Tim Oakes
Biographic Data
| ID | 201358 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tim Oakes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tim |
| FAMILY NAME | Oakes |
| SIGNATURE | OAKES T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Colorado Boulder |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1176-3180 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 242 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Geographies of China’s global engagements: Place, scale, and power
This Special Issue on Geographies of China’s Global Engagements includes nine in-depth empirical studies from Southeast, South, and Central Asia, as well as Latin America and the former Eastern Europe. A Comment by a scholar studying China’s engagements in Africa is also included in the Issue. The articles cover a diverse array of Chinese engagements, including commercial agriculture, connective infrastructure, and special economic zones and corr…
Colony, passageway, scenic spot: The mythological and material power of the road in southwestern China
Drawing on historical and scholarly accounts as well as contemporary fieldwork, this paper explores the mythological and material powers of roads in historical and contemporary processes of state-making in the frontier regions of Southwest China. Focusing on Guizhou Province, the paper argues that roads have been central to regional identity formation and that, as material infrastructures, roads have shaped historical processes of state formation…
The lingering exceptionalism of global China
In response to DiCarlo and DeBoom's recent article ‘Six paths of Global China’, this commentary argues that the power of the ‘global China’ idea derives from the baggage of lingering exceptionalism that it continues to carry within it. While global China has been embraced by many scholars as a move away from the methodological nationalism, othering, and exceptionalism that has characterized much of the China studies field, the wide-ranging global…
The Invention of Tradition in China: Story of a Village and a Nation Remade
Introduction: Vast land of borders: empire, state, and territory in China
Ethnic Identity of the Kam People in Contemporary China: Government Views versus Local Perspectives
Toward a critical geopolitics of smart tourism
This brief commentary develops an argument for a critical geopolitics of smart tourism. Several critical geopolitical issues related to smart tourism deserve more attention in tourism studies, including the digital infrastructuralization of tourism in the context of platformization and data governance geopolitics. The commentary focuses on smart tourism as a new paradigm in digitally mediated tourism, one which shifts the conversation regarding t…
Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia
Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong and the Center for Asian Studies at the
Ordering the frontiers: Purification projects as a territorializing strategy in southwestern China
This paper offers a case study in frontier colonization, and the subsequent transformation of that colonization into heritage, in order to explore the peripheral processes and projects of state making in China. The paper approaches China’s frontiers as exceptional spaces that compel the state to perform projects of purification. Such projects aim to order frontier space through bordering and “civilizing” practices, yet tend to also have disorderi…
The Belt and Road as method: Geopolitics, technopolitics and power through an infrastructure lens
Although infrastructures may be material manifestations of state territorial power, the political effects of infrastructures are seldom straightforward. And yet, many accounts of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) assume a relatively conventional approach to politics, and to political power. Geopolitical intentionality and top‐down policy and strategic planning tend to be emphasised over project‐level analyses. In response to what might be viewed…
The deer and the dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21 st century
The Deer and the Dragon is a well-organised and engaging collection of chapters on “the nature, dynamics and implications of inequality between China and the countries of Southeast Asia” (p. xxii)
Afterword: A critical reckoning with the 'Asian Century' in the shadow of the anthropocene
What does the advent of an 'Asian Century' portend for critical tourism geographies? This commentary argues that two recent developments have made a critical reckoning with the Asian Century more pressing than ever. First, the Asian Century is in danger of being eclipsed by the deteriorating relationship between China and the United States. And second, the COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges for tourism throughout the world and…
Infrastructures of Permanence and Deserted Architecture in China
Tim Oakes explores how a new infrastructural grid of roads in southwest China contrasts with the precarious commercial ventures that arise in anticipation of a future city that may never arrive
More-than-viral” Eurasian geographies of the covid-19 pandemic: Interconnections, inequalities, and geopolitics
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This paper develops the notion of “more-than-viral” geographies of the covid-19 pandemic. It introduces a set of commentaries on the pandemic in the Eurasian region and its links with the rest of the globe. Taking “more-than-human” perspectives in Human Geography as an inspiration, it develops ways of analyzing the covid-19 pandemic as a “more-than-viral” phenomenon in which human and …
Dance Machine: Performing the city in China's public space
This paper explores China's "plaza dance craze" (guangchangwure) as a practice of "vernacular urban modernity," through which urban public space is claimed, produced, and experimented with by ordinary urban residents. Resulting from fieldwork carried out in two small cities in southwest China's Guizhou Province between 2011 and 2014, the paper considers the contrast between the social space produced by plaza dance, on the one hand, and the projec…
China Made: Infrastructural Thinking in a Chinese Register
Resourcing remoteness and the ‘post‐alteric’ imaginary in China
What makes for an imaginary of remoteness that in turn produces economic yield? This article explores the interplay of remoteness and connectivity in Guizhou, a Chinese province that has long been constructed as rugged, lacking in civilisation, inaccessible and effectively immune to control. Situated in China's southwest, largely populated by minority peoples, the province has been iconic of the ‘remote’ across centuries of Chinese history, despi…
China’s urban ideology: New towns, creation cities, and contested landscapes of memory
This paper argues that “the urban” has emerged as the most significant ideological realm in contemporary China. In developing this argument, I suggest an alternative approach to how we theorize urbanization in China. Seeking to avoid the dichotomized analyses that often characterize scholarship on China’s urbanization, the paper suggests reading “the urban” as an ideological device. Such a reading calls for an analytical distinction between the c…
Making cultural cities in China: Governance, state-building, and precarious creativity
Happy town: Cultural governance and biopolitical urbanism in China
This paper explores the cultural inscription of urban space in China as a technology of government. Based on a three years of fieldwork, including interviews, surveys, and participant observation, the paper examines the case of one city's campaign to increase its "happiness index" by creating an ethnic culturally themed built environment. The paper examines the city's happiness campaign as a project of biopolitical urbanism, and finds that while …
Catastrophic Asia: An Introduction
Catastrophic Asia began as an experimental initiative of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Culminating in a spring 2014 symposium where three of the four papers presented here and earlier versions of the two commentaries were delivered, the project sought to bring together a diversity of perspectives on Asian experiences of and vulnerability to disasters. We sought to collect an unlikely group of scholars whose w…
Ethnic tourism in China
In chapter 13, Tim Oakes presents several key issues concerning the study of ethnic tourism in China today. Even though Chinese-language tourism scholarship has exploded since the mid-2000s, there remains a great deal of room for critical research on Chinese ethnic tourism. Noting the rise of independent tourism and leisure consumption in China, Oakes finds that ethnic tourism has expanded beyond the bounded geography of the ‘minority village’ an…
Villagizing the city: Turning rural ethnic heritage into urban modernity in southwest China
This paper examines the rural ethnic heritage-inspired transformation of the built environment of a relatively small county town in China. The paper explores the ways village-based ethnic heritage is being repositioned by local leaders as a resource for tourism-oriented revenue generation and for ‘improving’ the ‘quality’ and behaviour of town residents. Viewing heritage as a ‘technology of government,’ the paper provides an analysis based on thr…
Making Cultural Cities in Asia: Mobility, Assemblage, and the Politics of Aspirational Urbanism
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development
Emily T. Yeh. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. xvii and 324 pp., maps, photos, notes, bibliography, index. $26.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8014-7832-1), $75.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8014-5155-3).So...
Heritage as Improvement: Cultural Display and Contested Governance in Rural China
This article explores the display of cultural heritage as a contested project of governance and social ordering in rural China. It argues that heritage preservation and display are viewed by many Chinese scholars, officials, and villagers themselves as powerful tools of modernization and development; that cultural display implies a project of “improvement” and of building “quality” among the “backward” rural population; and that this view of heri…
Traveling for a cause: Critical examinations of volunteer tourism and social justice
Over the last decade there has been a rise in ‘volunteer tourism’ or ‘voluntourism,’ which is characterized by the combination of travel and volunteering, typically in social or economic development or conversation oriented projects. The papers in this special issue theoretically and empirically examine the dynamic interplay between volunteer tourism and the broader expansion of market-mediated social justice campaigns. Also examined is the poten…
The Belt and Road as method: Geopolitics, technopolitics and power through an infrastructure lens
Although infrastructures may be material manifestations of state territorial power, the political effects of infrastructures are seldom straightforward. And yet, many accounts of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) assume a relatively conventional approach to politics, and to political power. Geopolitical intentionality and top‐down policy and strategic planning tend to be emphasised over project‐level analyses. In response to what might be viewed…
China's Provincial Identities: "Reviving Regionalism and Reinventing "Chineseness
In His Science-Fiction NovelThe Diamond Age(1995), Neal Stephenson envisions a post-nation-state world of the future, where countless fragmentations of cultural identity differentiate humanity into spatially discrete tribal zones. Identity has become entirely spatialized, rendering its historical basis-that is, the experiences that generate a "collective memory" for a community-into a decontextualized montage of nostalgia. Stephenson writes a wor…
Cultural strategies of development: Implications for village governance in China
Since the early 1990s, culture has come to be recognized as a significant regional development resource in China. This paper raises the question of whether cultural strategies of development have ameliorated or exacerbated the government's increasing inability to provide for the public's basic needs. Specifically, it asks: what are the implications of China's cultural strategies of regional development for local-level governance? Three case study…
Eating the food of the ancestors: Place, tradition, and tourism in a Chinese frontier River town
This essay explores the development of tourism as a local cultural production in a remote region of south-west China. It offers a case study in the contests over how landscapes are represented and reconstructed for tourist consumption. Two issues underlie the analysis: One is the relationship between broader cultural discourse and its local appropriation and manipulation. In this case, that broader cultural discourse is one dominated by ideals of…
Resourcing Culture: Is a Prosaic 'Third Space' Possible in Rural China
Recalling Tony Bennett's plea for a more 'prosaic' cultural studies, this paper proposes a redefinition of the concept 'third space' as a prosaic space of policy and governmentality. Based on field research in rural China, where cultural heritage has become a central resource in economic development, the paper argues that cultural development cannot be relied upon to produce spaces of resistance, empowerment, or 'sustainability'. This is, in part…
Villagizing the city: Turning rural ethnic heritage into urban modernity in southwest China
This paper examines the rural ethnic heritage-inspired transformation of the built environment of a relatively small county town in China. The paper explores the ways village-based ethnic heritage is being repositioned by local leaders as a resource for tourism-oriented revenue generation and for ‘improving’ the ‘quality’ and behaviour of town residents. Viewing heritage as a ‘technology of government,’ the paper provides an analysis based on thr…
China’s urban ideology: New towns, creation cities, and contested landscapes of memory
This paper argues that “the urban” has emerged as the most significant ideological realm in contemporary China. In developing this argument, I suggest an alternative approach to how we theorize urbanization in China. Seeking to avoid the dichotomized analyses that often characterize scholarship on China’s urbanization, the paper suggests reading “the urban” as an ideological device. Such a reading calls for an analytical distinction between the c…
Looking Out to Look In: The Use of the Periphery in China's Geopolitical Narratives
Using a previous paper published in Eurasian Geography and Economics (Agnew, 2012) as a point of departure, an American geographer and specialist on China explores the role of the periphery (frontier, borderlands) in forging perceptions of China's place in the world. By presenting counter-narratives to the myth of a singular Chinese culture/ethnicity spreading inexorably from a Yellow River hearth region over five millennia, the author demonstrat…
Happy town: Cultural governance and biopolitical urbanism in China
This paper explores the cultural inscription of urban space in China as a technology of government. Based on a three years of fieldwork, including interviews, surveys, and participant observation, the paper examines the case of one city's campaign to increase its "happiness index" by creating an ethnic culturally themed built environment. The paper examines the city's happiness campaign as a project of biopolitical urbanism, and finds that while …
Making cultural cities in China: Governance, state-building, and precarious creativity
Bathing in the Far Village: Globalization, Transnational Capital, and the Cultural Politics of Modernity in China
positions: east asia cultures critique - Volume 7, Number 2, Fall 1999
Toward a critical geopolitics of smart tourism
This brief commentary develops an argument for a critical geopolitics of smart tourism. Several critical geopolitical issues related to smart tourism deserve more attention in tourism studies, including the digital infrastructuralization of tourism in the context of platformization and data governance geopolitics. The commentary focuses on smart tourism as a new paradigm in digitally mediated tourism, one which shifts the conversation regarding t…
Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia
Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong and the Center for Asian Studies at the
Ordering the frontiers: Purification projects as a territorializing strategy in southwestern China
This paper offers a case study in frontier colonization, and the subsequent transformation of that colonization into heritage, in order to explore the peripheral processes and projects of state making in China. The paper approaches China’s frontiers as exceptional spaces that compel the state to perform projects of purification. Such projects aim to order frontier space through bordering and “civilizing” practices, yet tend to also have disorderi…
Afterword: A critical reckoning with the 'Asian Century' in the shadow of the anthropocene
What does the advent of an 'Asian Century' portend for critical tourism geographies? This commentary argues that two recent developments have made a critical reckoning with the Asian Century more pressing than ever. First, the Asian Century is in danger of being eclipsed by the deteriorating relationship between China and the United States. And second, the COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges for tourism throughout the world and…
Dance Machine: Performing the city in China's public space
This paper explores China's "plaza dance craze" (guangchangwure) as a practice of "vernacular urban modernity," through which urban public space is claimed, produced, and experimented with by ordinary urban residents. Resulting from fieldwork carried out in two small cities in southwest China's Guizhou Province between 2011 and 2014, the paper considers the contrast between the social space produced by plaza dance, on the one hand, and the projec…
More-than-viral” Eurasian geographies of the covid-19 pandemic: Interconnections, inequalities, and geopolitics
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This paper develops the notion of “more-than-viral” geographies of the covid-19 pandemic. It introduces a set of commentaries on the pandemic in the Eurasian region and its links with the rest of the globe. Taking “more-than-human” perspectives in Human Geography as an inspiration, it develops ways of analyzing the covid-19 pandemic as a “more-than-viral” phenomenon in which human and …
Catastrophic Asia: An Introduction
Catastrophic Asia began as an experimental initiative of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Culminating in a spring 2014 symposium where three of the four papers presented here and earlier versions of the two commentaries were delivered, the project sought to bring together a diversity of perspectives on Asian experiences of and vulnerability to disasters. We sought to collect an unlikely group of scholars whose w…
Bathing in the Far Village: Globalization, Transnational Capital, and the Cultural Politics of Modernity in China
positions: east asia cultures critique - Volume 7, Number 2, Fall 1999
Eating the food of the ancestors: Place, tradition, and tourism in a Chinese frontier River town
This essay explores the development of tourism as a local cultural production in a remote region of south-west China. It offers a case study in the contests over how landscapes are represented and reconstructed for tourist consumption. Two issues underlie the analysis: One is the relationship between broader cultural discourse and its local appropriation and manipulation. In this case, that broader cultural discourse is one dominated by ideals of…
China's Provincial Identities: "Reviving Regionalism and Reinventing "Chineseness
In His Science-Fiction NovelThe Diamond Age(1995), Neal Stephenson envisions a post-nation-state world of the future, where countless fragmentations of cultural identity differentiate humanity into spatially discrete tribal zones. Identity has become entirely spatialized, rendering its historical basis-that is, the experiences that generate a "collective memory" for a community-into a decontextualized montage of nostalgia. Stephenson writes a wor…
Dragonheads and needlework: Textile work and cultural heritage in a Guizhou county
Introduction: Re-imagining Chinese mobilities and spaces
Capitalizing Asian Studies: Critical Scholarship and the Production of Knowledge in a Globalizing World
This paper explores the implications of the related trends of economic globalization and the corporatization of higher education in the United States for Asian area studies scholarship. It argues that the scales at which geographical knowledge is produced are increasingly in flux due to the shift in global political economy. Area studies scholarship is subsequently left scrambling to both understand this shift and make its knowledge production so…
Tourism and Modernity in China
This book explores how the experience of modernization is revealed in China's newly constructed tourist landscapes. It argues that in China's burgeoning ethnic tourist villages and theme parks can be seen all the contradictions, debasement, and liberating potentials of Chinese modernity. Tim Oakes uses the province of Guizhou to examine the Chinese tourist industry as an example of the state's modernization policies and how local people have enga…
Translocal China: An introduction
The most obvious and most commented upon element of spatial change in today’s China has been the unprecedented geographic mobility of millions of labor migrants, tourists, brides, entrepreneurs, and many others. What we seek by deploying the term “translocal,” is to complicate this literal notion of mobility with many other forms and functions of connectedness, both past and present, and to ask how they have transformed localities and relations a…
Translocal China
1. Translocal China: An Introduction 2. The Original Translocal Society and its Modern Fate: Historical and Post-Reform South China 3. Shanxi as Translocal Imaginary: Reforming the Local 4. Openness, Change and Translocality: New Migrants' Identification with Hainan 5. How Local are Local Enterprises?: Privatization and Translocality of Small Firms in Zhejiang and Jiangsu 6. Urban Transformation and Professionalization: Translocality and Rational…
Cultural strategies of development: Implications for village governance in China
Since the early 1990s, culture has come to be recognized as a significant regional development resource in China. This paper raises the question of whether cultural strategies of development have ameliorated or exacerbated the government's increasing inability to provide for the public's basic needs. Specifically, it asks: what are the implications of China's cultural strategies of regional development for local-level governance? Three case study…
Entries
Resourcing Culture: Is a Prosaic 'Third Space' Possible in Rural China
Recalling Tony Bennett's plea for a more 'prosaic' cultural studies, this paper proposes a redefinition of the concept 'third space' as a prosaic space of policy and governmentality. Based on field research in rural China, where cultural heritage has become a central resource in economic development, the paper argues that cultural development cannot be relied upon to produce spaces of resistance, empowerment, or 'sustainability'. This is, in part…
Mobility and Cultural Authority in Contemporary China . Pál Nyíri
Real Tourism
Over the past decade, tourism studies has broken out of its traditional institutional affiliation with business and management programs to take its legitimate place as an interdisciplinary social science field of cutting edge scholarship. The field has emerged as central to ongoing debates in social theory concerning such diverse topics as postcolonialism, mobility, and postmodernism, to name just a few. While there has been a diverse body of emp…
Looking Out to Look In: The Use of the Periphery in China's Geopolitical Narratives
Using a previous paper published in Eurasian Geography and Economics (Agnew, 2012) as a point of departure, an American geographer and specialist on China explores the role of the periphery (frontier, borderlands) in forging perceptions of China's place in the world. By presenting counter-narratives to the myth of a singular Chinese culture/ethnicity spreading inexorably from a Yellow River hearth region over five millennia, the author demonstrat…
Heritage as Improvement: Cultural Display and Contested Governance in Rural China
This article explores the display of cultural heritage as a contested project of governance and social ordering in rural China. It argues that heritage preservation and display are viewed by many Chinese scholars, officials, and villagers themselves as powerful tools of modernization and development; that cultural display implies a project of “improvement” and of building “quality” among the “backward” rural population; and that this view of heri…
Making Cultural Cities in Asia: Mobility, Assemblage, and the Politics of Aspirational Urbanism
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development
Emily T. Yeh. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. xvii and 324 pp., maps, photos, notes, bibliography, index. $26.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8014-7832-1), $75.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8014-5155-3).So...
Traveling for a cause: Critical examinations of volunteer tourism and social justice
Over the last decade there has been a rise in ‘volunteer tourism’ or ‘voluntourism,’ which is characterized by the combination of travel and volunteering, typically in social or economic development or conversation oriented projects. The papers in this special issue theoretically and empirically examine the dynamic interplay between volunteer tourism and the broader expansion of market-mediated social justice campaigns. Also examined is the poten…
Ethnic tourism in China
In chapter 13, Tim Oakes presents several key issues concerning the study of ethnic tourism in China today. Even though Chinese-language tourism scholarship has exploded since the mid-2000s, there remains a great deal of room for critical research on Chinese ethnic tourism. Noting the rise of independent tourism and leisure consumption in China, Oakes finds that ethnic tourism has expanded beyond the bounded geography of the ‘minority village’ an…
Villagizing the city: Turning rural ethnic heritage into urban modernity in southwest China
This paper examines the rural ethnic heritage-inspired transformation of the built environment of a relatively small county town in China. The paper explores the ways village-based ethnic heritage is being repositioned by local leaders as a resource for tourism-oriented revenue generation and for ‘improving’ the ‘quality’ and behaviour of town residents. Viewing heritage as a ‘technology of government,’ the paper provides an analysis based on thr…
Catastrophic Asia: An Introduction
Catastrophic Asia began as an experimental initiative of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Culminating in a spring 2014 symposium where three of the four papers presented here and earlier versions of the two commentaries were delivered, the project sought to bring together a diversity of perspectives on Asian experiences of and vulnerability to disasters. We sought to collect an unlikely group of scholars whose w…
China Made: Infrastructural Thinking in a Chinese Register
Resourcing remoteness and the ‘post‐alteric’ imaginary in China
What makes for an imaginary of remoteness that in turn produces economic yield? This article explores the interplay of remoteness and connectivity in Guizhou, a Chinese province that has long been constructed as rugged, lacking in civilisation, inaccessible and effectively immune to control. Situated in China's southwest, largely populated by minority peoples, the province has been iconic of the ‘remote’ across centuries of Chinese history, despi…
China’s urban ideology: New towns, creation cities, and contested landscapes of memory
This paper argues that “the urban” has emerged as the most significant ideological realm in contemporary China. In developing this argument, I suggest an alternative approach to how we theorize urbanization in China. Seeking to avoid the dichotomized analyses that often characterize scholarship on China’s urbanization, the paper suggests reading “the urban” as an ideological device. Such a reading calls for an analytical distinction between the c…
China (31 works) · Political science (28 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Geography (24 works) · Law (21 works) · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance (19 works) · Chinese history and philosophy (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Politics (14 works) · Archaeology (12 works)