Introduction

With ‘Worlds Panoramic’, Cultural Dynamics initiates a new section specifically devoted to the visualities of the Global South and its multiply fragmented borderzones. Inspired by recent and ongoing debates in visual culture, critical race and sexuality studies, environmental studies, world cinema and related fields, this section will feature provocative interventions by emerging and well-established artists and critics. We seek to respond to and extend Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall’s (1997) challenge almost two decades ago ‘to trace the ways in which “the image” is invariably articulated within the picturing sensibilities of a wider “visual culture”’ (p. 7).

Our first commitment is to the many ‘picturing sensibilities’ that today struggle across the Global South to declare and critique individual experiences of sensorial encounter, disruption and loss. We also dialogue with artists, curators and critics of post-creolizing aesthetic practices in the Caribbean, the Americas and beyond, and we extend our worlds-panoramic curiosities in the divergent and coinciding directions of what Naficy (2001) has named ‘accented cinema’. Extensive and focused in reach, ‘Worlds Panoramic: Visualities of the Global South’ is dedicated to chronicling the wildly fragmented contexts of sensory and visual, social and political transformation taking shape across the material and conceptual ethnoscapes of the Global South, its diasporic extensions, internal peripheries and constitutive fractures.

Our first featured piece, on ‘Asian Megastructure and Queer Futurity’, is by Eng-Beng Lim (Dartmouth College). Building on his award-winning work on performance and colonialism in Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias and on his text on ‘Future island’, Lim’s programmatic essay explores Singapore’s architectural megastructures, global island environments and queer everyday lives. ‘Worlds Panoramic’ launches its investigation of visual practices across the Global South from this megastractural islandscape.