Archipelagic Capitalism in Monsoon Marketplace

Speaker:
Professor Elmo Gonzaga, Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Discussant:
Dr. Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Monday, February 6, 2023
Time: 5:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: On Zoom and F2F

Writing about the vernacular emergence of a “cultural imaginary” of modernity in the Asian metropolis, Leo Ou-fan Lee highlights how an archipelago of multimodal archival materials could form “a contour of collective sensibilities and significations resulting from cultural production.” Advocating for a departure from an overarching unity or coherence in cultural analysis, Édouard Glissant suggests that archipelagic thinking could be used to uncover how “differences” might “interact, collide, and coexist” by “accident.” This talk will discuss the methods by which the forthcoming monograph “Monsoon Marketplace”(Fordham University Press) maps the contingent vernacular imaginaries of capitalist modernity and mass consumption in the divergent media cultures of archipelagic port cities Singapore and Manila during colonial occupation in the 1930s, national development in the 1960s, and neoliberal globalization in the 2000s. It will explore how the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated print and audiovisual representations could trace the emergence of accidental affinities outside official discourses of progress.

Elmo Gonzaga is Associate Director of the MA in Intercultural Studies Programme at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD from the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His work has appeared in the “Journal of Cinema and Media Studies,” “Cultural Studies,” “Interventions,” “Verge: Studies in Global Asias,” “South East Asia Research,” and the “Journal of Asian Studies.”