From Tim Brunell of the National University
of Singapore
I teach a third year undergraduate cultural
geography course, Cultural Landscapes, at the National University of Singapore.
On Thursday I was scheduled to give a lecture entitled 'Imag(in)ing Places'
combining insights from previous lectures on Orientalism and imaginative
geographies with recent work on urban place-making and boosterism in the
Asia-Pacific -- focusing on the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia. Rumour (in
Malaysia) has it that Prime Minister Mahathir decided that Kuala Lumpur must
have twin towers as a 'cultural landmark' for Malaysia after visiting New York
in the 1980s.
After the tragic events of Tuesday, I got my
students (about 20% of whom are Malay Muslims) to consider how the space and
form of spectacular buildings, transmitted in various media, become symbolic of
'both live and lost causes'. I found the following reading particularly
helpful:
King, A. D. (1996) Worlds in the city:
Manhattan transfer and the ascendance of spectacular space, Planning
Perspectives 11, 97-114.
especially:
'It is not just that the urban public or
private building becomes a manageable project for one, or a larger cadre of
politically-motivated activists; it is also that it is, already, a signifier of
some organization or ideology which, when invaded, blown up or burnt own, takes
on an additional level of signification. It focuses the lens of the
journalist's camera, he eye of the camcorder, the direction of the mobile TV.
It is always the image of the building - rarely the diffuse and ungraspable
'city', and even less, the 'imagined community' of the nation - which is used
to fix our gaze on the limited space of the rectangular screen. In what is now
a totally institutionalized mimetic televisual convention, it is the White
House, the Houses of Parliament, the Duma or the Eiffel Tower which,
subliminally elided into the captial city - is used to mediate the meaning of
the Nation to the Gazes of the World' (p. 102).
However, here in Singapore, I am also beginning to see the anglo-american centredness of Geography (and cultural geography in particular) as a severe limiting factor in making sense of such 'global' events. What they demand - from cultural geography to geopolitics - is precisely a move away from a narrow focus on spaces and meanings of Manhattan and/or Washington etc. Or, rather, the complexity of the meanings of these places themselves necessitates more serious and sustained engagement with cultural political processes beyond the US.