108 Book Reviews
Su Lin Lewis
Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia, 1920–1940.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [Asian Connections], 2016, xii + 309,
isbn 9781107108332, price: gbp 80.00 (hardback).
In Cities in Motion, Su Lin Lewis manages to produce a history of a dynamic
time period in Southeast Asia by studying the vibrant urban sphere of multi-
ethnic port-cities. Rather than focusing on the formation of nation-states or on
anti-colonial movements in the region as in many traditional histories, Lewis
highlights the rise of cosmopolitan civic societies through a comparative study
of Rangoon, Penang, and Bangkok. Other Southeast Asian port-cities, such as
Singapore or Jakarta/Batavia, are also mentioned in order to supplement and
enhance her findings.
Four themes run through this work: ‘global and regional connections, the
city as a cosmopolitan site, the rise of a self-consciously progressive middle
class, and the cultivation and prominence of youth in modern civic life’ (p. 2).
Lewis thus foregrounds global ‘interconnectedness’ within and across Asia and
beyond, allowing the intertwined developments in fields such as city-planning,
transportation, and technology to shine through the local differences of her
chosen sites of analysis. Another keyword in Lewis’s work is ‘simultaneity’, as
expressed in the experience of and experimentation with modern, cosmopoli-
tan forms by multi-ethnic participants in civic societies in Southeast Asia’s
port-cities.
The first chapter, ‘Maritime Commerce, Old Rivalries, and the Birth of Three
Cities’, examines the rise of the Southeast Asian port-city through readings
of pre-colonial literature. It thus ‘situates Southeast Asian cosmopolitanism
within a much older geographic unit than the modern nation-state’ (p. 23). By
focusing on the interconnectedness of Southeast Asian port-cities and their
intertwined origins, Lewis sets out to establish a new point of departure for
studying ‘modern Asian cities and their inhabitants outside a national frame-
work’ (p. 23). The chapter concludes with a short overview of new connections
formed in the early twentieth century thanks to improved transportation net-
works, such as faster steamship and rail links, as well as new modes of com-
munication and travel, including regional radio and air travel, that ‘accelerated
traffic of people, goods, and ideas’ (p. 46).
The second chapter, ‘Asian Port-Cities in a Turbulent Age’, moves towards
examining the developments of Southeast Asian port-cities in the colonial era.
Refreshingly, Lewis suggests that we rethink urban planning schemes in this
period via the term ‘simultaneity’ (p. 49). Rather than seeing the disciplining
of the urban public space as a purely colonial endeavor, ‘[m]unicipal admin-
© dafna ruppin, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/22134379-17401012
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Book Reviews 109
istration, transport systems, suburbs, and urban parks’ are viewed as part of
global efforts shared by expanding cities all over the world, allowing for inte-
gration and adaptation to local settings (p. 49). Lewis also highlights some of
the locations in port-cities, such as markets, shopping areas, street food stalls,
and public fairs, where supposedly fixed class distinctions and racial segrega-
tion could be blurred by allowing interactions between individuals to occur
across such categories.
In the third chapter, ‘Cosmopolitan Publics in Divided Societies’, Lewis turns
our attention to the ‘multiple and overlapping publics’ and types of cosmopoli-
tan connections that arose in these port-cities: from religious institutions,
through clubs and societies, to professional associations (p. 96). These affil-
iations were simultaneously local and global, creating connections that at
times eroded colonial or ethnic distinctions in these cities, and at other times
enhanced them. Outwardly-looking Asian middle classes embraced new ideas
they were exposed to in the context of the cosmopolitan city to revitalize their
multi-ethnic communities. Lewis convincingly argues that the ‘desire for self-
determination emerged within the context of growing internationalism’, pro-
viding ‘a tenuous counterweight’ to rising ethnic nationalism (p. 127).
The fourth chapter, ‘Newsprint, Wires, and the Reading Public’, focuses on
the much explored topic of the rising reading public and local print cultures
beginning in the late nineteenth century, yet Lewis offers a fresh look at these
developments by pointing out that the multitude of newspapers in different
languages in port-cities ‘testified to a plurality of communities within cities
and across oceans’ (p. 140, italics in original). She shows how port-cities were
a hub of intersecting ‘print-worlds’, linking growing reading publics ‘not only
to the affairs of a particular linguistic community, but to the politics and cul-
ture of multiple and varied communities: to cities, towns, and rural areas, to
diasporic homelands, and to the wider world’ (p. 140). The scope of interna-
tional coverage and the speed at which information was delivered, thanks to
new communication wires, provided new perspectives and opportunities to
literate Asian readers. Much like the cultures of association discussed in her
third chapter, the local press enabled for ‘individual and collective identities to
be articulated within a shared public space, and provided a venue for modern
ideas of citizenship, society, and individualism to be discussed’ (p. 180).
The fifth chapter, ‘Playgrounds, Classrooms, and Politics’, once again takes
up the previously studied topic of education in the colonial period, but widens
the scope by focusing on the role of an older generation of Asians, educated in
Asia and in the West, in ‘shaping new educational initiatives’ for the younger
generation of Asians (p. 182). Lewis shows how private and public ‘pluralist
and transnational educational environments’ emerged, moving us away from
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110 Book Reviews
the ‘colonial-nationalist teleological framework’ (p. 183). ‘Asian students were
not simply “Westernized elites” or “proto-nationalists”, but emerged within
a pluralist and transnational educational framework in the 1920s and 1930s’
(p. 226).
In the sixth and final chapter, ‘Gramophones, Cinema Halls, and Bobbed
Hair’, ‘simultaneity’ features again as a major trope, with urbanites in Asia and
around the world encountering new modes of audio and visual technologies at
the same time (p. 227). Despite the international, commercial, and Hollywood
products that were most popular among consumers of popular entertainment,
Lewis claims that the new technology also fused with local forms of perfor-
mance, stories, and cultural forms. The ‘modern girl’—and local responses to
her—similarly emerged in cosmopolitan cities influenced by the images and
attitudes she consumed in magazines and Western movies, yet undergoing
local alterations and drawing on other forms of womanhood from Asia (p. 248).
This review provided an overview of some of the major themes that run
through the book, but could not adequately address many of the subtleties
and differences of each of the port-cities discussed by Lewis. This goes to show
how effectively Lewis captures the global through focusing on the local in this
readable book, which won the 2015–2016 Urban History Association Best Book
Award (Non-North American). It is a highly satisfying read, producing a history
that goes beyond the particulars of the port-cities that provide the materials
for this book.
Dafna Ruppin
Utrecht University
[email protected]
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