Trans Asia Photography relaunches with three consecutive themed special issues, which pause on and defamiliarize each of the journal’s keywords: “trans,” “Asia,” and “photography.” Our design in doing so is to critically reflect on the core concepts that give shape and form to the journal’s vision and aspirations. Given this exciting moment, it seems apt that the Spring 2021 issue should begin with “trans,” a prefix that, among other meanings, connotes change, as in transition or transformation.
Prefixes seldom stand on their own, however. Their conceptual heft comes by way of their placement before stems, which they inflect, modify, or alter. Consider the fulminations on the temporality of the prefix, “post.” Debates on postmodernism, postcolonialism, and, we might add, postphotography, focused on whether the prefix marked a partial or complete overturning of one era to be replaced by another. In the past few decades, the emergence of the prefix “trans” has sparked similarly lively commentary. As Chadwick Allen observes, “Trans- could be the next post-. It could launch a thousand symposia, essays, and books, enlist sympathetic responses, provoke bitter critiques. It could propel the growth of a still-emerging field toward still-unexplored possibilities.”1
In contrast to discussions about “post,” which largely focused on the prefix’s utility for periodization, “trans” emphasizes spatial expansiveness and their crossing, not to mention disciplinary unruliness. When invoked to signify globalization, “trans” calls forth new critical paradigms meant to move beyond colonial and imperial metropoles and the intellectual traditions associated with them. However, so long as a Euro-American academic and museological lens remains the primary critical method, the transnational turn in the study of photography has yet to fully realize its promise to de-center Western perspectives and disciplinary frameworks.
The analytic potential of the prefix “trans” expands when it facilitates juxtapositions that can attend to differences while avoiding the pitfalls of facile comparison, when it brings together an array of disciplinary approaches while attending to their frictions. By emphasizing “trans,” TAP acknowledges the inspiring work of critics like Kuan hsing-Chen, whose theorization of Asia as method laid a foundation for the inter-Asia cultural studies project of developing Asian Studies in Asia.2 By invoking “trans” rather than “inter,” the journal TAP builds on this crucial work by expanding the parameters of Asia. Not only do we emphasize traversals and flows, but we also highlight the need to juxtapose geographies and cultural imaginaries both within Asia and across Asian diasporas.
“Trans” denotes colonial contact zones, whether along well-worn trade routes or on newer paths carved through neo-imperial ambition.3 It situates Asia in global terms, as a place, a region, a vision, an image, and more, formed through ever shifting networks and processes, and engendering Asian subjects through a dynamic series of photographic encounters. “Trans” accordingly brings to light the militarized currents that Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho identify as potent forces that drive exploration, produce dislocation, and generate touristic pleasures4—developments and experiences that photography renders visible, makes legible, and challenges. This special issue examines how the analytic lens of “trans” shifts and expands ways of seeing Asian photography. “Trans” has the potential not only to widen research methods and interdisciplinary approaches to photography but also to broaden the languages in which we speak about photography.
The contributors to this special issue test the conceptual flexibility and efficacy of the prefix “trans” in varied dimensions, including transpacific, transnational adoption, transmedial photography, and translation. Adrian de Leon’s article, “Transpacific Rizalistas: Portrait Photography and the Filipino Becoming-Subject,” considers the ways that diasporic subjects drew on photography to project an ideal image of gendered Filipino nationalism during a period of American imperialism. In “Transnational Family Photographs and Adoption from Asia,” LiLi Johnson further examines the diasporic networks that require an expanded perspective on Asian photography by turning to the visual construction of kinship that attends the phenomenon of transnational adoption. In addition to the diasporic subjects formed through portrait and personal photography and whose significance can be grasped through transpacific critique and through the analytic framework of transnational adoption, this special issue also considers the significance of transmedial photography. “Field Notes, Fluidities, and Fictional Archives: Transmedial Photography and Singapore’s Altered Coastlines” is a collaborative essay-interview that explores how forms of multi-modal photography might archive, critique, and trace the dispossessions and degradations of Singapore’s coastlines. In a conversation facilitated by Joanne Leow, the photographers/visual artists ila, Juria Toramae, and Robert Zhao Renhui collectively examine their works, which provide perspectives on the shifting nature of Singapore’s intertidal zones.
In his contribution to the “Portfolio” section of this special issue, artist Charan Singh meditates on the ways that translation—as a colonial legacy that, in India, persists in the era of global AIDs activism—poses the threat of suppressing indigenous expressions of gender and sexuality. In a series of photographic projects presented in the form of a conversation with the subjects who posed for him, many of them hijra, Singh experiments with the visual forms that might best confer dignity to individuals and communities. His projects consider the ways that the hegemonic imposition of a “universal” (or Western) language of queer gender and sexuality circumscribed and overrode the hijra’s right to desire and express fluid genders. Significantly, Singh draws attention to the translation instead of transgender, as one might expect, a move that accords with critics and activists who highlight the signal importance of indigenous forms of self-identification and gender expression. The special issue closes with Akshaya Tankha’s review of the Dhaka Art Summit 2020, which was held in Bangladesh that year. The Dhaka Art Summit can be viewed as part of the trans framework, for it has emerged in recent years as a premier art biennale attracting a global audience to Bangladesh's capital city, following in the footsteps of other Asia-based biennales that have transposed the attention of the global art community away from the usual art biennials in western Europe.
Notes
Chadwick Allen. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), xv.
Kuan hsing-Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskins, Transpacific Studies: An Emerging Field (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014).
Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, eds., Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). See also Lisa Yoneyama, “Toward a Decolonial Genealogy of the Transpacific.” American Quarterly 69.3 (2017): 471-482.
