Page 76 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

70 CULTURAL STUDIES

I

I begin with a rather obvious observation: HIV/AIDS is a migrating pandemic.
Over the last few decades, the developing countries have been extra-ordinarily
affected by global, and by definition mobile, developments. Since the 1980s,
many of them have also been the epicentres of the pandemic. By the mid-1990s,
it is becoming terribly clear that across many nations and regions the pandemic is
taking shape along the lines of transnational forces, such as that of capital flow
and distribution, new patterns of human and labour migration, tourism (including
sex tourism), postcolonial and neocolonial forms of government responding to the
pulls of globalization, new and continuing military presences in the Third World,
and the signifying practices of race, class, gender, and sexual identities in the
historical, mediated, literary as well as nationalist public health discourses. As of
December 1995, the World Health Organization estimates a total of eighteen
million cases of HIV infection worldwide. About three million cases have been
reported in South and Southeast Asia, three times more than the caseload in all
of North America. The number of AIDS cases totals about six million worldwide
as of 15 December 1995.
For almost a decade now, I have been writing about the cultural politics of
HIV/AIDS within the American setting. The current project that I am engaging
in, of which this article is a part, concerns the crisis of AIDS in Southeast Asia,
with a special focus on Thailand. In it, I attempt to understand global AIDS in
relation to Asian modernity within the framework of migration as a historical
material movement, as well as an analytic, a mode of being, a teleology. In Asia,
modernity is linked to disjunctive processes of decolonization, democracy
movements, and westernization (Appadurai, 1990). As an Asian who grew up in
one of the most modernized Asian cities, I have always understood Asian
modernity as an egregiously awkward celebration. Even before but especially
after Edward Said, critics have pointed out that orientalism has functioned to
invent the orient in such a way that it exists in the shared and coincided
coordinates of EuroAmerican and Asian political and cultural fantasies, which
explains why you do not have to be inside the orient to have orientalism. In this
way, the phenomenon of Asian modernity—which I take to be contemporaneous
to the rise of orientalism, although in varied periodization for different regions of
the Asian world—is as much an administrative and cultural discourse for the
West as it is for the East. Put in a different way, Asian modernity is a travelling
vector within the global imaginary. While it claims the Asian territory as its
object and target, Asian modernity is in fact a re-doubling historical trajectory,

Cultural Studies 11(1) 1997:64–77© 1997 Routledge 0950–2386