Page 75 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

JOHN NGUYET ERNI
OF DESIRE, THE FARANG, AND

TEXTUAL EXCURSIONS:ASSEMBLING
‘ASIAN AIDS’ 1

ABSTRACT
This article documents and discusses the neo-orientalist tendencies in
the First World’s sporadic coverage of ‘Asian AIDS’, with a particular
focus on the localized context of Thailand. It takes the problem of ‘Asian
AIDS’ as a critical point of articulation between a health crisis and the
specific geopolitical movements of capital, tourism, and desire within the
processes of globalization. In order to highlight the episodic nature of the
First World’s narrative about HIV/AIDS in Thailand and to witness the
necessarily fragmentary quality of representation in the global sphere
involving competing and constantly moving voices, I attempt to enact an
imaginary dialogue in the form of what Trinh T.Minh-ha has termed
‘textual excursion’. The purpose of this imaginary dialogue is to elaborate
on the various strands of narratives and different levels of discourse (for
example, the documentary, the theoretical, the imaginary, the political) that
comprise the field of jumbled voices. As the HIV/AIDS pandemic in
Pacific and Southeast Asia is taking shape around the configurations of
globalist imperatives, it illuminates a dual process: the revitalization of
orientalist fantasies in the global sphere and the self-orientalizing
tendencies within the Asian world captured by global development. It also
illuminates the necessity of addressing the problem of ‘Asian AIDS’ as a
migrating vector.
KEYWORDS
HIV/AIDS; Pacific and Southeast Asia; Thailand; global capitalism;
orientalism; subaltern theory; the media

The language of critique…opens up a space of translation: a place of
hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political
object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our
political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our
recognition of the moment of politics.
(Bhabha, 1994)