Pandemic musings in inter-Asia
Tejaswini NIRANJANA
ABSTRACT
Like the rest of the world, Asians have been living through extraordinary times in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic is still raging in many parts of the region, disrupting entire economies, families, public as well as private life, and schooling. The inter-Asia cultural studies project fundamentally depended on actual connections between scholars and activists across the region, made possible by easier boundary-crossings under globalization. In the new contactless world, our knowledge projects have to be re-imagined, our methodologies remade. While we are not yet on the path to doing that, this piece offers some experiential reflections about the pandemic world across Asian time-zones.
KEYWORDS: Pandemic time; inter-Asia cultural studies; mobility; online communication; online teaching
Notes on contributor
Tejaswini Niranjana is currently Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She co-founded the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore, India, and is a Visiting Professor at Ahmedabad University, India. Her most recent book is Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious (Duke UP and Tulika, 2020). She has edited, along with Wang Xiaoming, Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Orient Blackswan, 2015).