Joshua Neves, Associate Professor and Director of the Global Emergent Media (GEM) Lab at Concordia University (Montréal).

Dr. Neves writes: This talk examines the relationship between special effects and Asia or the South—what I am calling southern effects. It has two major lines of inquiry. The first focuses on cultural circulation. It begins with monstrous and magical cinematic histories before tracing the recent effects of these southern trajectories. Secondly, it explores the role of technological-economic distribution as a form of production. Special effects are now central to Asian media, shaping not only their relationship to global markets but emergent popular geographies. The link between these two global modalities—one obtaining from imperial legacies, the other, from the economic-cultural “rise” of Asia, focuses our attention on special effects as a key node of the global-popular. Tracing a particular genealogy of special effects in Asia, the talk will move from King Kong (1933) and Godzilla (1954) to the 2013 Chinese-Korean blockbuster Mr. Go (Kim Yong-hwa, 2013) and the 2021 release of King Kong vs. Godzilla, among others.

Bio: Joshua Nevesis Associate Professor and Director of the Global Emergent Media (GEM) Lab at Concordia University (Montréal). His research centers on digital media, cultural and political theory, and problems of development and legitimacy. He is the co-author of TechnoPharmacology(forthcoming), and author of Underglobalization: Beijing’s Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy(Duke 2020), and co-editor of Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global (Duke 2017).

Presented by the Cornell EastAsia+ Initiative, a collective of scholars, publishing professionals, curators, and graduate students dedicated to exploring new possibilities for academic publishing, networking, and collaboration in East Asia media studies and digital humanities research.

EastAsia+ is generously supported by funding from Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities.