The UP Asian Center will be holding the webinar "Reclaiming “Asia”: Understanding the Global Economy the Asian Way" on 10 April 2026, 2:00 PM, PST (GMT+8), online via Zoom. The event is free and open to the public, but signing in to a (free) Zoom account is required.
ABOUT THE WEBINAR
The infectious spread of K-Pop all over the world, the rise of the BTS and BLINK fandoms, the Squid Game craze on Netflix, and the irresistible digital markets of Temu and Alibaba are among the prevailing phenomena that dominate the global economy today. While old theorists would label these as Western capitalism done by Asians, theorists of today, such as Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, propose a radical take on the region by reclaiming “Asia.” By challenging us to move beyond thinking of Asia as simply a geographic region, but a political one, he provides a modern take on theorizing Asian global phenomena by not using Europe as a default, but by using the point of view of the excluded, Asia.
Through his theory, the Asiatic Mode of Critical Theory, proposed in his book, Made in Nowhere, Lee brings us back to the concepts of Eurocentrism, Marx’s Asiatic Mode of Production, Orientalism, and reminds us of its impact on how we view Asia, as different, as “other,” compared to the West. He then argues that because the region is not bound to a certain way of thinking, in Asia, we are free to invent our own. As a result, global capitalism has become Asiatic. To understand current economic phenomena, especially in the digital age, we must understand that boundaries have collapsed and that production happens everywhere and nowhere, all at once.
Hence, this lecture seeks to interrogate Asia as a concept and as a method in understanding global phenomena. It aims to figure out how we can talk about global politics without using Europe as the "default" setting for how history is supposed to work. By looking at the past and the present, it seeks to answer how the global economy works and who runs it.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
ALEX TAEK-GWANG LEE
Professor, Kyung Hee University
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is a professor of philosophy and cultural studies and a founding director of the Centre for Technology in Humanities at Kyung Hee University, Korea. He is also a visiting professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at the University of Brighton (UK) and Graduate School at The University of Santo Tomas (Philippines). He served as an academic advisor for Gwangju Biennale in 2017 and as a program manager for the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2021. He edited the third volume of The Idea of Communism (2016) and Deleuze, Guattari, and the Schizoanalysis of Postmedia (2023). He authored Communism After Deleuze (2025) and Made in Nowhere: Essays on the Asiatic Modes of Existence (2025).