Periscope articles and content
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”
The Death Knell (René Vautier, France/Rhodesia/Algeria, 1964, 5 min.) is a stunning film. The poem read by the brilliant Djibril Mambety. The music, at once both dirge and waltz. The artwork offered in lieu of René Vautier’s original footage, which … Continue reading “The Uncanny of Martyrdom: Watching The Death Knell (Le Glas)”
On the morning of the 23rd of November in 2009, in the southern Philippine province of Maguindanao, fifty-eight people were gunned down by over a hundred armed men, their bodies and all their effects, including their vehicles, dumped and hastily … Continue reading “…In Reverse”
“No prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis.” A senior official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government purportedly once confided to a UN official that this was Israel’s goal for Gaza. Supressing without starving the population has been a prevalent … Continue reading “Putting Palestinians on a Diet”
This edition of Periscope extends a conversation that took place on the occasion of the book launch held at New York University on April 30, 2016 to mark the publication of Allen Feldman’s Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics … Continue reading “Introduction: Degrounding War and the State”
Archives of the Insensible is a book I will turn to again and again, for insight, inspiration, aspiration, a model of indefatiguable critique, and well, just to finish the damn thing. I’ve been reading Allen’s work for a long time … Continue reading “State of the Art of the State of the…Questions from the Real for Feldman’s Archives of the Insensible“
I want to begin by thanking Allen Feldman for asking me to participate in this event to discuss his important new book. Feldman offers us one of the most powerful critiques of violence through what he calls “micrological description.” From … Continue reading “Feldman’s Critique of Violence”
I am struck by the rich and provocative detail of this remarkable book and by the disturbing insights it offers into the performance of violence in our time and how its representations make it banal and acceptable. My observations arising … Continue reading “Remarks on Allen Feldman’s Archives of the Insensible“
Nota Bene: The following dangerous supplement can be read as a resynthesis of one of the core threads running through Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics and Dead Memory (University of Chicago Press, 2015), which engages war as the … Continue reading “The Accidentalization of War”
In 2012, Social Text published a Periscope dossier on Palestine by a delegation of American Studies scholars to Palestine organized by USACBI. The following year, the first academic boycott resolutions were passed by the Association of Asian American Studies and … Continue reading “Solidarity and Radical Change”
2015 was the tenth anniversary of the official launching of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement by Palestinian civil society organizations, including over 170 political parties, activist organizations, trade unions, women’s groups, and other segments of the Palestinian national movement, … Continue reading “A Radical Vision of Freedom”
