Pied-a-terre Subjects in Asian World Cities

Eine gemeinsame Vortragsreihe von:
Exzellenzcluster ?Asia and Europe? der Universität Heidelberg & Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut Heidelberg

Drawing on research in Shanghai and Singapore, Aihwa Ong challenges the notion of the global city as a universal site for human rights. The Asia’s world city is a branded state-space — of spectacle and speculation — that coordinates and generates flows of global knowledge, talent, and values. Pied-a-terre subjects, especially knowledge nomads, are recruited and favored for their production of diverse material and symbolic values. Ong argues that the coming and going of pied-a-terre subjects radically destabilizes conventional notions about city and citizenship. The knowledge nomad, as embodiment of the fluidity of capital, participates in shaping the hyper-metropolis as both a national space and a site of mutating citizenship.

Prof. Aihwa Ong is Professor of Social Cultural Anthropology at Berkeley. Her research in many Asia-Pacific milieus has made significant contributions to an anthropology of the global. In books such as ?Ungrounded Empires?, ?Flexible Citizenship? and ?Buddha is Hiding?, she explores diverse transnational practices that articulate regimes of governing and mutations in citizenship. In ?Global Assemblages?, Ong and Stephen J. Collier use the concept to identify situated interactions of technology, politics and ethics that crystallize new meanings and practices of the human. Her new works, ?Neoliberalism as Exception?, and ?Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar? examine the entanglements of global forms, government, and subject-formation in East Asian contexts. She is currently working on emerging biotechnologies and robust sovereignties across Asia.