ERIN Y. HUANG: This one film that I used to open the book, it’s a documentary film called Yellowing, by a young Hong Kong filmmaker. And it documents the filmmaker’s experience living through the Umbrella Revolution that took place in 2014. The filmmaker can point the camera to the police who is tear gassing all the protesters, but if you watch the film, then you will kind of realize that, well, that is really kind of like the tip of the iceberg of this larger systematic violence of contemporary neoliberal colonialism in this special zone of exception, Hong Kong. The tear gassing gestures toward something that is much more totalizing, but this something would then be not really within the possibility of representation.

My name is Erin Huang. I am an assistant professor at Princeton University. I have a joint appointment in East Asian studies and comparative literature. I am the author of Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility.

I think the starting point of this project, which is a lot about, you know, resistance, neoliberal post-socialism, or neoliberal capitalism, and also cinema... I think the starting point for me was my own urban, or spatial, experience growing up. I grew up in a container port city, in Kaohsiung, which is in the southern part of Taiwan. And I think the official name that people would attach to Kaohsiung would be, it is an export processing zone. When I was much younger, it was extremely difficult for me to articulate exactly what kind of city shaped my life. It’s extremely difficult to articulate what kind of a city Kaohsiung is.

And that really kind of got me started thinking about my current interests in factory towns, special economic zones, export processing zones, and basically all kinds of zoning technologies that are becoming more and more developed in our contemporary world. I think, you know, the experiences that come out of the zones of experimentation and zones of exception, first of all, it’s something very new and it is really not something that we have a lot of studies on. So I think, you know, in this case, cinematic texts and also cultural productions coming from these zones, they really provide a way for me to understand exactly what is the kind of emergent affective horizons that we can find and try to map in this collection of very kind of special places

If you look into Asian studies, cities are usually the most dominant form of encounter. And we have a lot of scholarship that emphasizes a radical expansion of the size and the population of particular cities. However, I don’t think that is the only way to understand the kind of spatial revolution that is being created by rapid economic change. And that led me to this theorization of urban horror in the introduction of my book. I immediately made the distinction between horror as this kind of commodified sensationalized emotion or feeling. You know, think about it: when you go to see, like, a vampire film or, like, a serial killer film, I am constantly kind of wondering, is that really horrifying or it is just an aesthetic convention that is called horror? So that’s what I meant by horror as a commodified sensation. So rather than pursuing that, I am much more interested in how horror might be able to provoke or incite or even rehearse these sentiments of resistance—these feelings that we probably don’t even know that we have yet.

So I define horror as this gap or difference between the external reality that we perceive and also our internal frame of comprehension. In other words, whenever something that just kind of radically exceeds our existing frame of comprehension happens, then the feeling or the sentiment of horror arises. This kind of definition doesn’t come from my own imagination. I think part of my book is trying to kind of explore, what is the theoretical origin of this kind of understanding of horror? A kind of horizon of different kinds of sentiments that emerge, and collectively, you know, they rehearse a different imagination or a different possibility for the future, leading to possible future revolutions. What I’ve found there, interestingly, is the fact that the concept and the word “horror” is being used many different times by Marxist thinkers, especially in an early Engels text, The Condition of the Working Class in England.

It is a text that is focusing on Manchester, and he described the factory town in this particular quote. He says, “Everything which here arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch.” I thought about and looked at this quote like many, many different times, in part it is because I kind of sense that Engels is not talking about some kind of transhistorical horror, meaning that horror would be a feeling that anyone is born with. Instead, he kind of introduces a way of understanding horror as something that is being socially and culturally constructed. Basically it’s the emergence of a new kind of feeling. And this feeling was actually produced in the intensifying process of capitalist industrial development. And I kind of want to think about the emergence of urban horror that we have in the post-Cold War era as something that connects to this earlier moment, when Engles was trying to understand the emergence of this kind of industrial horror. Right? So even our feelings can become industrialized.

In Asian studies, post-socialism is a term that is used to describe the time period that comes after 1978, when China entered into the era of economic reform. However, you know, for me, I think post-socialism doesn’t really explain anything. It is being used as, like, a description. So from my perspective, I am more interested in asking questions. What do we really mean by post-socialism? And this is I think the most important question that I pursue: What kind of new economic possibilities and new governmental strategies are being enabled by this imaginary of post-socialism? And I would add a second point here. Usually when we hear the term post-socialism, immediately we think about formerly socialist countries like China or Russia. I think one thing that I am trying to do in this project is really try to deconstruct even this kind of spatial imaginary. And even try to trace post-socialist histories in formerly non-socialist countries. It’s totally possible to try to understand post-socialism in Japan, post-socialism in the U.S. So in this case, I think I am more interested in how the post-, which is this kind of socio-geopolitical imaginary that comes after the end of the Cold War... I am more interested in asking how that post- is actually, you know, producing and also mediating all these newly emergent economic and political relationships in-between China and also the rest of the world.

This would be how I understand neoliberalism as well. It’s not limited to this narrative or this idea that neoliberalism originates from the West, in the U.S. or in Europe. You know, what I’m hoping through this concept and neoliberal post-socialism is to try to think about, and also to try to understand a possibly socialist origin to neoliberalism. I think in the U.S. mainstream discourse, neoliberalism is usually defined as deregulation, the disappearance of state power and state control, et cetera. However, I think, you know, if we try to look at all these kinds of emergent neoliberal economies in Asia, we find something very different, which is you have these kind of state-intervened and state-controlled flexible economies. And, you know, with the case of Hong Kong, this kind of neoliberal zone of experimentation that allows maximum economic flexibility but constricts political freedom. In the case of neoliberalism in Asia, I think one of the most important distinctions is actually the creation of all of these kinds of spaces of exception: the special economic zones; the special administrative regions; the science, technology, and industrial parks. So rather than thinking about China as, you know, this kind of really difficult to define emergent economy, I tried to kind of collect how China can maintain this semi-coherent imaginary of being a socialist nation; but then at the same time, it is allowing or creating all of these spaces and zones of experimentation, of exception. So that it can strategically kind of participate in the global neoliberal economy without needing to change its socialist foundation.