In the Spirit of the “Post-Tropical”

From the Approaching Global Asias Working Group
A black background with multiple small boxes of various sizes. The word "The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia" is written on top in white.
Event Date & Time
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Event Location
Liberal Arts Engagement Hub, Room 120 Pillsbury Hall

315 Pillsbury Drive SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455

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An Approaching Global Asia(s) Fall Speaker Event

In the Spirit of the “Post-Tropical”: E(pidemics), F(orest), G(host), and H(umidity) in Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (2012-present) 

With Dr. Palita Chunsaengchan (Assistant Professor, Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, University of Minnesota)

 

The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (2012-present) is a collaborative critical artwork project, initiated by Singapore-based artist and filmmaker, Ho Tzu Nyen. The project is a web-based archive of video montages, texts, and the artist’s notes on 26 Latin alphabets. Each of the alphabets proposes and generates terms that openly question and reimagine what is or what constitutes Southeast Asia—a geographical, political, and military term attributed by “others” during the Cold War. 

Led by Tina Chen’s invitation for Global Asia(s) pedagogy to meet at contact zones and for scholars to acknowledge its multi-scalar challenges and expansiveness that exceeds any single scholar’s research expertise, Dr. Chunsaengchan examines The Critical Dictionary for its potentials for multifaceted encounters with conceptual, epistemic, material, and intermedial challenges of world/region-making. On the level of production, The Critical Dictionary requires a cross-disciplinary understanding and arrangement of technical expertise, which could connect critical historiography to digital archives to human/non-human vocal performances to montage editing. Given theoretical debates about unity (or lack thereof) of Southeast Asia, Dr. Chunsaengchan's presentation explores video montages and notes specifically of the following four letters: E for epidemics, F for forest, G for ghost, and H for humidity. Dr. Chunsaengchan posits her analysis of these four terms in relation to an emergent transnational art-symposium movement called the Post-Tropical Cinema (2024-25). The group was formed by Thailand-based and Thai diasporic artists and public intellectuals who sought to experiment with aesthetics and affects of cinema, sound, and screens by paying attention to conditions of the Global South, specifically of the areas of the Tropics. By comparing Nyen’s four critical terms to the Post-Tropical Cinema’s four approaches to cinema; ritual, sensorium, imagery, machine, Dr. Chunsaengchan hopes to annotate their engagement with ecology, infrastructure, history of colonialism, and praxes of survival as a communal prototype for a global life-making practice. 

 

Speaker Bio

Palita Chunsaengchan is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian cinema and media cultures at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Minnesota. Her monograph, Chimeric Cinema: The Formation of Thai Film Culture, traces the history of Thai cinema and its relationship to modernity and Siam’s distinct form of coloniality from its debut in 1897 in the royal court through its uses in the aftermath of the Siamese Revolution of 1932. Her publications appear in Asian Cinema, SOJOURN, JMPS and JAS. She is also one of the contributors of The Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Liverpool UP, 2024) and Contemporary Thai Cinema: New Movements and Social Change (Edinburgh UP, forthcoming). 

 

Cosponsors:

German, Nordic, Slavic and Dutch, Art History, French and Italian, Asian American Studies, Institute for Advanced Studies
 

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