Aspirations In and Out of Place: Subjectivity, Transnational Mobility and Spatial Practice

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

Take a snapshot of urban space in a global city: hundreds of Filipino domestic workers gathering for a beauty pageant in Hong Kong’s city center, a Chinese woman migrant serving coffees to local residents in a coffee bar of Bologna in Italy, a Nigerian man marrying a Chinese woman in an African church in Guangzhou, Taiwanese R&D engineers diligently producing international patents with the hope to relocate and work overseas, and a Chinese tourist baffled by rows of identical shops and wondering where to spend her money in Hong Kong.

Contemporary urban life is often infused with the sense of movement, blended with and contradicted by border-crossing in both its geographical and metaphorical sense; whereas the urban landscape has been permeated by a diversity of people and commodities in and out of place. These movements across space have been the interactive outcome of structural powers and subjective aspirations. Moving through physical and virtual space, people encounter new situations that may give rise, again, to new possibilities of movement and subjectivity.

This panel includes new and emergent studies regarding Asian people and Asian cities. Each is a specific case on urban space with intersectional focuses on class politics, gendered sociability, inter-ethnic relations, flows of desire, and institutional control of movement. How is agency performed in negotiation with institutionalized spaces? How are new identities produced in these spatial practices? Building off each other, the panel as a whole explores how subjectivity and aspirations are experienced through mobility.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing-Diaspora

Session Organizer

• Ting Deng, Harvard University

Chair

• Ting Deng, Harvard University

Individual Presentations

• Balikbayan Aspiration: From College Graduates to Maids with Beauty Queen Titles in Hong Kong - Ju-Chen Chen, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Performing Gendered and Ethnic Sociability: Spatial Practices of Chinese Women Bartenders in an Italian City - Ting Deng, Harvard University

• Inter-national/Inter-ethnic Negotiation: Business and Romantic Partnership of Africans in Guangzhou - Dan Lin, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Border-Crossing, Cityscape, and the Sites of Desire in Hong Kong - Yuk Wah Chan, City University of Hong Kong

• Circulation, Control, and the Production of Taiwanese Patents in Pursuit of Aspirations “Out of Place” - Matthew West, The Chinese University of Hong Kong