Asian/American and the Digital|Technological Thus Far
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7531631 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anne Cong-Huyen (0000-0001-5234-2545, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 1 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 100-100 |
| Publication date | 2015-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Verge Studies in Global Asias (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2373-5058 • E-ISSN: 2373-5066 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.5749/vergstudglobasia.1.1.0100 |
| OpenAlex | W2756357345 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 3 |
100 Interface Anne Cong-Huyen Asian/American and the Digital|Technological Thus Far the nationalist project begun by early Asian American activists and scholars1 today finds itself converging with Asian area studies in the current era of neoliberal globalization. Brought on by fluctuating global economies, including bilateral trade agreements and normalization accords, emergent networked travel and information communication technologies (ICT) have fundamentally changed economic and political functions that affect diasporic populations such as Asians and Asian Americans. In fact, some have argued that the proliferation of these networks and technologies have effectively compressed time and space, making high-speed financial trading, foreign direct investment, and decentralized manufacturing and management materially possible . Concurrent with these changes are the rise of the hypervisible and mobile transnational managerial classes, the exploitation of laboring migrants, and even the mobility of elite “heritage migrants” who are returning to Asian “homelands” that even their parents may never have known. Through the course of such developments, cultural ideologies , texts, and dialogues have become ever more transnational and global, and digital technologies have been central to these processes. Digital|technology—and the associated labors, cultures, and research they make possible—have become increasingly important in the academy , and this piece underscores the importance of work at the intersections of Asian/Asian American studies and digital humanities, new media studies, and science and technology studies. These various fields are interrelated and can be read concurrently to produce a more holistic ecology of Asian/Asian American digital scholarship beyond the arguably Interface 101 rigid confines of “digital humanities,” which has become the bastion of scholarship of, about, and in the digital form. As the larger international, national, and institutional shifts that some say have incited the current “transnational turn” were taking place, the digital humanities were gaining considerable cachet in the academy, particularly among administrators and funding agencies. To some, it may seem as if Asian studies and Asian American studies have had limited engagement with big tent digital humanities and have instead been siloed within area studies and American ethnic studies, and even from each other. However, scholarship in these areas has long been engaged with the digital, the technological, and the unseen politics therein. For example, in 1995, David Morley and Kevin Robins started discussions around Western cultures’ fascination with Asian technocultures when they coined the term techno-Orientalism (Morley and Robins 1995). Around the same time, Lisa Nakamura (2002) started writing about racial passing and tourism online, and not long after, the collection Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace (Lee and Wong 2003) brought together a range of scholars working in information technologies . In more recent work, Minh-ha T. Pham (2011, 2013) interrogates the gendered and racialized subjectivity of Asian women in Web 2.0 social media spaces, and Kalindi Vora (2012) links the United States and Asia through the labor of South Asian surrogate mothers, organ donors, and cyborg bodies in call centers. Although these examples are primarily academic , this critical work of the digital and the technological can take many forms, from filmmakers like Debbie Lum (2012), who investigated the role of the Internet and translation software in facilitating crossborder marriages between China and the United States, to art collectives like the Propeller Group, which employs various media to strategically question consumer culture and capitalism in liberalizing Vietnam. DigitalhumanitiescontinuestogrowintheUnitedStates,withuniversities across the United States scrambling for millions of dollars in federal and private grants to build their own digital humanities labs and centers, for cluster hires, and for initiatives. There have been attempts to make digital humanities more transnational and global, to diversify the voices, subjects of scholarship, and origins of work. Despite this work, exemplified in such networks as centerNet or Global Outlook::Digital Humanities ,2 there seem to be gaps across Asia. According to centerNet, which is described as an “international network of digital humanities centers,” there are four digital humanities centers across Asia, located in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The Around DH | Global List,3 a project of 102 Interface Global Outlook::Digital Humanities, offers a broader and more numerous list of projects, researchers, and institutions, but the concentration again is in the highly developed economies of East Asia
| Citations per year | 0.4 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2021 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |