Overview

This book studies the effects of globalization on the living space in East Asian metropolises including Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai. The author attempts to explain how walking in the global city reveals the contradiction between everyday life and globalization. It is through walking that one witnesses vividly the oscillation between the yearning evoked by the ideology of open space and the dejection caused by the compression of living space as a consequence of capital globalization. The book draws on films and literary works that address the politics of walking including Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai's film Chungking Express, Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto's works Tetsuo, The Body Hammer and Tokyo Fist, and Chinese novelist Wang Anyi's Meitou, Looking for Shanghai and The Song of Endless Sorrows.

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This book is a breakthrough study in English of the literary and cinematic representations of the Asian metropolis in the shadows of globalization. Drawing on literary, visual, and sociological sources, Michelle Huang elucidates the systematic straitjack An intelligent and witty examination of the politics of space in the global city. The author brilliantly dissects how the expanding urban glamour zone relentlessly tightens the knot around the lived space of everyday life for a growing number of resident

An intelligent and witty examination of the politics of space in the global city. The author brilliantly dissects how the expanding urban glamour zone relentlessly tightens the knot around the lived space of everyday life for a growing number of residents in Shanghai, Tokyo and Hong Kong. -- Saskia Sassen, author of Globalization and Its Discontents A revelatory journey - imagine Walter Benjamin in Hong Kong - through the modern Asian mega-city and the labyrinth of its representations. Huang is a brilliant essayist and guerrilla geographer who doesn't hesitate to knock urban theory off its weary Eurocentric pedestal. The result is sensational. -- Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear This book is a breakthrough study in English of the literary and cinematic representations of the Asian metropolis in the shadows of globalization. Drawing on literary, visual, and sociological sources, Michelle Huang elucidates the systematic straitjackets that constrain the body and the illusions that drug the mind. She shines a searching light on the gap between the glamorous mirage of infinite space of capital and the lived strata of the disadvantaged urban residents. This gap gives the lie to the promise of freedom by the myth of globalization. Huang reveals the individual's unending struggle to wrestle with the rational, alienating imperative to restructure urban space and regulate the lived space and mobility of ordinary people. -- Ban Wang, author of The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in 20th Century China

Author Information

Tsung-yi Michelle Huang received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her works on cinema, literature, cultural studies, global cities, and Hong Kong culture have been published in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Narrative Theory, among others. Recently she has been working on a project that defines and examines specific East Asian metropolises (Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, etc...) as both linked cities and distinctive global centers, mapping the tension within these domains. She currently is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at National Taiwan Normal University.

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