Transit Asia Critical Concepts
edited by Joyce C. H. Liu, Brett Neilson, Karin Oen-Lee and and Ned Rossiter
- Low Latencies
- Published: forthcoming
- ISBN: 978-1-78542-167-9
- PDF ISBN: 978-1-78542-166-2
Concepts hold the world together. But what happens when the world fragments, explodes in war, faces the epistemic collapse wrought by AI, or the ravages of climate spun out of control? Concepts also disintegrate, lose their self-positing status. And yet critique does not simply dissolve in conditions of radical uncertainty. There is a hunger to critique. It finds new forms, partial, provisional, forged from within instability rather than above. Transit Asia Critical Concepts emerges from this conceptual turbulence.
The concepts gathered in this book are not designed to map Asia, to fix its contours, or confirm its coherence. They move across Asian environments, through infrastructures of labour and logistics, inside computational architectures and their human remainders, against the unevenly distributed catastrophes of climate and war in ways that exceed the regional frame they inhabit. That excess is not incidental. It is what thinking from Asia produces, a movement beyond the cultural imaginaries, institutional settings, and lived encounters that give Asia its apparent shape.
Editor Bios
Brett Neilson is Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. He is author, with Sandro Mezzadra, of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor and The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism.
Ned Rossiter is Director of Research at the Institute for Culture and Society, and Professor of Communication, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University. His current book projects include Media of Decision and (with Soenke Zehle) The Experience of Digital Objects: Automation, Aesthetics, Algorithms.