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45
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Introduction
Shu-Mei Huang is Associate Professor at the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning at National Taiwan University. Huang specializes in Heritage studies, memory studies, and urban studies. Her work appears in the International Journal of Heritage Studies, International Journal of Cultural Policies, Memory Studies, etc. Huang is also the leading editor of the volume Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific (Hong Kong University Press).
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Publications
Publications (45)
The past 10 years witnessed a resurgence of youth activism in East Asia. While some may consider it as simply reflecting a broader, general trend of young people reacting to the neoliberalizing world, this paper pays special attention to the changing cultural geographies of East Asia that underlie part of the picture. In 2014, the Sunflower movemen...
Hong Kong, in contrast to its previous image as a glamourous global city, has recently been associated with negative keywords such as oppression, fear, violence and even human rights emergency, following the 2019 Anti‐Extradition Law Movement and later the implementation of National Security Law (NSL) in 2020. Meanwhile, the Hong Kong Special Area...
In this commentary, I respond to Shawn Bodden’s (2023) work ‘Working Through Our Differences’, which discusses the limits of ontology in critical geographical theories. I build upon Bodden's invitation to bring attention to ordinary voices and acts to understand how people place themselves instead of pointing people to their proper place. I echo th...
This article brings attention to the moral aspect of remembering by examining the emerging interest in wartime documentary heritage in East Asia, particularly epitomized in recent competitions and disputes over nomination processes of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Memory of the World. It examines China and Jap...
This research attends to how urban tenants bring matong (toilets in the form of urine buckets)-which are a material, semiotic, and marketable piece of infrastructure-into the debates over the remaking of a heritage district in Hongkou, Shanghai. Challenges abound for the site, which is occupied by prewar buildings where Jewish refugees found shelte...
Shu-Mei Huang’s study of Jewish heritage in Shanghai in Chapter 8 illuminates the diplomatic maneuvering that has simultaneously celebrated and obfuscated a complex instance of heritage encapsulating memories of Jewish exile and flight across the length of Eurasia. In light of recent trends towards the globalization of Holocaust memory, Huang discu...
Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific explores the making and consumption of conflict-related heritage throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Contributing to a growing literature on ‘difficult heritage’, this collection advances our understanding of how places of pain, shame, oppression, and trauma have been appropriated and refashioned as ‘heritage...
Purpose/
This paper illustrates how Taiwan has tried to mobilize its prehistory Austronesian linguistic heritage and indigenous cultural memories to reposition itself in the Asia-Pacific. It examines how the attempt has gradually evolved into cross-border exchange and partnership based on the interconnectivity across the Pacific on different levels...
Amid increasing interest in city branding in East Asia, the municipalities of Gunsan (South Korea) and Chiayi (Taiwan) chose colonial heritage-making as their city branding strategies to recreate their cities' identities and regenerate their economies. Both cities were mostly built by Japanese imperial authorities and thrived in the 1920s and 1930s...
The past decade has witnessed an emerging interest in growing quinoa in indigenous townships in Taiwan, which has overlapped with the recovery effort from disasters following Typhoon Morakot in 2009. This paper critically examines the acclaim given to the quinoa boom as testifying to the community resilience of the indigenous people displaced by di...
This series of articles represents the outcomes of a two-part webinar, titled Bottom-Up Resilience and hosted by APRU Plus in July 2020. Through a partnership between Pacific Rim Community Design Network and the APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Hub, the discussion brought together a group of activists, organizers, and researchers across the r...
Based on a transnational study of decommissioned, postcolonial prisons in Taiwan (Taipei and Chiayi), South Korea (Seoul) and China (Lushun), this book offers a critical reading of prisons as a particular colonial product, the current restoration of which as national heritage is closely related to the evolving conceptualization of punishment. Focus...
The chapter offers a review of how the planning of housing provision has transformed in post-handover Hong Kong against the rise of China’s influence. Focusing on housing or geographies of housing, this chapter argues that neoliberalism has evolved in Hong Kong as an ongoing process of reshaping the boundary of the city, which demands a normalizati...
Place‐making is an assemblage of related concepts and practices predicated on the phenomenon of place. Although scholars have mostly focused on human actions in particular locations and have prioritized the significance of materiality, some have argued that place is porous and multiscalar and contains multiple human and nonhuman actors. As a proces...
Unlike housing, heritage is rarely prioritized in recovery planning, especially when the site subject to preservation was abandoned even before the disaster occurred. The fact that the preservation of indigenous architecture and landscapes is sometimes a necessity for those who cherish place attachments is often ignored; moreover, the fact that suc...
Placemaking is an assemblage of practices predicated on the shaping and understanding of places. As place continues to evolve over time, placemaking has also fluctuated between moments of reification as bounded territorial practices and phases of de-materialization that challenge parochial fixity. Against the backdrop of post-disaster recovery in S...
The recently increased interest in transnational, serial nominations for UNESCO World Heritage status and comparable forms of official recognition demonstrates the critical role of heritage as diplomacy. There are both opportunities and challenges, nevertheless, when treating difficult heritage as diplomacy, such as in the case of colonial prisons...
This article presents an alternative approach to understanding urban farming. Through the lens of feminist theories of regenerative politics, it demonstrates that urban farming can be rearticulated as/for/from within a transformative planning practice. Drawing on planning practices in the less studied terrain of Hong Kong—the New Territories border...
Existing disaster studies scholarship tends to uncritically privilege official institutional responses to disasters over bottom-up, community-based reactions and adaptations in the longer term. Meanwhile, the state-recognized disasters mostly exclude socioeconomic and environmental contradictions that generate disasters by making people vulnerable...
At the Lushun Russo-Japanese Prison (LRJP) Museum, I was drawn to a photo display in which one old Japanese man is regretfully writing down his testimony (Fig. 31.1). The Japanese physician Goga Shyoichi was the medical officer in the prison from May 1944 to July 1945. The narratives at the side frame Shyoichi’s memories through shame and guilt, qu...
Research into prison tourism and prison heritage has not taken enough time to understand how historical change has left impacts in urban contexts, which sometimes continues even after the prisons are decommissioned. This paper discusses the punitive state in the context of the historical penal landscape of Taipei through an exploration of how an hi...
待客人情從不是香港人形象，然而2014 年遮打運動（又名雨傘運動）過程
中，許多港人無論如何要到場「保護學生」的真切實踐，加上各類媒體的大幅重
點報導，交織而成的香港人形象是嶄新的、勇敢的、熱情且兼容多元的，好似歡
迎任何族裔以粵語大聲高唱海闊天空，一齊撐起雨傘。對照近年全城瀰漫「這城
市在死亡」（the city is dying）的低迷，2014 年9 月28 日後「香港人已經不一
樣」的論點表現於場內場外各類形式的論述、圖像。本文欲從佔領現場觀察出發，
關注其中慇勤待客（hospitality）表現所實踐的時空延展，來探討佔領運動創造
的「非常城市」給正常城市社會的啟示。
Many of the hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong people who...
Drawing upon the massive redevelopment catalyzed by the government-led urban renewal in Hong Kong in the past two decades, Shu-Mei Huang recharges the story of post-colonial Hong Kong through care, displacement, and how care is displaced in urban governance. Theorizing “carescapes” as a heuristic device, Huang tracks how care is displaced, underval...
Tracing the continuously changing dynamics between China and its quasi-independent capitalist ‘special territory’, Hong Kong, this paper brings together the under-recognised cross-border caregivers and over-recognised care consumers in the wake of multiple care crises, articulating how internal and international migration clashes in the borderlands...
