Colonial and economic narratives that overdetermine how scholars study and understand people’s relations to landscapes, plants, and other beings in Asia—what we term the computational environments of Global Asias—variously figure Asia as either a resource frontier from which to derive cheap manufacturing labor and raw materials for European and U.S. markets (Nakamura 2014) or as a site of alien wilderness waiting to be tamed through computational and militaristic techniques. These computational environments include the synonymization of industrial plantations and jungles in Southeast Asia with global resource frontiers, the deserts of Southwest Asia as an ideal environmental laboratory to test Western military technologies and weapons, and the rendering of East Asia’s population and their geopolitical and financial statuses as fungible sites for the advancement of data centers and AI technologies. In this Global Asias Cyber Chat, we invite interested interlocutors to join us in questioning the production of universalizing claims of Asian environments across localities and cultures. Featuring three speakers—Wesley Attewell, Shaoling Ma, and Kalindi Vora—we will explore the following questions: How has Asia been cast as a computational and environmental object of study and control? What are the contestations, negotiations, remakings, and reclaimings constituted when Asia is conceptualized otherwise?

Email gai@psu.edu to register.