“This Looks Like Chinatown!”: Contested Geographies and the Transformation of Social Space in Jyatha, Kathmandu

Abstract

AbstractAs tourists from China account for a larger and larger share of Nepal's tourism economy, Jyatha—a small neighborhood in Kathmandu—has absorbed a substantial portion of the Chinese businesses catering to this booming demographic. Its landscape is heavily populated with Chinese businesses, leading Nepalis (and others) to increasingly refer to the space with the English term “Chinatown.” Drawing on Low's (2000) and Chuang and Trémon's (2013) conceptual frameworks of space, this article analyzes three central dimensions to the emergence of a Chinatown in Jyatha. First, it describes the social production of Chinatown space, the physical conversion of the material landscape. Specifically, I analyze the prevalence and prominence of commercial signs as a proxy for quantifying the degree of Chinese incursion into Jyatha. Second, the article turns to the social construction of Chinatown space, or the way in which the material space of Jyatha gets encoded with ambivalent meanings. Nepali narrations of the neighborhood highlight local anxieties regarding cultural autonomy and, more acutely, differential economic advantage. Third, the article discusses the social situation of Chinatown space, or the way in which the site of Jyatha gets discursively rescaled to address regional and global concerns. Nepalis frequently understand Jyatha to embody broader geopolitical narratives—regarding China's ascendance on the world stage, and especially as this relates to the Nepal's regional center of gravity vis‐à‐vis India. These three aspects—production, construction, and situation—converge in Jyatha. Through such practices, Nepalis simultaneously reiterate and contest the emergence of Chinatown. In so doing, they discursively challenge sociopolitical, economic, and spatial inequality at several scales.