Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

A Tale of Two Cities: Hong Kong and Dubai

By Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

Celebrating Disappearance/Appearance

Hong Kong and Dubai have more in common than towers wearing architectural brandnames. Being hubs between what has commonly been called the “East” and the “West,” both cities have been submitted to spectacular developments that transformed them within a few decades from fishing villages deprived of any urban history into international metropolises. Both cities possess port locations that are central to trade and both cities have attracted massive international capital as well as large expat communities. Neither Hong Kong nor Dubai occupies a central position within its respective region as a producer of goods, but both function as centers of facilitation and are rather para-sites than sites. Dubai is the third most important re-export centre in the world just after Hong Kong and Singapore. Neither Hong Kong nor Dubai has transport rivers and, at present, neither city has a significant amount of raw materials. Though the foundation of modern Dubai depended very much on initial oil reserves that are no longer available, it is correct to maintain that both cities owe their present existence to obstacles that forced them to invest in non-traditional economies. Finally, both cities came to symbolize globalization and an extreme form of urbanity based on aggressive international capitalism.

Attracting international investments, but little “culture” (and being deprived of local cultural resources), for a long time, Hong Kong’s entire existence as a city depended on financial markets. Dubai’s existence can be defined in the same terms. As a matter of fact, Dubai has been quite commonly called “the Hong Kong of the Middle East.” Neither Hong Kong nor Dubai are “real” cities in the conventional sense because neither has preserved its historical context.

Hong Kong and the Celebration of Disappearance

In the 1980s, when Hong Kong owned the world’s largest container cargo terminals, the city’s image was that of a cultural desert determined by superficiality, internal fragmentation, consumerism, and the lack of urban history or local identity. Today all this is seen as typical for Dubai. However, a “cultural turn” promoting a local ethos based on a common language and a particular geographical location, seemingly reversed Hong Kong’s cultural situation in the 1980s, creating a film industry focusing on local stories and local people that would become famous as the Hollywood of the East. In popular music, Cantopop has been a local genre since the 1970s. This, together with a belief in typical Hong Kong virtues such as rationality and discipline, would give Hong Kong the cultural identity it needed, which changed the perception of the city. This individualist cultural system was even strong enough to oppose big businesses.

In a way, Hong Kong became a “postmodern” city: Hong Kong is neither “pre-modern” because it does not exhibit a continuous string of histories, traditions, and culture, nor is it “modern” in the sense of de-cultured, or simply functionally economic. Mike Featherstone has called this type of city, which decides to return to culture, style, and decoration, “postmodern” because here cultural elements are most often “decontextualized, simulated, reduplicated and continually renewed and restyled.”

It is for these precise reasons that it is wrong to characterize Hong Kong’s cultural ascendance as a straightforward process of acculturation. Ackbar Abbas describes Hong Kong’s “cultural self-invention” as a device that is linked, in a paradoxical fashion, to a complex concept of “disappearance,” which comprises at least three things: First, “disappearance” addresses Hong Kong’s frantic cycle of construction, demolition, and reconstruction that yields the impression of a constant disappearance of architectural substance. Second, as Hong Kong has been submitted to more and more aggressive and advanced stages of globalization, the newly built Hong Kong architecture remains restricted to that of the brandname kind. This tendency creates a global environment that, once again, threatens to erase the newly achieved local culture and makes the city “invisible” within an international context, letting topical cultural experience disappear into an anonymous international system. This internationalization concerns also the film industry as its productions have been more and more geared towards international (and Mainland-Chinese) markets. The third meaning of disappearance has to do with the “real” disappearance of Hong Kong as it is taken over by China and will presumably, sooner or later, be absorbed into an oversized motherland.

The first two developments are not unique to Hong Kong, but what is unique is the way in which Hong Kong copes with them. As a matter of fact, Abbas links all three developments (which partly overlap and are difficult to disentangle) to the nostalgic experience of the disappearance of colonial space, which created, in his opinion, not simply a space from which “the colonial” has disappeared, but rather a “colonial space of disappearance.” Abbas’ point is that “disappearance” does not lead to disappearance at all, but rather to a sustained “aesthetics of disappearance” creating, in the case of Hong Kong, the particular cultural space of a “floating identity.” Hong Kong cinema, for example, is eager to keep pace with a subject that is always at the point of disappearing.

Dubai and the Colonial Space of Appearance

Hong Kong will not disappear but it has installed its existence within a peculiar aesthetics of disappearance. Abbas actually believes that Hong Kong will remain almost unchanged for another fifty years. The floating state of Hong Kong’s existence makes it a true forerunner of Dubai, which seems to be suspended in a similar state of floating existence, though at the opposite end of the spectrum. Dubai will simply not appear. For this city, the act of becoming has been charged with such complicated connotations that “becoming” seems to have been eternalized. While Hong Kong revels in what is (almost) no longer there, Dubai revels in what is not yet there. While Hong Kong engenders the feeling of a déjà disparu rooted in an irretrievable, colonial ex-past, Dubai installs itself in a perpetual not yet there that speaks to us through the veil of an indiscernible ex-future.

Dubai has been financed by colossal debt from international banks and its neighbor Abu Dhabi, but “Dubai as an event” has from the beginning been staged as a spectacular and eternally postponed “not yet there.” Apartments were sold long before they were built and would change their owners five times. While in Hong Kong, property speculation causes the absurd state of affairs that sooner or later any building, no matter how new or monumental it is, will vanish from the map, in Dubai maps have been written in the future tense from the beginning. We assist in the creation of Borges’ map that covers the earth because the map is supposed to be the earth. At the airports of Dubai and Abu Dhabi expensive color catalogues of the most famous architectural attractions are handed to tourists for free though a large part of the buildings presented in these catalogues do not yet exist. They are scheduled for the (sometimes very distant) future. The only positive impression that these pictures yield is that of a déjà vu of a not yet there.

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is assistant professor of philosophy at the Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait and the author of Films and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick, and Wong Kar-Wai (2007), Aesthetics and Politics of Space in Russia and Japan: A Comparative Philosophical Study (2009), and The Cool-Kawaii: Afro-Japanese Aesthetics and New World Modernity (2010).

Anti-Nuclear, Anti-American: Is a Pan-Asianist Japan on the Rise Again?

By Christopher W. A. Szpilman

Pan-Asianism crops up in most unexpected places. Take the case of one Hiroshi Takashi. Hirose (b. 1943), a self-styled expert on nuclear energy, is a best-selling if controversial Japanese author. Since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, if not earlier, he has been crowing on about a looming nuclear catastrophe and, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster, he has emerged as a leading critic of Japan’s nuclear energy program. Although I agree with Hirose that nuclear power is replete with danger, I must note that his premises are largely false and his reasoning fallacious. But my goal here is not to dwell on the content of the anti-Western and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories Hirose propounds. I merely want to note that he can be legitimately described as a pan-Asianist. I realized this after I read Hirose’s Japan’s Destiny, Asia’s Destiny, published in 2004.

In this book, echoing the views of Japan’s prewar pan-Asianists, Hirose bemoans the moral decay and vulgarity of the United States and deplores what he believes is the slavish dependence of the Japanese establishment on America. Noting that America has fallen into moral decrepitude, is “spiritually stagnant,” and weakened politically by its military overstretch throughout the world, Hirose argues that “at long last we, the Japanese, have now a chance to lead Asia independently. No better opportunity than this will ever come our way….We must view Asia as our new paradise” (p. 374).

As Hirose sees it, it is the pernicious American influence that prevented Japan from remaining a genuine Asian country in the first place, because it caused the Japanese to lose empathy with their fellow-Asians. “After the war in Japan,” he says, “the feeling of friendship and solidarity with Asians was largely lost” (p. 382), presumably on account of the shameless deal with the United States by Japan’s leaders who swapped their (and Japan’s) Asian soul in exchange for material prosperity.

The conclusion is obvious. The long-lost empathy with their fellow-Asians can be regained, says Hirose, only if Japan “renounces its alliance with the United States.” Only then, he insists, Japan will be able to become the leader of Asia.

Such expressions of solidarity with Asia may come as a surprise when voiced by an anti-nuclear campaigner (for surely the problem of nuclear energy is not only limited to Asia but is of concern to all mankind), but they have much in common both with the views of many idealistic Japanese volunteers working to help the needy in war-afflicted Asian countries and, on the opposite extreme of the political spectrum, with the views of Ishihara Shintarô, a populist politician whose Pan-Asianist views we document in our Pan-Asianism: a Documentary History. Hirose’s case provides further evidence for the great relevance of Pan-Asianism to understanding modern Japan and Asia.

Christopher W. A. Szpilman is professor of modern Japanese history and international relations at Kyushu Sangyo University, Fukuoka. He is the co-editor of Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, Volumes 1 and 2.

What Sells Better than Sex? REVENGE! The Taylor Swift Takeover

By Elizabeth Barfoot Christian

Taylor Swift’s not superstitious.

The gorgeous yet gangly 20-year-old queen of crossover country, continues to show that only those who screw her over need fear her favorite number, 13, which she famously marks on her right hand before each performance.

But do her wrong, and you’ll wish you’d never crossed her path. She will live to sing about it---and make millions off your shame with a sweet smile on her face.

Swift has definitely lived up to her name with the speed at which she has smashed music records, becoming the youngest artist ever to win album of the year at the Academy of Country Music Awards in 2009 for Fearless, her second album. It was the best-selling album of 2008 and 2009 and has become the most-awarded album in country music history.

She repeated the win in 2010 at the Grammys, also becoming the youngest artist ever to win Album of the Year.

Thus far, Swift has won more than 70 awards in a career not yet five years old.

So what’s her formula for success? This former teen angel has proven she’s a music marketing powerhouse. And the grown-up Taylor’s menu includes songs served up with a spoonful of sugar-coated revenge! Her latest album, 2010’s Speak Now, debuted at No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard 100, selling more than 1 million its first week, a feat not done since 2005—and only achieved by three female artists before her.

Here’s a brief run-down of how this nice girl can do nasty—and why her fans love her for it.

Humiliated in front of millions by Kanye West upon her win at the VMAs, she acted like a lady, then later offered her forgiveness in lyrics. Result: hit song “Innocent.”

Wronged by player John Mayer, Swift wrote him a “Dear John” letter neither he nor we shall ever forget.

After losing the love of her life, Joe Jonas, to a looser lady, Taylor memorialized the bad behavior. Result: hit song “Better Than Revenge.”

Writers are always taught to write what they know, and no one tells her tales better than Taylor. The world just rarely gets access to one’s diary so creatively delivered. Swift seems to genuinely want to engage her audience in her life. She spends hours with fans after each show and is involved in every aspect of her image. She values what her fans think of her, and she has the kind of wholesomeness that attracts little girls, teenage boys and moms, alike. Something about her songs resonates with all of us.

Taylor, the victim, knows how to do vicious better than anyone since the angry Alanis Morissette of the ‘90s. Now, we can all sit back and wait for the jilted-by-Jake Gyllenhaal ditty.

Elizabeth Barfoot Christian is assistant professor of journalism at Louisiana Tech University and the editor of Rock Brands: Selling Sound in a Media Saturated Culture.

Next blog: The publicly profane Odd Future of the music industry