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.
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”
