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Chinatown
The "99% Invisible" episode titled "It's Chinatown" discusses the unique cultural and architectural aspects of Chinatowns in various American cities like San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. This episode gives an excellent context for examining the concept of textual communities and their different readings of a cultural landscape, as outlined in Duncan and Duncan's (1988) work on (Re)reading the landscape.
Textual Communities
Two primary textual communities emerge in the context of Chinatown: Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans, and American tourists and non-Chinese residents. The former group has a direct connection to the cultural and historical elements of Chinatown and views this landscape as a personal and communal space. It represents a piece of their homeland and a center for cultural preservation. For them it is a community hub. This reading is bound up with their own sense of identity, heritage, and experiences of immigration and adapting to a new land. In contrast, the other group consists mostly of tourists and interacts with Chinatown as though it were an exotic destination. Their interpretation is shaped by external perceptions of Chinese culture, which are often influenced by orientalist views. For them, Chinatown is a place...…and then creates a version of Chinatown that caters to tourist expectations rather than authentic cultural representation. At the same time, the Chinese community, especially in the early days of Chinatown's formation, was certainly a vulnerable population in terms of cultural representation and the risk of cultural stereotypes being perpetuated by nature of their neighborhoods.
Conclusion
The episode "It's Chinatown" from "99% Invisible" thus illustrates how different textual communities - Chinese immigrants and American tourists - read the same landscape differently. Identity informs the readings, influencing perceptions of authenticity, historical significance, and cultural representation. The differences in power and vulnerability between these communities…
References
99% Invisible. (2023). Its Chinatown. Retrieved from
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/its-chinatown/
Duncan, J. and Duncan, N. (1988). (Re)reading the landscape. Environment & Planning D:
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