AMES & CSCL Symposium in Media Studies

Join the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature for talks by our two speakers.

In the Mood for Texture: The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City

What does it mean to imagine “Asia” beyond the reductive visions of contemporary policy? This talk explores the contemporary visual culture of Chinese pasts and colonial modernities, revived in the cinemas, new media, and hospitality venues of Bangkok. Examining the doubling of Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Shanghai across these sites, it investigates how a transregional Chinese modernity that emerged under but always exceeded conditions of colonial and national governance informs the present. As film directors such as Wong Kar-wai and hotels, bars, and clubs revive 1930s Shanghai and 1960s Hong Kong modernities—and exploit the Chinese past of Bangkok’s old European trading quarters—this redeployment of (semi-)colonial histories and Chinese urban pasts is emerging as a primary signifier of the good life and understandings of Asia in the present. The deployment of this twentieth century translocal modernity points to enduring regional imaginaries that diverge from global notions of “China Rising,” the People’s Republic’s Belt and Road Initiative, or the policies of the Association for Southeast Asian Nations. Bangkok—as a Chinese city—stands at the center of these prominent, transregional revivals in which media and urban design projects speak of radically different desires than those current policy.

Death in the Andamans: Photography, Anthropology, and an Infrastructural Imagination

In this talk, Debashree Mukherjee discusses the foundational role played by the archipelagic space of the Andaman Islands, its settlers, and its indigenous peoples in the history of the camera as a technology of surveillance and witnessing, self-making and othering. Mukherjee foregrounds the spatio-temporal meanings of the technologically produced image through the material and ideological frame of distance and practices of distancing. Inextricable from distance and distancing are impulses towards proximity and closeness, efforts to annihilate space and time, to surmount difference. They draw on insights from critical infrastructure studies and logistics studies to historicize and politicize practices of distancing and mediations of distance, be they aesthetic practices or administrative strategies.

Arnika Fuhrmann, Professor at the Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University, is an interdisciplinary scholar of Southeast Asia, working at the intersections of the region's aesthetic and political modernities. Fuhrmann is the author of Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Duke University Press, 2016), and Teardrops of Time: Buddhist Aesthetics in the Poetry of Angkarn Kallayanapong (SUNY Press, 2020).  

Debashree Mukherjee, Associate Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University, is a scholar of film and media, specializing in modern mass media form produced in South Asia and its diasporas. Mukherjee is the author of Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press, 2020), and co-editor of the upcoming edited volume on American Cinemas. 

The talks will be followed by a Q&A and reception.