A reminder of tomorrow’s Anthropology colloquium:
Worlding Cities, Pied-a-terre Subjects
September 16th – 12-2pm
Green College Coach House
Co-sponsored with Center for Cross-Faculty Inquiry
The rise of Asian cities as centers of spectacle and speculation challenges conventional notions about the global city as a site of universal human rights. I argue that the ambitious Asian city is a branded state-space, a spectralized site that coordinates and generates flows of global knowledge, actors, and values. Pied-a-terre subjects, especially knowledge nomads, are recruited and favored for their production of diverse material and symbolic values. But, while pied-a-terre subjects are crucial to the prestige and wealth of the worlding city, they are the embodiment of the denationalized character of capitalism. Poised between staying and going, the knowledge nomad performs a transfer of value that shapes the hyper-metropolis as both a national space and a site of mutating citizenship.
Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Ong is the author of many books on modernity, citizenship, sovereignty, and neoliberalism in emerging Asia-Pacific contexts. Her works can be found in Koerner Library; click here to see a list.