Global Asia

As Global Asia is rapidly institutionalized by the state, by corporations, and by the academy, the term’s potential for political critique is at risk of becoming homogenized and encumbered with hierarchies of power. In this Periscope dossier, we seek to rescue and reform Global Asia as a framework and a method. Our version of Global Asia must, we argue, be tethered in a critical aesthetics. By “critical aesthetics,” we refer to scholarship that reveals the ways aesthetic practices bear out critique of uneven power structures, transnational flows, or imperial formations. As an assemblage of affect and embodiment that renders the historical and the political through sensory experience, critical aesthetics offers us a means of understanding moving and multi-sited Asia(s) that are mediated and produced by cultural texts–what we call “alternative globalities.” The twin terms “critical aesthetics” and “alternative globalities” thus thicken, nuance, and anchor the framework of Global Asia as a cultural and political critique that seeks to align the humanistic study of aesthetics with the rethinking of global figuration and sites of power.