Introduction

Abstract

Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global focuses on video as a cultural form and practice across Asia.While invoking its titular terms-Asia, video, culture-as necessary organ izing frames, the volume si mul ta neously seeks to trou ble, recast, and pluralize them.Our aim is to move conversations about Asian media beyond static East-West imaginaries, residual Cold War mentalities, triumphalist declarations about resurgent Asias, and budding jingoisms.The essays collected here explore the region's pulsating relation ship with the transnational, paying close attention to the role of video in shaping sub-and trans-Asian encounters.How, for instance, do global media pro cesses transform our understanding of "Asia" as overlapping cultural, economic, and po liti cal potentiations?And how do the region's videomedia, too often consigned to the underbelly of the digital, not only drive new forms of cultural circulation and contact, but also animate new infrastructures, intimacies, and speculations?How are these proliferating Asias at once an engine of planetary growth and a glaring register for all the contradictions of the global?In what ways does this shifting continental imaginary instantiate the "Global South," taken as a dynamic formation with its agonistic histories and convulsive geographies? 1 To foreshadow the collection's thematic and analytical scaffoldings, we hope to situate Asian video cultures as crucial constituents of a "global