Inter-Asia Intermediality 2022

A Two-Part International Workshop Convenors: Brian Bernards (USC) and Elmo Gonzaga (CUHK)

Workshop Theme and Overview

Over the past two decades, intermediality and inter-Asia have emerged as key buzzwords in the humanities whose increasing presence as the theme and focus of scholarly conferences, journals, and monographs has followed a remarkably similar timeline and trajectory. Discussions
of intermediality grew at the turn of the millennium in response to technological innovations to the platforms and networks for media circulation and consumption. Almost concurrently with the rise of intermediality, inter-Asia emerged as a subfield of—as well as a challenge and response to the inadequacies of—the field of Asian area studies with the aim of connecting scholars at different institutions across the region while encouraging scholarship that would avoid the trap of East-West bilateralism by instead interrogating processes of regionalization in Asia in all their unevenness and variation.

Inter-Asia Intermediality: A Two-Part International Workshop intends to highlight the intersections between these two emergent fields by bringing them into a productive scholarly conversation. Beyond the continuity and smoothness of encounter and passage within and between different forms of media (as well as between Asian subregions), we are interested in intermediality’s contradictions and frictions amid the tenuous relationships within Asia. We seek to explore in this conference how intermediality can intervene in similar, multiple ways in the dynamic and elusive cross-cultural, intraregional, and trans-border exchanges between East, Southeast, and South Asia.

The impact of the rise of digital media (and digital media’s refashioning—or remediation—of older media forms) as a catalyst of processes of inter-Asian regionalization—as well as its exposure of tensions and challenges in those processes—has not been sufficiently interrogated. To this end, our workshop will foreground two reciprocal and mutually reflexive questions for further inquiry:

1) How do processes of intermediality (including the frictions, contradictions, connections, and divergences between different platforms of media convergence) break up homogeneous or regionally bounded conceptions of Asia?
2) By modifying platform-specific media content for distribution and exhibition on unintended platforms or for unanticipated audiences, how do regionalized inter-Asian productions and circulations of media content challenge homogeneous or disciplinary- bounded understandings of specific media platforms?

With the aim of curating a published volume, this two-part, hybrid workshop features three keynote speeches, eight panels, and a film screening and discussion across four days at the University of Southern California and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Poster, Flyer, and Program Cover Image Designed by Ka Lee Wong (USC)

Complete Workshop Schedule

Part I: University of Southern California

Los Angeles, CA, USA | Friday-Saturday, May 20-21, 2022

All times Pacific Daylight Time (PDT)

Friday, May 20, 2022

8:00

USC Hotel Pick-Up
(Brian will meet participants outside lobby to walk to breakfast and workshop location)

08:15-09:00:

Continental Breakfast, Workshop Check-in at Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) Plaza (Pick up name badge and gift bag)

Main Workshop Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) 350/351 Franklin Room

09:15-09:45

Opening Remarks

1) Welcome / Workshop Overview: Brian Bernards (USC Center for Transpacific Studies)
2) Message from Host/Sponsor: Janet Hoskins (USC Center for Transpacific Studies)
3) barangay: An Offshore Poem Reading by Adrian De Leon (USC Center for Transpacific
Studies)

10:00-11:45

Panel I (Infrastructure, Ecology, Technology)

1) Padma Chirumamilla (National U of Singapore), “Amaravati, Baahubali, and Hindu
Nationalism’s Technological Futurities” (~10:05-10:20)
2) Nadine Chan (U of Toronto), “Intermediatic Forests: Enmeshed Infrastructure and
Empire ‘at-a-Distance’” (~10:20-10:35)
3) Shaoling Ma (Yale-NUS), “Energy Highlands in Liu Chuang’s ‘Bitcoin Mining and
Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities’” (~10:35-10:50)
4) Co-Panelist Responses (~10:50-11:10) + Q&A (~11:10-11:40)

12:00-13:00

Lunch (Pick up lunch box outside Franklin Room)

13:15-15:15

Panel II (Trans-Cinematic Histories)

1) Dag Yngvesson (U of Nottingham, Malaysia), “After the Curfew, Before the Digital:
Lewat Djam Malam as Intermedial Archipelagic Cinema” (~13:20-13:35)
2) Palita Chunsaengchan (U of Minnesota), “In the Absence of Celluloid: Intermediality in
Early Thai Cinema with the Co-Production of Miss Suwanna of Siam” (~13:35-13:50)
3) Alden Sajor Marte-Wood (Rice U), “The Migration of Subgenre: OFW Productions in
the Intermedial Age of Mechanical Social Reproduction” (~13:50-14:05)
4) Seoyeon Lee (U of Southern California), “
” (~14:05-14:20) (Re)mapping The Boundary of Asia Through Science Fiction: Inter-Asia/Planetary Travel in The Wandering Earth
5) Co-Panelist Responses (~14:20-14:40) + Q&A (~14:40-15:10)

15:15-17:00

Break

17:00-18:45

Campus Dinner for Workshop Participants at The Lab Gastropub

19:00-20:40:

MEKONG 2030 Screening at Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) 227 (Rosen Family Screening Theater)
Omnibus film (93 mins) of five shorts: “Soul River” (dir. Kulikar Sotho [Cambodia]), The “Che Brother” (dir. Anysay Keola [Laos]), “The Forgotten Voices of the Mekong” (dir. Sai Naw Kham [Myanmar]), “The Line” (dir. Anocha Suwichakornpong [Thailand]), “The Unseen River” (dir. Pham Ngoc Lan [Vietnam]), 2020

20:40-21:30:

Q&A with Sean Chadwell, MEKONG 2030 and Luang Prabang Film Festival Executive Director. Moderated by Panivong Norindr (USC)

Saturday, May 21, 2022
Continental Breakfast at Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) Plaza

08:45-09:45
Main Workshop Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) 350/351 Franklin Room

10:00-11:45

Panel III (Audiovisual Internationalisms)

1) Ling Zhang (SUNY-Purchase), “Specter of Acoustic Internationalism: ‘Voice of
Malayan Revolution’ in China, 1969-1981” (~10:05-10:20)
2) Lan Duong (U of Southern California), “Song, Sound, and the Circulation of Refugee
Affect in Life of a Flower and Song Lang” (~10:20-10:35)
3) Rita Rongyi Lin (Northwestern U), “‘No More Trauma’? Trans-East-Asian Cultural
Appropriation and Nationalist Rhetoric in NCT 127’s ‘Kick It’ and Its Popular Chinese
Receptions” (~10:35-10:50)
4) Co-Panelist Responses (~10:50-11:10) + Q&A (~11:10-11:40)

12:00-13:00

Lunch (Pick up lunch box outside Franklin Room)

13:15-15:00

Workshop Keynote

Bliss Cua Lim (U of California, Irvine), “Intermedial Labor in a Minor Mode: Creators,

Animators, and Queer GL Fans in the Philippines, Asia, and Beyond”

15:00-15:30

Short Coffee/Tea Break

15:30-17:15 Panel IV (Indigenous Media and Circulation)

1) Sheela Jane Menon (Dickinson College), “Creatives, Curators, and Collaboration: Indigenous Art and Media in Malaysia” (~15:35-15:50)
2) Junting Huang (Cornell U), “Tracing Inter-Asian Connections through ‘The Elders’ Drinking Song’” (~15:50-16:05)
3) Pujita Guha (U of California, Santa Barbara), “Noncivilization, Media, and Ethnography on a Strange Terrain” (~16:05-16:20)
4) Co-Panelist Responses (~16:20-16:40) + Q&A (~16:40-17:10)

17:20-17:45

Concluding Remarks by Brian Bernards (USC) and Elmo Gonzaga (CUHK) (Looking Ahead to Part II of Workshop in Hong Kong)

18:00-19:30

Campus Dinner for Workshop Participants at Rock & Reilly’s USC Village

Part II: The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Hong Kong | Friday-Saturday, 10-11 June 2022

All times Hong Kong/Singapore/Manila Time

Friday, 10 June 2022

10:00-10:15

Opening Remarks
1) Welcome/Workshop Overview: Elmo Gonzaga (CUHK) & Brian Bernards (USC)

10:15-11:55

Panel I (Trans-border Co-productions and Exchanges)

1) Zakir Hossein Raju (Independent U, Bangladesh), “From Mumbai to Malayan Film
Industry: Inter-Asian and Intermedial Journey of Phani Majumdar through Trans/national
Cinemas of South and Southeast Asia” (~10:20-10:35)
2) Elizabeth Wijaya (U of Toronto), “A World of Premieres: Taste and Multi-region Co-
productions in Pandemic Times” (~10:35-10:50)
3) Olivia Khoo (Monash U), “The Warehouse as Intermedial Zone: Assemblages of Intra-
Asian Art and Cinema” (~10:50-11:05)
4) Co-Panelist Responses (~11:05-11:25) + Q&A (~11:25-11:55)

11:55-12:00

Lunch Break

13:00-14:40

Panel II (Multimodal and Minority Nationalisms)

1) Adil Johan (U of Malaya), “Rocking Singapore: The Intermediated Malay Voice in
Performance of a National Anthem” (~13:05-13:20)
2) Jose Kervin Cesar Calabias (Lingnan U), “Influencing/Indigenizing Migration: Igorot
Domestic Worker Vloggers of Hong Kong” (~13:20-13:35)
3) Lin Song (Jinan U) and Avishek Ray (National Institute of Technology, Silchar),
“Digital Territorialization and Techno-Nationalism: Revisiting the TikTok Ban in India” (~13:35-13:50)
4) Co-Panelist Responses (~13:50-14:10) + Q&A (14:10-14:40)

14:40-15:00 Coffee/Tea Break

15:00-16:45

Workshop Keynote

Patrick Flores (U of the Philippines, Diliman), “‘Dynamics of Towardness’: Intermediating Asia”

Saturday, 11 June 2022

10:00-11:40 Panel III (Paratextual Multi-Screen Variations)

1) Noah Viernes (Akita International U), “‘Time Zones’: Political Resonance and the
Multiplicity of Screens in the Work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul” (~10:05-10:20)
2) Adhani Juniasyaroh Emha (U Gadjah Mada), “A Peek on Identity Construction of
Metropolitan Women through Ika Natassa’s Trilogy Novels Divortiare, Twivortiare, and Twivortiare 2” (~10:20-10:35)
3) Kim Jihoon (Chung-ang U), “Apichatpong’s Projection Performance Fever Room and Site-Specific Installation Constellations in Terms of Projection’s Paracinematic, Intermedial Variations” (~10:35-10:50)
4) Co-Panelist Responses (~10:50-11:10) + Q&A (11:40)

11:40-12:40

Lunch Break

12:40-14:20

Panel IV (Intermedial Connections and Memories)

1) Dorothy Wai Sim Lau (Hong Kong Baptist U), “Intraregional Star Currency: Michelle
Yeoh’s Goodwill Image and Her Southeast Asian Connections in the Intermedial Space” (12:45-13:00)
2) Heewon Chung (U of Seoul), “Photography, Poetry, and Polyphony: Postmemory of the
Gwangju massacre in Han Kang’s ‘Human Acts’” (13:00-13:15)
3) Wikanda Promkhuntong and Supawan Supaneedis (Mahidol U), “Inter-Media Memories of Hong Kong Films in Thailand: An Observation on Cultural Mediators and Generational Changes” (13:15-13:30)
4) Co-Panelist Responses (~13:30-13:50) + Q&A (~13:50-14:20)

14:20-14:40 Coffee/Tea Break

14:40-16:25 Workshop Keynote II