Non-quintessential inter-ness in Asia cultural studies
KIM Soyoung
Being a member of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, I have come to perceive a form of conferences as a site of multiple interactions; travelling to a conference site, sojourning there a while , engagements with topics and people, waking up to an off-centering of knowledge production .
The conferences in Bangalore, India, and Trawas, Indonesia among many others, stir me to acknowledge my personal but at the same time historically conditioned lack of understanding of other parts of Asia. During this process I come to realize the significance of and a need for constructing alternative frameworks, inter-Asia referencing and trans-Asia comparative methods.
Organizing the 2005 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies conference with Prof. Earl Jackson Jr., “Emergent Subjectivities in Cultural Movements,” whose main objective was to examine the culture of emerging subjects in the social and political movements as responses to the changing historical conditions across Asia. I have come to think of “inter-ness” in every sense of the word and also in the process of fund raising.
Author’s biography
Kim Soyoung is professor of cinema studies at Korean National University of Arts; and also chief editor of Trans: Journal of Visual Culture Studies, and editorial collective member for Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Traces: A multilingual Journal of Cultural Theory and Translation.