Periscope articles and content
I began to investigate the El Quimbo hydroelectric power project on the Magdalena River after reading the following headline in March 2012: “The River Refuses to Shift its Course.” El Quimbo is a dam built on the Yuma River–the Indigenous … Continue reading “Hunger as a Teacher”
Economic modes of extractivism, austerity, and disaster capitalism increasingly intertwine in Puerto Rico, where at present we are witnessing the privatization of the public sphere on a massive scale. The path to austerity for Puerto Rico was already set before … Continue reading “The Other Puerto Rico”
The islands now known as the US Virgin Islands have a long and complicated relationship with racialized processes of capital accumulation. Along with neighboring islands across the Caribbean region, St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John served as important nodes … Continue reading “Beyond the Fragments of Global Wealth”
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”
“Reflections on Disruptive Film” collects texts that articulate, meditate on, or respond to the short films included in Disruptive Film: Everyday Resistance to Power, curated by Ernest Larsen and Sherry Millner. This is the first of three two-disc sets that … Continue reading “Introduction”
What do the worlds of Jack Smith and striking Taiwanese dockworkers have to do with each other? Birgit Hein’s Jack Smith (Germany, 1974, 10 min.) and Chen Chieh-Jen’s The Route (Taiwan, 2006, 17 min.) are produced more than three decades … Continue reading “Drag Mermaids and the Imaginary Global Picket Line”
