Screening Asia: Passing, Performative Translation, and Reconfiguration

The questions of what is "Asia" and what role it plays in the world system have preoccupied philosophers, historians, social scientists, cultural anthropologists, and politicians of different persuasions, both within and without Asia, ever since the beginning of Western colonial history. The word Asia is derived from Asu, an ancient Phoenician term, meaning "the place of sunrise," as opposed to Ereb, or "the place of sunset," later known as Europe. Originally referring vaguely to the broad landmass to the east of the Aegean Sea, Asu became an administrative unit of Rome by the first century BC. The Asian continent as we know now came as a later development. The Asian continent did not acquire a recognizable shape in European cartography until the 1375 Catalan Map.¹ The definition of Asia has been shifting up till now. The fact that the cultural, political, as well as geographical content of "Asia" is constantly reshaped demonstrates its problematic and metageographical quality.

In the new millennium, when worldwide politics, culture, and economics are undergoing tremendous reconfigurations, to raise the question of "What's left of Asia" both continues the age-old intellectual and political engagement with the role of Asia and signifies a renewed effort to intervene into the current economic, political paradigm.

This project of problematizing Asia, of reassessing its role in the current world system, has acquired special urgency for two reasons: globalization and New Asia discourses. Globalization, which is first and foremost a form of globalized capitalism, aided by accelerated flow of capital, information, and electronic media, has produced the "global village" (Marshall McLuhan), "financial capitalism" (Fredric Jameson), and "flexible accumulation" (David Harvey). As a result of globalized capitalism, Leo Ching argues, "'Asia' has become a market, and 'Asianness' has become a commodity circulating globally through late capitalism."² The question I shall discuss then is what is left of the political importance of Asia in the face of its commercialization. The second imperative for reconsidering Asia is to challenge the post-1980s New Asia discourse, which sees the rise of Asia as "a reactive postcolonial desire to rise to the top of the world," while masking "deeper social contradictions and problems."³ Globalization and the New Asia triumphantalism are mutually reinforcing. The latter draws upon the former for legitimacy and manifests the former's homogenizing desire.

It is important to note, however, that globalization does not automatically lead to mere homogenization. As Arjun Appadurai, among others, contends in Public Culture, globalization always entails glocalization; that is, the capitalist desire for homogenization and hegemony is always counterbalanced and ruptured by local "disjuncture and difference."⁴ Thus, to reenvision Asia in this post–Cold War "transitional era,"⁵ one must take into consideration both the "global design" and the "local histories," studying their contentions as well as intersections by conducting what Walter Mignolo calls "border thinking."⁶ A crucial step in conducting border thinking is precisely to emphasize the agency on the part of Asia, understood not as an essentialist category, but rather as a contextualized position fostered by various translational strategies, as I shall examine in the following pages. The purpose is to imagine and develop an alternative social order, based on the local histories and experiences, so as to challenge and fracture the ostensibly globalized capitalist ideology. As Arif Dirlik puts it, the Asia/Pacific Rim is "a new paradigm for global economic organization and change," not simply "a frontier of development."⁷

Regarding the shifting imaginaries of Asia in the past centuries from the Western and Eastern perspectives (especially Japan), Wang Hui has provided a thorough delineation and theoretical assessment.⁸ My endeavor in this essay is to chart out how Asia has been imagined and imaged through three specifically coded border-crossing film actresses. Whereas an analysis based on film texts alone can by no means constitute a direct social claim, my politicization of cinema aims to assess a film both as a cultural product arising from a constellation of determinants and as a social agent addressing its circumstances, thereby proffering new imaginaries. By analyzing the implicit as well as explicit Asia...