C J W L Wee
Biographic Data
| ID | 48807 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C J W L Wee |
| GIVEN NAMES | C J W L |
| FAMILY NAME | Wee |
| SIGNATURE | WEE C J W L |
| AFFILIATIONS | English, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4271-1332 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 36 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Discoursing Asia
The 1990s saw art exhibitions and biennials staged in East and Southeast Asia and Australia representing a contemporary rather than traditional Asia. These events were supported by region-wide fora on Asian contemporary art that promoted the discursive and imaginative capacity to curate such an Asia. The Japan Foundation Asia Center contributed to this capacity building via what could be called cultural infrastructural networks – their symposia o…
Introduction
Beyond national identity
This article argues that the artistic-cultural work of the late Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002) from the mid-1990s commenced on what tentatively can be called an extraterritorial theatre practice that engaged with the modern state’s capacity to make national identity singular in the interests of political, military and economic goals, and in which cultural formation and identity must exceed the nation-state’s purview. The present, “globalised” moment req…
What makes theatre modern
Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002) was often regarded as the doyen of Singapore theatre. The interview reveals how his theatre practice in the 1960s–1970s worked through Chinese theatre (in both its spoken and more traditional sung forms), Brechtian theatre (with its alienation effect) and modern Russian theatre (in its naturalistic form) in the attempt to form a flexible modern Chinese-language theatre in Singapore that could intellectually engage with the…
Challenges to Asian public intellectuals
Kuo reflects upon the Pacific War and what he feels holds post-war Japanese culture back from attaining “genuine greatness,” given a capacity enabled by its early modernising efforts for “the liberation of the self, the democratisation of society and ... the realisation of the knowledge-based mode of production and exchange.” He also argues that nations in East and Southeast Asia share a similar socio-political “baggage with Japan — chiefly the s…
East Asian pop culture and the trajectory of Asian consumption
This article focuses on Chua Beng Huat’s work on the East Asian pop culture that became more prominent in East and Southeast Asia from the 1990s, when the circulation of multilingual and multi-format pop culture started to exceed linguistic, ethnic and national boundaries. It argues that Chua’s work indicates that the pop-cultural production and innovation that support the globalisation and regionalisation processes in East Asia need not be natio…
Imagining the Fractured East Asian Modern
It has been said (rightly) that the "opposition of center and periphery goes a long way, since it stretches from the great capitals and world cities to the most miserable, so-called 'undeveloped' regions and countries," and that the "domination of centers . . . guarantees the homogeneous character of space [for i]t exercises control at all . . . points of view over peripheries that are both dominated and broken apart." 1 What happens, though, whe…
The Suppressed in the Modern Urbanscape
The Singapore People's Action Party (PAP) state's adapted Euro-US modernist impulses were reflected not in high cultural achievements but in building construction. Since independence, the PAP has revamped Singapore's colonial downtown into a conceptually empty postnational space filled with decontextualized buildings designed by famous foreign architects. While this uniformly high-rise environment and urban development is common among the high-ec…
Screening Singapore
This paper investigates the mutually constitutive relationship between the context of film production and the composition and content of images produced. Singapore film director Eric Khoo is central to our investigation, and his 2005 film Be With Me is a key example of how Singapore's ongoing urban redevelopment to become a world city reflexively shapes the style and appearance of the city-state projected in the film. Singapore's history as a dev…
We Asians”? Modernity, Visual Art Exhibitions, and East Asia
Rapid economic development in East Asia in the 1980s–1990s saw a revivification of the idea of “Asia,” a region no longer regarded as backward. This article examines the East Asian visual arts scene, one of the most visible sites of cultural interaction in which the idea of contemporary New Asia was curated into “being” in Japanese, Australian, and Singapore museums. A key goal was the attempt to imagine a cosmopolitan-multicultural Asia able to …
The Indigenized West in Asian Multicultures
This essay examines what happens to the cosmopolitan culture of the west for postcolonial societies when economic and political power has shifted away from a geographical location to a less locatable planetary position. The essay also investigates whether postcolonial Others in the semi-periphery ever effectively lay claim to a cosmopolitan Anglo-Asian multiculture that has a part ownership, no matter how fraught, of what can be called the global…
The Asian Modern
This book is an account of how the modernization processes for postcolonial societies in Asia such as India, Malaysia, and Singapore are fraught with collaborations and conflicts between different socio-political, historical, economic, and cultural agents
The Theatre of Krishen Jit
In a career spanning more than 40 years, playwright and director Krishen Jit, who passed away in April 2005, was the doyen of Malaysian theatre. Jit constantly reinvented himself. His shifting cultural position was part of an ongoing analysis of changing national sociopolitical moods and mores. A public intellectual, Jit was passionately engaged in a critique of cultural difference in relation to the staging of Malaysian identity
Books
March 01 2004 The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization. By BharuchaRustom C.J.W.-L. Wee C.J.W.-L. Wee Teaches literature and cultural theory in the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information C.J.W.-L. Wee Teaches liter…
Creating High Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert” of Singapore
December 01 2003 Creating High Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert” of Singapore C.J.W.-L. Wee C.J.W.-L. Wee C.J.W.-L. Wee teaches literature and cultural theory at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He was formerly a Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, and is the author of Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern (Lexington Books, 2003), and the editor of Local Cultures and the “New Asia”:…
National Identity, the Arts, and the Global City
Local Cultures and the New Asia
Southeast Asia, until the Asian economic crisis of 1997-2000, was a high economic growth area. However, despite the neo-liberal and globalizing logic of capitalism, local conditions and cultures determine that capitalism will spread in ways not entirely consonant with its Western origins. Capitalism is not a free-floating entity -- it is a socially embodied phenomenon that needs to function in various cultural contexts. Consequently, the tension …
Capitalism and ethnicity
Asian Values”, Singapore, and the Third Way
The “Clash” of Civilizations? Or an Emerging “East Asian Modernity
This paper examines Samuel Huntington's influential article, Clash of Civilizations?, particularly his interest in Confucian civilizations. Huntington's civilizational approach, this paper suggests, is marred by ahistorical and essentialist thinking on both the causes of the emergence of and Southeast Asian newly industrializing economies (NIEs) and the reasons for the clashes between and West in recent years. What is at stake instead is to a lar…
Staging the New Asia
Research Article| September 01 1996 Staging the New Asia: Singapore's Dick Lee, Pop Music, and a Counter-Modernity C. J. W.-L. Wee C. J. W.-L. Wee Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1996) 8 (3): 489–510. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8-3-489 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation C. J. W.-L. Wee; Staging the New Asia: Singapore's Dick Lee, Pop Mu…
Contending with Primordialism
Research Article| August 01 1993 Contending with Primordialism: The “Modern” Construction of Postcolonial Singapore C. J. W.-L. Wee C. J. W.-L. Wee Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (1993) 1 (3): 715–744. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-1-3-715 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissio…
Contending with Primordialism
Research Article| August 01 1993 Contending with Primordialism: The “Modern” Construction of Postcolonial Singapore C. J. W.-L. Wee C. J. W.-L. Wee Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (1993) 1 (3): 715–744. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-1-3-715 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissio…
East Asian pop culture and the trajectory of Asian consumption
This article focuses on Chua Beng Huat’s work on the East Asian pop culture that became more prominent in East and Southeast Asia from the 1990s, when the circulation of multilingual and multi-format pop culture started to exceed linguistic, ethnic and national boundaries. It argues that Chua’s work indicates that the pop-cultural production and innovation that support the globalisation and regionalisation processes in East Asia need not be natio…
Capitalism and ethnicity
Asian Values”, Singapore, and the Third Way
Staging the New Asia
Research Article| September 01 1996 Staging the New Asia: Singapore's Dick Lee, Pop Music, and a Counter-Modernity C. J. W.-L. Wee C. J. W.-L. Wee Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1996) 8 (3): 489–510. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8-3-489 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation C. J. W.-L. Wee; Staging the New Asia: Singapore's Dick Lee, Pop Mu…
Introduction
Beyond national identity
This article argues that the artistic-cultural work of the late Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002) from the mid-1990s commenced on what tentatively can be called an extraterritorial theatre practice that engaged with the modern state’s capacity to make national identity singular in the interests of political, military and economic goals, and in which cultural formation and identity must exceed the nation-state’s purview. The present, “globalised” moment req…
What makes theatre modern
Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002) was often regarded as the doyen of Singapore theatre. The interview reveals how his theatre practice in the 1960s–1970s worked through Chinese theatre (in both its spoken and more traditional sung forms), Brechtian theatre (with its alienation effect) and modern Russian theatre (in its naturalistic form) in the attempt to form a flexible modern Chinese-language theatre in Singapore that could intellectually engage with the…
Challenges to Asian public intellectuals
Kuo reflects upon the Pacific War and what he feels holds post-war Japanese culture back from attaining “genuine greatness,” given a capacity enabled by its early modernising efforts for “the liberation of the self, the democratisation of society and ... the realisation of the knowledge-based mode of production and exchange.” He also argues that nations in East and Southeast Asia share a similar socio-political “baggage with Japan — chiefly the s…
The Suppressed in the Modern Urbanscape
The Singapore People's Action Party (PAP) state's adapted Euro-US modernist impulses were reflected not in high cultural achievements but in building construction. Since independence, the PAP has revamped Singapore's colonial downtown into a conceptually empty postnational space filled with decontextualized buildings designed by famous foreign architects. While this uniformly high-rise environment and urban development is common among the high-ec…
We Asians”? Modernity, Visual Art Exhibitions, and East Asia
Rapid economic development in East Asia in the 1980s–1990s saw a revivification of the idea of “Asia,” a region no longer regarded as backward. This article examines the East Asian visual arts scene, one of the most visible sites of cultural interaction in which the idea of contemporary New Asia was curated into “being” in Japanese, Australian, and Singapore museums. A key goal was the attempt to imagine a cosmopolitan-multicultural Asia able to …
The Indigenized West in Asian Multicultures
This essay examines what happens to the cosmopolitan culture of the west for postcolonial societies when economic and political power has shifted away from a geographical location to a less locatable planetary position. The essay also investigates whether postcolonial Others in the semi-periphery ever effectively lay claim to a cosmopolitan Anglo-Asian multiculture that has a part ownership, no matter how fraught, of what can be called the global…
The “Clash” of Civilizations? Or an Emerging “East Asian Modernity
This paper examines Samuel Huntington's influential article, Clash of Civilizations?, particularly his interest in Confucian civilizations. Huntington's civilizational approach, this paper suggests, is marred by ahistorical and essentialist thinking on both the causes of the emergence of and Southeast Asian newly industrializing economies (NIEs) and the reasons for the clashes between and West in recent years. What is at stake instead is to a lar…
Contending with Primordialism
Research Article| August 01 1993 Contending with Primordialism: The “Modern” Construction of Postcolonial Singapore C. J. W.-L. Wee C. J. W.-L. Wee Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (1993) 1 (3): 715–744. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-1-3-715 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissio…
The “Clash” of Civilizations? Or an Emerging “East Asian Modernity
This paper examines Samuel Huntington's influential article, Clash of Civilizations?, particularly his interest in Confucian civilizations. Huntington's civilizational approach, this paper suggests, is marred by ahistorical and essentialist thinking on both the causes of the emergence of and Southeast Asian newly industrializing economies (NIEs) and the reasons for the clashes between and West in recent years. What is at stake instead is to a lar…
Staging the New Asia
Research Article| September 01 1996 Staging the New Asia: Singapore's Dick Lee, Pop Music, and a Counter-Modernity C. J. W.-L. Wee C. J. W.-L. Wee Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1996) 8 (3): 489–510. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8-3-489 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation C. J. W.-L. Wee; Staging the New Asia: Singapore's Dick Lee, Pop Mu…
Asian Values”, Singapore, and the Third Way
Capitalism and ethnicity
National Identity, the Arts, and the Global City
Local Cultures and the New Asia
Southeast Asia, until the Asian economic crisis of 1997-2000, was a high economic growth area. However, despite the neo-liberal and globalizing logic of capitalism, local conditions and cultures determine that capitalism will spread in ways not entirely consonant with its Western origins. Capitalism is not a free-floating entity -- it is a socially embodied phenomenon that needs to function in various cultural contexts. Consequently, the tension …
Creating High Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert” of Singapore
December 01 2003 Creating High Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert” of Singapore C.J.W.-L. Wee C.J.W.-L. Wee C.J.W.-L. Wee teaches literature and cultural theory at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He was formerly a Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, and is the author of Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern (Lexington Books, 2003), and the editor of Local Cultures and the “New Asia”:…
Books
March 01 2004 The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization. By BharuchaRustom C.J.W.-L. Wee C.J.W.-L. Wee Teaches literature and cultural theory in the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information C.J.W.-L. Wee Teaches liter…
The Asian Modern
This book is an account of how the modernization processes for postcolonial societies in Asia such as India, Malaysia, and Singapore are fraught with collaborations and conflicts between different socio-political, historical, economic, and cultural agents
The Theatre of Krishen Jit
In a career spanning more than 40 years, playwright and director Krishen Jit, who passed away in April 2005, was the doyen of Malaysian theatre. Jit constantly reinvented himself. His shifting cultural position was part of an ongoing analysis of changing national sociopolitical moods and mores. A public intellectual, Jit was passionately engaged in a critique of cultural difference in relation to the staging of Malaysian identity
The Indigenized West in Asian Multicultures
This essay examines what happens to the cosmopolitan culture of the west for postcolonial societies when economic and political power has shifted away from a geographical location to a less locatable planetary position. The essay also investigates whether postcolonial Others in the semi-periphery ever effectively lay claim to a cosmopolitan Anglo-Asian multiculture that has a part ownership, no matter how fraught, of what can be called the global…
We Asians”? Modernity, Visual Art Exhibitions, and East Asia
Rapid economic development in East Asia in the 1980s–1990s saw a revivification of the idea of “Asia,” a region no longer regarded as backward. This article examines the East Asian visual arts scene, one of the most visible sites of cultural interaction in which the idea of contemporary New Asia was curated into “being” in Japanese, Australian, and Singapore museums. A key goal was the attempt to imagine a cosmopolitan-multicultural Asia able to …
Screening Singapore
This paper investigates the mutually constitutive relationship between the context of film production and the composition and content of images produced. Singapore film director Eric Khoo is central to our investigation, and his 2005 film Be With Me is a key example of how Singapore's ongoing urban redevelopment to become a world city reflexively shapes the style and appearance of the city-state projected in the film. Singapore's history as a dev…
Imagining the Fractured East Asian Modern
It has been said (rightly) that the "opposition of center and periphery goes a long way, since it stretches from the great capitals and world cities to the most miserable, so-called 'undeveloped' regions and countries," and that the "domination of centers . . . guarantees the homogeneous character of space [for i]t exercises control at all . . . points of view over peripheries that are both dominated and broken apart." 1 What happens, though, whe…
The Suppressed in the Modern Urbanscape
The Singapore People's Action Party (PAP) state's adapted Euro-US modernist impulses were reflected not in high cultural achievements but in building construction. Since independence, the PAP has revamped Singapore's colonial downtown into a conceptually empty postnational space filled with decontextualized buildings designed by famous foreign architects. While this uniformly high-rise environment and urban development is common among the high-ec…
East Asian pop culture and the trajectory of Asian consumption
This article focuses on Chua Beng Huat’s work on the East Asian pop culture that became more prominent in East and Southeast Asia from the 1990s, when the circulation of multilingual and multi-format pop culture started to exceed linguistic, ethnic and national boundaries. It argues that Chua’s work indicates that the pop-cultural production and innovation that support the globalisation and regionalisation processes in East Asia need not be natio…
Introduction
Beyond national identity
This article argues that the artistic-cultural work of the late Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002) from the mid-1990s commenced on what tentatively can be called an extraterritorial theatre practice that engaged with the modern state’s capacity to make national identity singular in the interests of political, military and economic goals, and in which cultural formation and identity must exceed the nation-state’s purview. The present, “globalised” moment req…
What makes theatre modern
Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002) was often regarded as the doyen of Singapore theatre. The interview reveals how his theatre practice in the 1960s–1970s worked through Chinese theatre (in both its spoken and more traditional sung forms), Brechtian theatre (with its alienation effect) and modern Russian theatre (in its naturalistic form) in the attempt to form a flexible modern Chinese-language theatre in Singapore that could intellectually engage with the…
Challenges to Asian public intellectuals
Kuo reflects upon the Pacific War and what he feels holds post-war Japanese culture back from attaining “genuine greatness,” given a capacity enabled by its early modernising efforts for “the liberation of the self, the democratisation of society and ... the realisation of the knowledge-based mode of production and exchange.” He also argues that nations in East and Southeast Asia share a similar socio-political “baggage with Japan — chiefly the s…
Discoursing Asia
The 1990s saw art exhibitions and biennials staged in East and Southeast Asia and Australia representing a contemporary rather than traditional Asia. These events were supported by region-wide fora on Asian contemporary art that promoted the discursive and imaginative capacity to curate such an Asia. The Japan Foundation Asia Center contributed to this capacity building via what could be called cultural infrastructural networks – their symposia o…
Political science (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Socioeconomic Development in Asia (12 works) · Art (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · History (10 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Asian Studies and History (8 works)