| Abstrakt: |
The Postcolonial Legacy In the fields of architecture and urbanism scholarship on South and Southeast Asia has diverged considerably. While recent work on South Asia has favoured explorations of colonial period histories, scholarship on Southeast Asia has focused predominantly on contemporary urban conditions. Accordingly, the former builds on the foundations of postcolonial theory quite explicitly while the latter is concerned with the political economies of globalization. These very different theoretical lenses suggest that the politics of the region during the late twentieth century shaped architectural writing in distinct ways This paper sets out to identify some of the characteristics of architectural writing on South and Southeast Asia in the late twentieth century and possible changes we might witness in the coming decade. It examines how interdisciplinary scholarship has pervaded the field taking it beyond empirical approaches to polemical and reflexive critiques of culture, power and the academy. The contribution and limitations of postcolonial studies is examined. This paper also raises issues of other forms of marginality and subjectivity, typically addressed by postcolonial studies, which are being superseded by techno-scientific environmental agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
