Asian Film and Media Symposium: Queer Migrations and Diasporic Intimacies
Asian Film and Media Initiative Symposium:
Queer Migrations & Intimate Diasporas
Friday, April 19, 2019
721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Room 652
This one-day symposium asks how feminist and queer Asian migrant and diasporic visual cultures – from cinema to social media practices to independent games – betray and reimagine the intersecting axes of gender, race, sex, and the nation. The lineup brings together critics and makers of film history, game design, and media theory. Talks will be held purposefully short – 15min – and feature works in progress to allow for collective discussion. Come join us. RSVP required.
The symposium is organized by Feng-Mei Heberer. For abstracts see below.
Panels moderated by Neferti Tadiar (Columbia University) and E.K. Tan (Stony Brook)
Panel 1: 11am-1pm
Christopher B. Patterson (University of British Columbia): Video Games, Empire, and the Asiatic
Naomi Clark (New York University): Rule-Bound Relations
Feng-Mei Heberer (New York University): Migrant Mediations, or When Poly-Surveillance becomes Meaningful Social Interaction
Lunch break: 1-2pm
Panel 2: 2pm-4pm
Arnika Fuhrmann (Cornell University): Bangkok as a Chinese City: Queer Migrations and Intimate Diasporas
Homay King (Bryn Mawr College): Anna May Wong and the Color-Image
Meenasarani Linde Murugan (Fordham University): M.I.A. coming back with power: Documentary Resurrections and Feminist Disarticulations
Abstracts and Bios
Naomi Clark (New York University): Rule-Bound Relations
In this talk, Clark discusses her recent and early-stage forthcoming work, spanning digital and analog game projects that explore relations between artist and interactor, opponent and collaborator, human player and fictional character.
Naomi Clark has been designing, producing, and writing games for various platforms, audiences and contexts for over two decades. She currently teaches game design on the faculty of the NYU Game Center in the Tisch School of the Arts.
Arnika Fuhrmann (Cornell University): Bangkok as a Chinese City: Queer Migrations and Intimate Diasporas
Examining the intimacies of three Asian cities (Bangkok, Hong Kong, Shanghai) with each other, this project aims to uncover abiding, alternate notions of culture, ethnicity, and regional connectivity. To do so, it investigates ‘shadow’ memories of other regional networks and models of collectivity that manifest in ruins, gendered bodies, intimacy, and diasporic affect. At the moment of the disappearance of their material remnants—as Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Shanghai undergo some of the greatest urban transformations in their histories—ephemeral infrastructures take up the work of historical memory. The city, femininity, and diasporic intimacies and affects figure as key repositories in which blueprints of prior cultural and social models are stored, imaged, and transformed.
Arnika Fuhrmann is an interdisciplinary scholar of Southeast Asia, working at the intersections of the region’s aesthetic, religious, and political modernities. She is the author of Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Duke University Press, 2016) and is currently working on a project about the revival of aesthetics of colonial modernity and Chinese pasts across cinema and hospitality venues entitled, In the Mood for Texture: Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Shanghai's Urban and Media Revivals of Chinese Colonial Modernity.
Feng-Mei Heberer (New York University): Migrant Mediations, or When Poly-Surveillance becomes Meaningful Social Interaction
This talk centers the popularity of social media and, in particular, the selfie among Filipina workers in Taiwan, to examine how online self-recording practices reflect on and participate in larger migrant regulations in the Asia Pacific. Major questions to peruse: how do migrant workers engage digital media to tell their stories and make sense of their life abroad in ways that popular migrant worker discourse does not? Moreover, how can we broach the important issue of minority representation, and self-representation, without losing sight of the socio-technological and biopolitical economies that supersede human meaning-making processes?
Feng-Mei Heberer is an Assistant Professor and Interim Director of the Asian Film and Media Initiative in the department of Cinema Studies, New York University. Her research broadly engages the fields of transnational media, ethnic, feminist, and queer studies to explore the intersections of media, race, capital and migration.
Homay King (Bryn Mawr College): Anna May Wong and the Color-Image
The Toll of the Sea (Chester Franklin, 1922), a Madame Butterfly story adaptation starring Anna May Wong, was the first Technicolor film to be widely distributed in general release. In this talk, I discuss how Wong and the fictional China she inhabits are virtualized in the film under the rubric of an orientalist palette. The film, I argue, is a kind of feature-length China Girl—a type of test image used to calibrate color film that features a female model, often in Chinese dress—as well as a feature-length color-image, in the sense defined by Gilles Deleuze, where color absorbs the figures and objects it tints.
Homay King is Professor and Chair of History of Art and co-founder of the Program in Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Virtual Memory: Time-based Art and the Dream of Digitality (2015), which won the SCMS Anne Friedberg Award of Distinction, and Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (2010), an inspiration for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’sChina: Through the Looking Glass. Her essays on film, contemporary art, and theory have appeared in Afterall, Criticism, Discourse, Film Quarterly, October, Qui Parle, and elsewhere. She is a member of the Camera Obscura editorial collective.
Meenasarani Linde Murugan (Fordham University): M.I.A. coming back with power: Documentary Resurrections and Feminist Disarticulations
This paper examines the documentary MATANGI / MAYA / M.I.A. (2018) in relation to its efforts to resurrect M.I.A.’s career, even as she has been deemed ‘dead’ or ‘canceled’ by many fans. Several academic essays, album reviews, and celebrity profiles have puzzled through her glitchy global appropriations, inarticulate politics, and new wealth. This paper takes up M.I.A.’s sonic and visual aesthetics and politics in relation to interviews and tweets where she has been explicitly anti-Black. These contradictions point to a failure of her feminist politics, especially at the intersections of Third World and Black Feminisms.
Meenasarani Linde Murugan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. Her research focuses on television history and theories of race and visuality, with special attention to popular music, fashion, and diaspora. She has written on contemporary Asian American pop culture aesthetics and politics for the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Platform. Her book, Gender and Race in Postwar Variety Television: Colorful Performance, is under contract at Routledge.
Christopher B. Patterson (University of British Columbia): Video Games, Empire, and the Asiatic
Like literature and film before it, video games have become the main artistic expression of empire today, and thus form an understanding for how war and imperial violence proceed under the signs of openness, transparency, and digital utopia. To understand games as such, this presentation discusses games as Asian-inflected commodities, with its hardware assembled in Asia, its most talented esports players of Asian origin, and most of its genres formed by Asian companies (Nintendo, Sony, Sega). I argue that games draw on established discourses of Asia to provide an “Asiatic” space, a playful sphere of racial otherness that straddles notions of the queer, the exotic, the bizarre, and the erotic.
Christopher B. Patterson is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on transpacific discourses of literature, games, and films through the lens of empire studies, queer theory and creative writing. He is the author of Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (Rutgers University Press, 2018), and Stamped: an anti-travel novel (Westphalia Press, 2018).
Neferti Tadiar (Barnard College/Columbia University): Moderator
Neferti X. M. Tadiar is Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Barnard College and Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. She is author of the books, Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009) and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004), and co-editor with Angela Y. Davis of the collection, Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation (2005). Her current book project, Remaindered Life, is a meditation on the disposability and surplus of life-making under contemporary conditions of global empire. Professor Tadiar is co-Editor of the journal Social Text.
E.K. Tan (Stony Brook): Moderator
E.K. Tan is Associate Professor in the Department of English, and Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University. He specializes in modern and contemporary Chinese literature, Sinophone studies, Southeast Asian studies, Queer Asia, Postocolonial and Diaspora theory. Following his monograph, Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World (2013), his current book project, Queer Homecoming in Sinophone Cultures: Translocal Remapping of Kinship, proposes the concept of “queer homecoming” as critical intervention to the normative patrilineal kinship structure defined by traditional family values and the myth of consanguinity among Sinophone communities.