This book provides a bidirectional investigation of Asia’s spatiotemporality by asking how Asia is located and how localities are Asianized. The author examines “display-ness” as a theoretical common divisor and argues that Asia’s architectural and urban spectacle is as meaningful and significant as an indicator of Asia’s postcolonial condition.

Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia, is a former colony of the British Empire which today prides itself in being a multicultural society par excellence. However, the Islamisation of the urban landscape, which is at the core of Malaysia’s decolonisation projects, has marginalised the Chinese urban spaces which were once at the heart of Kuala Lumpur. Engaging with complex colonial and postcolonial aspects of the city, from the British colonial era in the 1880s to the modernisation period in the 1990s, this book demonstrates how Kuala Lumpur’s urban landscape is overwritten by a racial agenda through the promotion of Malaysian Architecture, including the world-famous mega-projects of the Petronas Twin Towers and the new administrative capital of Putrajaya. Drawing on a wide range of Chinese community archives, interviews and resources, the book illustrates how Kuala Lumpur’s Chinese spaces have been subjugated. This includes original case studies showing how the Chinese re-appropriated the Kuala Lumpur old city centre of Chinatown and Chinese cemeteries as a way of contesting state’s hegemonic national identity and ideology. This book is arguably the first academic book to examine the relationship of Malaysia’s large Chinese minority with the politics of architecture and urbanism in Kuala Lumpur. It is also one of the few academic books to situate the Chinese diaspora spaces at the centre of the construction of city and nation. By including the spatial contestation of those from the margins and their resistance against the state ideology, this book proposes a recuperative urban and architectural history, seeking to revalidate the marginalised spaces of minority community and re-script them into the narrative of the postcolonial nation-state.

Despite widespread recognition that we are living in an era of mass globalization, there has been a startling resurgence of nationalism in many regions of the world. Alongside this development, many new national museums are being built or refurbished, pointing to the critical role the telling of history plays in processes of building national identity. From new museum construction to the re-purposing of colonial monuments, and from essentialized narratives to spaces which encourage visitors to dream, this book explores the development and influence of national museums in three contemporary Asian societies – Singapore, Hong Kong, and Macau.

Critical Reflections draws together the multi-disciplinary research of scholars working in/on cities across Southeast Asia. The fourteen essays collected in the volume are organised into three thematic sections: (re)conceptualisation, competition and intervention. Collectively, these reflections contribute to and interrogate the expanding urban and regional studies literature. The volume constitutes a critical corrective to the existing literature which all-too-often seeks to diagnose contemporary urban trends everywhere from a small number of, mostly Western, "paradigmatic cases". Yet, while acknowledging the increasing interconnectedness and shared global orientation of most cities in Southeast Asia, the volume is wary of positing an equally generalising regional model. Individually, these essays attend to the diversity of contemporary urban experiences in Southeast Asia.

In Behind the Postcolonial Abidin Kusno shows how colonial representations have been revived and rearticulated in postcolonial Indonesia. The book shows how architecture and urban space can be seen, both historically and theoretically, as representations of political and cultural tendencies that characterize an emerging as well as a declining social order. It addresses the complex interactions between public memories of the present and past, between images of global urban cultures and the concrete historical meanings of the local. It shows how one might write a political history of postcolonial architecture and urban space that recognizes the political cultures of the present without neglecting the importance of the colonial past. In the process, it poses serious questions for the analysis and understanding of postcolonial states.

This book examines the role of music in British-South Asian postcolonial literature, asking how music relates to the construction of postcolonial identity. It focuses on novels that explore the postcolonial condition in India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom: Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, Amit Chaudhuri's Afternoon Raag, Suhayl Saadi's Psychoraag, Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, and Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, with reference to other texts, such as E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and Vikram Seth's An Equal Music. The analyzed novels feature different kinds of music, from Indian classical to non-classical traditions, and from Western classical music to pop music and rock 'n' roll. Music is depicted as a cultural artifact and as a purely aestheticized art form at the same time. As a cultural artifact, music derives meaning from its socio-cultural context of production and serves as a frame of reference to explore postcolonial identities on their own terms. As purely aesthetic art, music escapes its contextual meaning. The transgressive qualities of music render it capable of expressing identities irrespective of origin and politics of location. Thereby, music in the novels marks a very productive space to imagine the postcolonial nation and to rewrite imperial history, to express the cultural hybridity of characters in-between nations, to analyze the state of the nation and life in the multicultural diaspora of contemporary Great Britain, and to explore the ramifications of cultural globalization versus cultural imperialism. It will be a useful research and teaching tool for those interested in postcolonial literature, music studies, cultural studies, contemporary literature and South-Asian literature.

"Offers an intense scholarly experience in its comprehensiveness, its variety of voices and its formal organization... the editors took a risk, experimented and have delivered a much-needed resource that upends the status-quo." - Architectural Histories, journal of the European Architectural History Network "Architectural theory interweaves interdisciplinary understandings with different practices, intentions and ways of knowing. This handbook provides a lucid and comprehensive introduction to this challenging and shifting terrain, and will be of great interest to students, academics and practitioners alike." - Professor Iain Borden, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture "In this collection, architectural theory expands outward to interact with adjacent discourses such as sustainability, conservation, spatial practices, virtual technologies, and more. We have in The Handbook of Architectural Theory an example of the extreme generosity of architectural theory. It is a volume that designers and scholars of many stripes will welcome." - K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory, Harvard University The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory documents and builds upon the most innovative developments in architectural theory over the last two decades. Bringing into dialogue a range of geographically, institutionally and historically competing positions, it examines and explores parallel debates in related fields. The book is divided into eight sections: Power/Difference/Embodiment Aesthetics/Pleasure/Excess Nation/World/Spectacle History/Memory/Tradition Design/Production/Practice Science/Technology/Virtuality Nature/Ecology/Sustainability City/Metropolis/Territory. Creating openings for future lines of inquiry and establishing the basis for new directions for education, research and practice, the book is organized around specific case studies to provide a critical, interpretive and speculative enquiry into the relevant debates in architectural theory.

This book is the first overall and detailed discussion of contemporary Asia’s architectural theorisations and phenomena based on its heteroglossic and decolonisation character. Lin presents a theoretical journey of transdisciplinary reflection upon contemporary Asia’s pragmatic phenomena which is methodologically achieved by means of elaborations of how tangible Asian architecture can be philosophically theorised and how interchangeable architectural theory is practically ‘Asianised’. Discussions in the book are critically integrated with comparative studies focused on Japan, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. These empirical examinations are highlights of phenomenal localities, architecture, cities and cultures which reference the historicity of the Asia Pacific, Asia’s contemporary architectural situations, and their subtle relationship with the ‘West’. The schematisation of intended ‘fuzziness’ for Asia and its architecture is framed as the notion polychronotypic jetztzeit to represent a present time-place context of contemporary Asian architecture and urbanism. This book will be of great interest to scholars of Asian Studies, Architectural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Urban Studies and Cultural Studies.

Asian Alterity is an interdisciplinary theoretical analysis that vigorously contests the homogeneity of the mainstream Eurocentric values. Part I argues for the need for an alternate perspective to be introduced so as to understand the diversity of Asia's cultural differences at their varied development stages and to meet the complex challenges of the explosive urban expansion and disruptive changes in traditional cultures and lifestyles.Part II of the book consists of nine case studies of Asian major urban cities by well-established academic writers and urban theorists. Each author presents diverse aspects of urban dynamism. The case studies will collectively demonstrate a broad framework to understand the essentiality of the interdisciplinary mode of Cultural Studies as an important lens towards meeting the challenges in Asian Architecture and Urbanism.Highlights of the book:

What is the modern in Southeast Asia's architecture and how do we approach its study critically? This pathbreaking multidisciplinary volume is the first critical survey of Southeast Asia's modern architecture. It looks at the challenges of studying this complex history through the conceptual frameworks of translation, epistemology, and power. Challenging Eurocentric ideas and architectural nomenclature, the authors examine the development of modern architecture in Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, with a focus on selective translation and strategic appropriation of imported ideas and practices by local architects and builders. The book transforms our understandings of the region's modern architecture by moving beyond a consideration of architecture as an aesthetic artifact and instead examining its entanglement with different dynamics of power.