Languages: The dossier accepts submissions in Portuguese and English. Articles submitted in English must include an abstract in Portuguese.
For inquiries, please contact Aline Corso at aline.corso@gmail.com.
This dossier proposes a critical and transdisciplinary investigation into emergent audiovisualities in contemporary Asian cultures, understood as dynamic forms of producing and circulating visuality through articulations among image, technology, and subjectivity. In an increasingly mediated landscape shaped by sophisticated technical devices and algorithmic regimes of visibility, we seek to examine transformations in modes of seeing - and being seen - through the aesthetic, sociotechnical, and cultural specificities of the Asian continent.
More than an analysis of images, this proposal is oriented toward a reflection on modes of production, mediation, and reception of the sensible, interrogating the visual technologies that traverse Asian cultural practices. Among the guiding questions of this dossier are:
How are regimes of visuality reconfigured by digital platforms, algorithmic surveillance, and technological aesthetics in Asian contexts?
What do images produced between spirituality, tradition, and technoculture demand from us when they call forth other forms of sensibility?
What visualities emerge from Asian pop cultures - such as K-pop, BLs, dramas, anime, webtoons, and local cinemas - and what modes of existence do they produce?
How are bodies and identities performed, filtered, and rescaled in Asian visual media, and what desires or dissidences traverse these representations?
What is lost - and what resists - in digital archives, in the noise and silences that mark the continent’s visual narratives?
How do spiritual knowledges, cosmologies, and philosophies influence the creation of images and articulate with contemporary technologies?
In what ways does the global circulation of Asian audiovisualities reconfigure imaginaries of time, body, modernity, and the future?
What counter-images emerge from Asia in response to Western visual hegemonies?
We adopt the expression “Asian audiovisualities” because we understand that the technocultural dynamics emerging in regions such as East Asia are not limited to fixed geographic borders. These practices reverberate through and intertwine with productions from other parts of the continent - such as Southeast Asia, South Asia, and West Asia - through shared cultural circuits, digital platforms, and transversal aesthetics.
Examples include the consumption of K-pop in Thailand, the adaptation of Korean webtoons in Indonesia, the popularity of Thai BLs in countries such as the Philippines and Japan, and the growing presence of Indian cinema on digital platforms across Southeast Asia. These phenomena illustrate movements of hybridization and cultural recombination that challenge rigid national, linguistic, and identitarian boundaries. The intensification of these connections is driven by digital technologies - such as social networks, curation algorithms, artificial intelligence, and streaming services - which create zones of contact between local aesthetics and global dynamics. The designation “Asian” thus seeks to acknowledge the plurality of visual regimes, media practices, and visual imaginaries that traverse the continent, valuing both their singularities and their interrelations, as well as their potential for aesthetic and cultural reinvention.
Thematic Axes
We invite submissions of articles that explore, though are not limited to, the following axes:
Regimes of visuality: visibility, opacity, and power: reflections on what becomes visible or invisible in Asian audiovisual productions. This axis examines how technical, aesthetic, and political devices regulate visuality, including censorship, surveillance, selective representation, or the erasure of subjects and narratives;
Technoculture and digital subjectivity: investigates how visual technologies - such as cameras, filters, apps, and social networks - shape modes of subjectivation. It includes themes such as digital performativity, identity construction, self-curation, and technologically mediated affects;
Algorithmic aesthetics and Asian social media: explores the influence of algorithms, platforms, and interfaces (such as TikTok/Douyin, Bilibili, and WeChat) on the aesthetics of images and videos. It also addresses forms of virality, consumption, and circulation of content in Asia’s digital media environments;
Hybrid audiovisualities and cultural translation: focuses on adaptations, remakes, appropriations, and reinventions of Asian audiovisual products in global contexts. It also examines flows between local and international cultures, as well as the ways Asian works are reinterpreted in diasporas or Westernized markets;
Image, affection, and interpellation: addresses the power of images to affect, provoking emotional, cognitive, or ethical responses. It investigates the image as an interpellative force - something that touches us, calls upon us, or destabilizes us;
Media art, experimentation, and visual technopoetics: analyzes experimental visual practices that employ emergent technologies such as augmented reality, artificial intelligence, immersive installations, and generative art. It includes research on video art, expanded cinema, and new forms of aesthetic creation in Asia;
Aesthetics of time: excess, silence, and repetition: explores how Asian audiovisualities construct alternative temporalities, fragmented narratives, contemplative rhythms, or intensive repetition. It proposes thinking of time as a sensitive aesthetic experience that is historically situated;
Technologies of memory: archive, noise, and erasure: investigates how the audiovisual contributes to the construction - or destruction - of collective and individual memory. It addresses digital archives, historical erasures, noise in the transmission of memory, and disputes over the right to remember;
Body, desire, and gender in Asian aesthetics: discusses how bodies are represented in Asian visual media, with a focus on sexuality, gender identity, desire, normativity, and dissidence. It includes queer, feminist, and decolonial analyses of the body;
Technique, spirituality, and transcultural visualities: explores relationships between Asian spiritualities (Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, animisms, among others) and contemporary visual technologies. It questions how the audiovisual may express non-Western cosmologies and experiences of the sacred;
Geopolitics of images and narrative disputes: analyzes how Asian images and audiovisual products challenge global narratives dominated by the West. It includes representations of Asia in cultural conflicts, media nationalisms, symbolic disputes, and the construction of imaginaries;
Ethics of the image: surveillance, control, and resistance: reflects on the uses of the image in contexts of social control, state surveillance, facial recognition, and algorithmic monitoring. It also investigates visual strategies of resistance, anonymity, and critique of visual power;
Audiovisualities in the Asian diaspora: focuses on visual productions by Asian communities outside the continent - such as in Latin America, Europe, and the United States - exploring questions of identity, belonging, cultural translation, and aesthetic hybridity.
This dossier seeks to deepen reflections on the articulations among technology, image, and culture in Asian societies, offering innovative theoretical and methodological contributions to the fields of visual, media, and cultural studies. Our aim is to decentralize hegemonic analytical frameworks by positioning Asian audiovisualities as powerful epistemic territories capable of challenging and enriching traditional categories of analysis. In doing so, we hope to consolidate Prajna: Journal of Oriental Cultures (Prajna: Revista de Culturas Orientais) as a critical reference space for debates on Asian cultures and their global projections in the field of contemporary audiovisual studies.
