -- it is a socially embodied phenomenon that needs to function in various cultural contexts. Consequently, the tension between the universal status that some claim capitalism now occupies in the post-Cold War world and the particularities of the local cultures it enters should be of great concern.
Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern
Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern explores the problematic formation of national culture within modern English society. In this ambitious work of post-colonial and cultural theory, C. J. Wan-ling Wee investigates the complex interaction between a modern, industrialized, metropolitan, and progressively rational English national culture and a nationalistic imperial discourse interested in territorial expansion and the valorization of an idealized agrarian past. Starting with the Victorian era, the work documents the complex relationship of concepts such as 'home' and 'frontier' and 'EnglishO and 'colonial' through an analysis of key literary-cultural figures in their historical contexts: Rudyard Kipling, Charles Kingsley, T.S. Eliot, and V.S. Naipaul. Wee brings the discussion of modernity into the present with a consideration of post-imperial Singapore--a neo-traditionalist modern society that reworks many of the colonial tropes and contradictions--to investigate the ambiguities and contradictions revealed in the West's engagement with modernity.
The Asian Modern
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Tactical Globalization
This book is about a small city state's social experiment with globalization. It examines how Singapore conducts its globalization experiment through the state apparatus of schooling and education policy. The author argues that Singapore engages with globalization by anticipating the «problem space» of globalization with calculated actions and experimentation, termed «tactics» and «tactical globalization» in the book. Central to the book is an examination and analysis of the «Thinking Schools, Learning Nation» education policy and reform. While Tactical Globalization contributes to the sociology of globalization by foregrounding new narratives on globalization that are emerging, it also takes a contextual and innovative approach to education policy analysis, which includes a speech-turned-policy document and a nationally televised segment of a documentary called Learning Journeys.
Asianism and the Politics of Regional Consciousness in Singapore
Over the last two decades, Singapore has undergone a substantial degree of ‘Asianization’. Apart from participating in the Asian values debate of the 1990s, re-visioning itself as ‘New Asia’ and a global-Asian hub, and establishing Asian identities for the commodities it consumes and produces, Singapore has also repurposed its modernity, cultures, and ethos along similar regionalist precepts. However, even in recent times, Singapore continues to vacillate ambivalently between identifying with and differentiating itself from Asia. Responding to the challenges Singapore faces in coming to terms with its Asian identity, this book examines the complex cultural, social, and political unde...
Indian Ocean Studies
The Indian Ocean is famously referred to as the "cradle of globalization," as it facilitated cultural and economic exchanges between Africa, the Arab world, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and China, for 5000 years prior to European presence in the region. As this ocean's significance has gained increasing attention from scholars in recent years, few have examined the 'human' dimensions in Indian Ocean exchanges. Including the work of historians, geographers, anthropologists and literary analysts, each essay in this volume addresses a specific human factor, such as the fate of the creole in the Bay of Bengal, creolization as a globalized phenomenon, migrancy and diaspora, the lives of seafarers then and now, and the lives of those who inhabit the ocean's littoral. This volume is a necessary addition to the field of Indian Ocean studies.
Rogue Flows
Rogue Flows brings together some of the best and most knowledgeable writers on consumption and cultural theory to chart the under-explored field of cultural flows and consumption across different regions in Asia, and the importance of these flows in constituting contemporary Asian national identities. It offers innovative possibilities for envisioning how the transfer of popular and consumer culture (such as TV, music, film, advertising and commodities) across Asian countries has produced a new form of cross-cultural fertilisation within Asian societies, which does not merely copy Western counterparts. Rogue Flows is unique in its investigation of how “Asianness” is being exploited by Asian transnational cultural industries and how it is involved in the new power relations of the region. It is an important contribution to the literature of Asian cultural studies.
Multicultural Organizations in Asia
A new study of how Asian Pacific organizations and private enterprises are expanding into markets beyond their national bases by transforming themselves in multinational and transnational directions. It shows how multicultural relations are fundamental to such shifts. It explains the organizational processes that characterize economic restructuring and the transgression of state borders by organizations seeking economic opportunities. It shows how these ambitions require boundaries to be overcome both inside and outside of organizations. This study also details the trend towards fluidity and complexity of boundaries – both physical and symbolic – within and without of organizations due t...
