Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Simone Chung, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

I am currently completing a monograph on the postcolonial poetics of Southeast Asian cinema, namely Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The book, contracted with Indiana University Press, seeks to intervene in postcolonial film studies in 2 ways: by introducing the field to a region whose rather unique colonial history has been understudied, and by thinking of postcolonial aesthetics beyond the usual tropes such as hybridity and syncretism.

I will present a summary of my findings collected this summer during my fellowship at ARI, which was devoted to the chapters related to Singapore. The country has an uncommon preoccupation with space, maybe because land is scarce, and intensely politicized. Its cinema shares that investment in spatiality. More specifically, the films are cartographic, and the way in which they map, organize, and understand Singapore as a place, and Singapore’s place in the world, retain the ideological inflections of its post/colonial identity. Existing scholarship about these films dwells on how local films are critical responses to social realities, political power, and state ideology. This analysis builds on them with theoretical considerations of key films, art and museum exhibits, and other artifacts, that provide a sketch of how symptoms of Singapore’s spatial phenomenology manifest themselves in cinema.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Gerald Sim is Associate Professor of film and media studies at Florida Atlantic University. His first book, The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) is a Neo-Marxian examination of critical race film studies. For his current Senior Visiting Research Fellowship at ARI, he is at work on a second manuscript tentatively titled, Besides Hybridity, contracted with Indiana University Press. The book aims to reconceive postcolonial aesthetics through a study of films from Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, with specific regard to these traditions’ respective articulations of space, sound, and genre. It builds on published and forthcoming works in Film Quarterly, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and Positions: Asia Critique. Gerald’s essays on topics ranging from film music, to financial media, Japanese cinema, Edward Said, and digital cinema/new media can also be found in journals such as the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Rethinking Marxism, Asian Cinema, Discourse, and Projections.

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