Towards the South: Architectural Identity Politics of Xiamen University Malaysia

Xiamen University is the first university in China to establish a large-scale branch campus abroad. Via a research into the design of Xiamen University Malaysia (XMUM) campus, this article explores the articulation of architecture and identity on regional, political and cultural boundaries. In the Architecture literature, there is an intention to focus only on the physical locality of a place, with the social-spatial attributes of this place being ignored. This traditional approach cannot be applied directly to the architectural construction of XMUM as well as its parent university since they are frontier of Chinese ethnicity and culture, where terms such as “locality” and “self” cannot be understood in themselves anymore. To this end, this article sets up a temporal-spatial analytical framework, and uses interdisciplinary methods as ethnography, depth interview and architectural formal analysis to study the thread of architectural ideas of XMUM in regards to China’s international relations and associated identity politics ascending to its parent university. Furthermore, the article examines how architecture acts as both result of and influence on the construction of identities, and how it establishes a spatial dimension of China in a global perspective, arguing that the campus is a tradeoff between the mimic of cultural tradition and the obviously alternative local spatial condition, and finally concludes that through no other than challenging the locality that architecture establishes the field of identity politics.

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ISBN
978-1-944214-31-9