The Brazilian artist Néle Azevedo’s Minimum Monument (cover image above) is an ephemeral public art project comprised of hundreds of tiny human ice figures positioned in urban spaces. From the moment they are installed, the sculptures are already in thaw, … Continue reading “Monumental Extinctions”
Jaden Smith’s music video Fallen (directed by Miles Cable and Jaden Smith, USA, 2016, 4 min and 39 sec.) staggers and then collapses face first into settler-imperial iconographies of occupation. In the video, Smith–the actor, musician, model, and self-proclaimed living … Continue reading “Sampling the Land and the Trappings of Empire: Jaden Smith’s Moving-Image Settler Aesthetic”
On the third floor of the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Texas, couched between dinosaur skeletons and luminescent gems and crystals, sits the Tom Hunt Energy Hall. Plans for the hall were announced in 2008, declaring it … Continue reading “The Cinema of Extractions in Dallas, Texas”
Singapore has been engineered as the paradigmatic example of “Global Asia,” a place where curated narratives of “Asian culture” attract global capital. Amid the city-state’s iconic markers of cosmopolitan modernity (modern architecture, a multilingual population fluent in English, and food … Continue reading “In Search of Alternative Globalities: A Critical Aesthetics of Global Asia”
This is an admittedly grandiose title for a short essay, one that playfully references the name of the journal I edit, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and highlights a key characteristic of work on Global Asias, namely its ambitious imagination … Continue reading “Always Verging on the (Im)possible: the Structural Incoherence of Global Asias”
What would it mean to examine the current European migration crisis from a Global Asia framework? This question only seems odd when adopting the perspective of European state actors rather than those of the Syrian refugees who are the largest … Continue reading “Dead Refugees and Immortal Nations, Sights and Sites of Global Asia”
Global Asia is, to use Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin’s term, a constellation of geopolitical, economic, and cultural forces creating a set of mediated and mutable linkages for analyzing how images of Asia circulate around the globe historically and how … Continue reading “Noir Fiction in Malaysia and Singapore as a Critical Aesthetic of Global Asia”
What does the prominence of cuteness as an aesthetic category amid US-Chinese codependency and rivalry tell us about the global population’s attachments and desires? Under what circumstances do cute objects become facilitators of the cruel optimism that structures the relation … Continue reading “Cuteness: The Aesthetic Category of a Dystopic Global Asia”
Global Asia deploys the discourse of globalization as a reframing of an expansive geographic point of reference. A significant element regarding debates about globalization is whether it restages with greater efficiency the same underlying context for political and social violence … Continue reading “Global Asia and the Legacy of Counterinsurgency: Malaya Speaks and the Malayan Film Unit”
Housed in the former Supreme Court and City Hall buildings, Singapore’s National Gallery opened in 2015 under state sponsorship and is emblematic of the island nation’s ambitions to be a globalized Asian hub of not just shipping and finance, but … Continue reading “Questioning Asianist Autoethnography: Critical Aesthetics of Global Asia in Singapore’s National Gallery”
Two events made this year’s month of March a densely political one in Italy. On 4 March, the general election resulted in a hung Parliament, but saw the definite political victory of Italy’s two main populist parties: the Five Star … Continue reading “From Trilateral to Troika, and from the Five-Pointed Star to the Five Star Movement”
On Hunter of Stories. 2017. By Eduardo Galeano. Translated by Mark Fried. Nation Books. The late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano made it his life’s mission to come up with an alternate history of Latin America, one that relied more on … Continue reading “Stalking History”
I love my child but I will always love my father more. I love my child and this is why I learn to keep her good face clean. As you clean your face remember to move your hands toward your … Continue reading “Look at What You’ve Done”
Even with everything in such turmoil since Antoine’s body had been found on the beach, Maï was very happy that Emilie had decided to come see her. The two friends Skyped all the time, but it was the first time … Continue reading “from Emilie’s Flight“
On Cape Verde, Let’s Go: Creole Rappers and Citizenship in Portugal. 2015. By Derek Pardue. University of Illinois Press. As Europe grapples with an apparently inexorable wave of ethnic nationalist politics in response to its so-called immigrant crisis, the question … Continue reading “Musical Migrancy”
