Ali Banisadr: The Alchemist is a new publication and exhibition organised by the Katonah Museum of Art and the first major museum survey of Iranian-born artist Ali Banisadr. Covering twenty years of the artist’s practice, the exhibition and catalogue offer a fresh perspective on the artist’s career across the mediums of painting, drawing and printmaking.
The IT sector seems to be concerned with the flow of information across nations. However, it can also be about the flow of emotions. Labour around technology is not only about programming; it can also be about emotional exhaustion. In The Future of Futurity: Affective Capitalism and Potentiality in a Global City, anthropologists Poornima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta document the workings of call centres by looking at how the BPO “agents” (workers or operators are called agents) navigate the demands of their job: doing “night work”, learning and unlearning accents, and racist abuse from the customers.
Macau—onetime Portuguese colony, now casino hotspot—has long captured the imaginations of travelers, reporters, artists and writers. The city served as the only gateway to China for centuries; then, after the rise of Hong Kong, its slightly seedier vibe made it a popular setting for books, articles and movies exploring the more criminal elements of society.
The noun “Partition” (with a capital “P”) has, in South Asia and perhaps globally, come to mean the 1947 split of India and Pakistan, a climactic event that still roils, if not poison, domestic and international politics.
Aatish Taseer, with roots in England, India, Pakistan, and the USA, appears to be a member of the globalized elite, able to call multiple nations his own. For Taseer, however, there is only one country he calls home. A self-described “Indian writer”, Taseer, for much of his adult life, has distanced himself from his absentee, Pakistani politician father. Still, despite Taseer’s best efforts, his father’s nationality has come back to haunt him.
For many middle and high school students across the United States, the book Farewell to Manzanar has been their introduction to one of the darkest times in American history. Jean Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir tells of her childhood years in what was called the Manzanar War Relocation Center but in reality was a concentration camp. From 1942 until just after the end of the war in 1945, more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent were held in Manzanar alone. It wasn’t the only concentration camp for first, second and third generation Japanese-Americans, but it is the most well-known because of Wakatsuki Houston’s book, first published a half-century ago.
In 1898, during an era of racial terror at home and imperial conquest abroad, the United States sent troops to suppress the Filipino struggle for independence. The deployment included three regiments of the famed African American “Buffalo Soldiers.” Among them was David Fagen, a twenty-year-old private in the Twenty-Fourth Infantry, who achieved notoriety after deserting to join the Filipino guerrillas.
Mud, blood, farts and plenty of swearing: esteemed author Jia Pingwa minutely details the brutal reality of peasant life in this magnum opus set during the Cultural Revolution.
The American expat-in-Asia novel has been done so many times it’s practically its own genre, but the inverse is almost unheard of—until now. Naomi Xu Elegant’s debut novel, Gingko Season, is a witty, humorous and clever story of twenty-five-year-old Penelope Lin, an expat from Beijing who navigates adulthood alongside a diverse cast of friends.
For centuries, scribes across East Asia used Chinese characters to write things down–even in languages based on very different foundations than Chinese. In southern China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, people used Chinese to read and write–and never thought it was odd. It was, after all, how things were done.
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