Page 77 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

OF DESIRE, THE FARANG, AND TEXTUAL EXCURSIONS 71

first as a relational, or in Homi Bhabha’s term, a ‘translational’ project with the
West as partner in the global field, and second as a self-administered moment of
identity and authority within the Asian world itself. In this way, one may say that
there can be no orientalism without also the phenomenon of self-orientalism.
And this in part explains my bewildering sense of Asian modernity as an
awkward celebration.
My main concern is whether and how the emerging HIV/AIDS pandemic in
Asia may be duplicating and rearticulating such global epistemological and
political processes. I wonder whether the epidemiological patterns of infection in
the developing countries articulate and are articulated by the underlying global
processes of change. I want to find out whether, how, and where the discursive
vectors about Asian AIDS—including, for example, transnational biomedicine,
anthropology, and the media—are constructed and distributed along the
configurations dictated by globalist imperatives. I wonder also how the Asian
regions that have been affected by the pandemic respond to and cope with it and
how they negotiate their response to AIDS with their response to pressures of
global development.
This article focuses on the vectors of representation that give rise to and frame
the problem of ‘Asian AIDS’. It discusses the episodic nature of the First
World’s narrative about AIDS in Thailand, one of the epicentres of the epidemic
in Asia. I should want to read this episodic nature as something characteristic of
a kind of ambivalent colonial impulse void of a sustained, univocal sense of
racial superiority or sexual innocence vis-à-vis the Other.

II
International AIDS-control efforts, which have by and large focused on
epidemiological surveillance, have only recently acknowledged the devastation of
the Pacific and Southeast Asian region by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, especially in
Thailand, India, and the Philippines. Meanwhile, the press of the developed
world has been anxiously silent about it. The handful of media reports from the
United States, as we shall see, has created a classic orientalist heterosexual
‘Asian AIDS’ that reinaugurates the postcolonial discourse of global economic
development and precolonial fantasies about militarized and leisurized
masculinity, both firmly etched in the spatial and temporal movement and class-
based consumption of interracial desire and pleasure in the form of sanuk (the
term sanuk in Thai language connotes ‘fun’ coyly coded as casual sexual
exchange). Such discourses and fantasies are a paradoxical mode of knowledge
in which Pacific and Southeast Asia appears as an ambivalent territory: it is
something that is always already known and wholly predictable, and something
that must be eagerly reinvented and repeated. 2 In this kind of neocolonial
moment, ‘Pacific and Southeast Asia’ and ‘Asian AIDS’ follow the same paths of
imaginings that gave rise to ‘Africa’ and ‘African AIDS’ in the 1980s, but with a
difference. Besides positing (and eagerly repeating) the conceptual superiority
3