Magazine

“In Thailand, the word IMF entered popular usage during the Asian financial crisis and became a synonym for ‘cheap.’ I think the foreign origin of the word, or what Vicente Rafael calls the ‘promise of the foreign,’ is what opens the word itself to becoming a carrier for new meanings.”

“In Japan, there was the benshi narrator. In Thailand, there were the versionists who would travel in troupes in the provinces, where they would present films accompanied by a live aural performance that served to supplement the projected image in various ways, from narration to dubbing, commentary or even critique. You can read this practice as an extreme localization of the foreign or generic.”

IMAGE CRISIS — By Andrew Maerkle
“I think it would be too ambitious to say that the lectures in themselves offer an escape from capitalism, because that’s obviously not what’s happening. The starting point can be just a single question that I’m trying to answer. For Asia the Unmiraculous, this is the question of the relationship between race and capitalism.”