Review of 'Southeast Asia on Screen: From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945-1998)' (original) (raw)
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Southeast Asia on Screen: From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945– 1998), edited by Gaik Cheng Khoo, Thomas Barker, and Mary J. Ainslie (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), presents a collection of studies on film cultures that explore cinema’s function as a vessel of accounts across several Southeast Asian countries. The anthology is divided into three main sections where the accompanying chapters map out topics such as developments on nationalism, advances leading to Golden Ages, contributions by key figures, and selected popular works. The thirteen chapters are composed of scholarly essays that focus on a specific period, film artists, and cultural texts that additionally shape the connections within the Southeast Asian region.
Southeast Asia on Screen: From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945-1998)
Southeast Asia on Screen: From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945-1998), 2020
After the end of World War II when many Southeast Asian nations gained national independence, and up until the Asian Financial Crisis, film industries here had distinctive and colourful histories shaped by unique national and domestic conditions. Southeast Asia on Screen: From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945-1998) addresses the similar themes, histories, trends, technologies and sociopolitical events that have moulded the art and industry of film in this region, identifying the unique characteristics that continue to shape cinema, spectatorship and Southeast Asian filmmaking in the present and the future. Bringing together scholars across the region, chapters explore the conditions that have given rise to today’s burgeoning Southeast Asian cinemas as well as the gaps that manifest as temporal belatedness and historical disjunctures in the more established regional industries.
"This Area is [NOT] Under Quarantine": Rethinking Southeast/Asia through Studies of the Cinema
State of Motion 2020: Rushes of Time, 2020
This essay uses the chronotopes, or the spatiotemporal properties, of contemporary Southeast Asian cinema to inquire into the ways in which the region’s new cinemas allow us to rethink humanities approaches to the “area” of Southeast Asia and to pedagogies of Asia more broadly. I wish to draw attention to a mode of analysis that exceeds the merely spatial logics of cinema and area and argue that new area studies pedagogies cannot forego the concomitant consideration of temporality. A focus on the chronotopes of (Southeast) Asian cinemas significantly strengthens the study of the region as multiply networked in time and space, rather than bounded by geography and the conventions of traditional area scholarship.
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The thrill of going over a volume on contemporary popular culture is compounded when the activity betokens a celebrity system whose members may be already enjoying a measure of popularity, and whose fame has the potential of reaching a wider public. The reader could casually drop a statement like "Oh, I knew that artist before she became a global household name" to admiring colleagues, and in effect replicate the outward spread of stardom whose processes new media have
This research examines the intersections among Southeast Asian strategic cultures, cinematic visualizations, and the formation of Southeast Asian foreign policies from 1945 to 1967. Veering away from realist, political, economic, and strategic frameworks on foreign policy and international studies, I apply cultural analysis to the study of the foreign policy orientations of Southeast Asian states in the early period of the Cold War-a period that coincided with the era of nation-building and decolonization in Southeast Asia. The underlying premise of this approach is that politics and foreign policy formulation are not impervious to culture-that the processes by which states relate to one another are inevitably grounded in distinct cultural spheres. Through an investigation of the strategic cultures of Southeast Asian states, I provide a provocative alternative for understanding how and why these states navigated the Cold War the way they did. I examine how Southeast Asian strategic cultures reflected and/or were shaped by the dominant ideologies in the national cinemas in three countries-Malaya/Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. I then explore how the strategic cultures of these Southeast Asian states eventually influenced their nation-building processes and international relations. Using films as the primary analytical reference, I investigate what the dominant ideologies in popular cinematic products that circulated in the region illuminate concerning the broader cultural context, in general, and strategic cultures, in particular, of Southeast Asian states; how these films depict international realities following the Second World War, the Cold War and its major players (the United States, China, and, albeit to a lesser degree, the Soviet Union), and the role of the Malayan/Malaysian, Philippine, and Indonesian states in the battle between the communists and the anti-communists; how popular films and genres impinge on the corroboration or rejection of particular discourses dominant in Southeast Asian nationbuilding and foreign policy-making during the Cold War; and finally, how the strategic cultures of Southeast Asian states, which were captured in and influenced by the popular films produced by Southeast Asians themselves, shaped the outlook of key policy makers in dealing with and coming to terms with decolonization and Cold War realities in the region. I argue that Southeast Asian films advance a cultural narrative about anticolonialism, independence, and nation-building that produced, affirmed, and reinforced the Southeast Asian strategic culture of non-alignment. The ideologies, (re)created, negotiated, and embodied in Southeast Asian films, reflected and influenced the strategic cultures of Southeast Asian states. I further maintain that the strategic cultures not only shaped the perceptions of Southeast Asians concerning international affairs, they also affected the manner in which the peoples viewed themselves and others, and shaped their international behaviour.
Introduction: Rethinking Asian Media and Film
Special issue of The Asian Journal of Social Science, 2013
This Introduction pulls together the main themes of the papers in this special issue, which covers major regions in Asia from Japan, Korea and China to Indonesia, India and Iran. The papers are all critical of the implications of imposing Eurocentric and metropolitan frameworks on the diverse assemblages of practices of producing, distributing and engaging with Asian media and film. Bringing a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds to bear, the contributors question exist- ing approaches and concepts, reconsider what should count as objects of study and propose new theoretical approaches appropriate to the study of such large and rapidly changing industries. What emerges, however, is the extent to which issues of knowledge and power permeate not just the debates, but also the critiques. Drawing upon the papers, the Introduction concludes by sug- gesting the possibilities of a more rigorous and sustained analysis in terms of practice.