Trajectories,institutions, and re-locations: a conversation on Inter-Asia outside Asia

ABSTRACT

This conversation explores the resonances of the Inter-Asia project outside the geographical boundaries of Asia. The participants, who represent diverse national, institutional, and professional experiences, discuss the following topics: how Asia and the Inter-Asia project has affected their intellectual trajectories; navigating academic institutions and formations; the changing meaning of diaspora and migration and their effects on language and communication; and the relationship between the academy and social movements. Particular attention is paid to reframing Australia and Canada from an Inter-Asia perspective.     

Networking Asia Pacific: queer film festivals and the spatiotemporal politics of inter-referencing

ABSTRACT

Expanding on the critique of Euro-America-centrism in knowledge production, this article examines three spatiotemporal hierarchies through the inter-referencing practices of Asia Pacific Queer Film Festival Alliance. First, through the analysis of the documentary short Lady Eva and its circulation, I look at how the network opens up the issue of Pacific indigeneity in the transpacific context, which has the potential to unsettle the existing epistemic structures that rest upon the binary of West/non-West or white/Indigenous. Second, I investigate how the queer film festival alliance serves as sites for the articulation of queer rights, which sometimes cast a progressivist temporal narrative based on a hierarchical arrangement of geographical places. Third, through the case of ShanghaiPRIDE Film Festival, I examine how anti-institutionalism in film festival organizing offers a critique of gay-male dominated queer film festivals and the capitalist developmental logic that emphasizes profit and financial viability. By doing so, I scrutinize how the spatiotemporal hierarchies embedded in the film festival network complicate the understanding of inter-referencing as citation, collaboration, and competition. At the same time, I use inter-referencing to further the discussion of spatial politics in film festival studies by highlighting the spatiotemporal hierarchies.     

From inter-Asia studies toward tricontinental studies

Abstract

This paper proposes new conceptual frameworks for “inter-Asia studies” in order to be more appropriate for addressing and redressing the demands of global patriarchal capitalism as well as overcoming the “regime of separation” of Asian studies from African and/or Latin American studies. To do that, first, I will problematize the male-East Asia-metropolis centeredness of “inter-Asia.” Then, I will try to locate “inter-Asia studies” into the field of “tricontinental studies” invented by the decolonial and deimperial spirit of connection between the colonized continents of Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the third section, I will propose a “feminist inter-referencing reading” that involves shuttling back and forth between the postcolonial sub-regions of Asia, Africa and/or Latin America horizontally from the location and perspective of gendered subalterns rather than upward-mobile metropolitan feminists. The feminist standpoint that reading takes is combined with the conceptual frameworks of labor, ecology and ethnicity. It is also held that such a feminist inter-referencing reading needs the imaginative and interpretative metaphor of the “planet” to overcome the Westernized notion of the “nation” and “globe” as well as the concept of “universality shared by all humans” not monopolized by Westerners. Lastly, this paper will illustrate the new kind of “tricontinental studies” by providing an example of “feminist inter-referencing reading” which connects and compares the sub-regions of South Korea, Vietnam and Liberia.