Asian Studies

When and under what circumstances do people invent the concept of the other? This question has been posed and responded to many times over in a largely modern, colonial, Eurocentric context. However, the invention of others is not simply a European prerogative: it is a practice common to cultures and societies throughout the world, past and present. This timely symposium proposes to examine these issues in a visually rich, historically grounded and contextualized collection of talks and discussions that focus critical analytic attention on the manifold Asian imagination and invention of others. We seek to highlight and examine the robust and visually potent technologies of othering deployed in Asia by Asians past and present while addressing the multiple contexts, regional variations, and sets of interests, involved. In this way, we can focus both multi-media representations of “others” and on how and why these variable constructions were mobilized around complex cross- and intra-cultural negotiations over time.… more →