Screen violence and partition

ABSTRACT

Recent film and television treatment of South Asia from UK producers have introduced new angles on the violent politics of colonial past, whether this be the activities of the East India Company in the early days of Empire, or about Partition, at the ostensible Raj’s end. The controversy over Gurinder Chadha’s 2017 film Viceroy’s House is taken as an opportunity to consider the new South Asian film and television studies and the emergent scholars that are challenging conventional media studies models. The co-constitution of here and there is given as an analytic lens through which to comprehend representation and stereotyping in films “about” politics in South Asia, and the view taken is that a debilitating divide and rule, via mechanisms of representation, remains strongly in place, despite the fighting efforts of the new South Asian media scholarship.     

Looking for other stories: women's writing,Self-Respect movement and the politics of feminist translations

ABSTRACT

The primary purpose of this essay is to survey the recent zombie craze in Northeast Asian films from Japan and South Korea. While the concept of the zombie may have originated in colonial Haiti, with its ghoulish images and supernatural lore, zombies were later imported to North America and reformulated as popular cultural entertainment by Hollywood. They are now flourishing in an East Asian cinematic context preserved in a globalized form. The films under investigation – I Am a Hero and Train to Busan – share similar cultural subtexts despite their incommensurable experiences of global capitalism in Asia and its latest ideological phase, neoliberalism. Both films critique the current neoliberal order and were nurtured by historical traumas experienced by both countries as well as the pandemic spread of viruses, both real and imaginary, that have ravaged the region. Nevertheless, the most prominent issue explored by Japanese and Korean zombie films is the continuity of society and its reproduction: as cultural artifacts of the neoliberal world, these films offer dystopian visions in which exploitation accelerates to such an extent that states cannot protect themselves against the viral and capitalist onslaught.     

A Chinese in the new world: television dramas,global cities,and travels to modernity

Abstract

After having lain dormant for some 20 years during 1973 and 1991, the Singaporean film industry is experiencing a revival. Films produced since the early 1990s have been resolutely ‘local’ in their portrayals in an effort to ground this emergent cinematic modernity. Only a handful of these films have, however, received any international attention; most remain ‘too local’, ‘too colloquial’ to be exported further afield. This paper explores those visions or versions of the local presented in contemporary films from Singapore that simultaneously manufacture a brand of foreignness assimilable by international audiences. Through an overview of films from the revival period, this paper will show that the images that do travel successfully overseas are those that portray the dark side to Singapore’s road to economic modernization, the failed processes of an Asianized modernity. It is these images, representing one vision of an ‘authentic’ social reality, that is recognizable by international audiences in the context of previous successes by Asian films utilizing a shared form of (local) expression. My question is whether we can read these images as a particular kind of ‘slang’ – a vagabond expression that represents a filmic vernacular that also strategically invokes a cinematic modernity for the Singaporean film industry. This argument may extend to other (emergent) Asian cinemas that also participate in the production of this particular brand of foreignness. The paper will therefore provide some initial speculations towards the regionalization of cinema and ask whether such a move might be desirable and what its purpose might be.     

In the heat of the moment: South Asian responses to the events of 11 September 2001

Abstract

This review article looks at three books, published in 2002, which provide from different perspectives a response by South Asian Muslims to the new interest in Islam evoked by the events of 9/11. Written from different vantage points, they represent an intellectual effort to come to grips with the notion of an ‘Islamic’ identity – debating notions of jihad, and its connections with Islamic faith, with the notion of an Islamic umma or nation, and where Muslim societies are headed to in the 21st century. It is not only the emergence of the Taliban movement in the North‐western portion of South Asia that has brought the focus on South Asian Islam. As M.J. Akbar has observed, South Asia forms the demographic heartland of Islam. The books reviewed do not fall into the category of the myriad publications that have become a kind of apology for Islam, but represent an effort at understanding the connections between geo‐political concerns and intellectual academic approaches to the subject of Islam.     

Shifting spaces,frozen frames: trajectories of queer politics in contemporary India

Abstract

This paper is a comparative reading of two Malayalam films The Journey (Sancharram, 2004) and The Wandering Bird Does Not Cry (Deshadana Kili Karayarilla, 1986) as representative of differing trajectories of queer politics in the Kerala public sphere. It uses an analysis of the representative strategies of these two films, to interrogate the limits of a universal language of sexual identity politics. The paper places the two films in the different historical contexts in which they are produced, and deploys a film from an earlier time period to problematize some of the assumptions of contemporary queer politics. For this purpose it undertakes a close reading of the cinematic codes of both these films, especially the spatial arrangements in the films. I argue that the location of Sancharram in the LGBT discourse in India and abroad makes it so enmeshed in setting up an established meaning for the term ‘queer’ that the process of queering becomes one of stabilizing a chosen form of desire as the ideal one. In this process of setting up a stable trajectory for queer desire, it also freezes the spatial and social terrains of Kerala. The process of queering that Deshadana Kili Karayarilla undertakes is not one that attempts to set up a particular subject position as the queer subject position. It sets out to trouble the naturalized construction of the heterosexual couple and injects a sense of instability into the social sphere itself. The paper examines how some of the taken‐for‐granted assumptions of transnational queer politics, like the celebration of visible bodies, gets radically questioned when we turn to non‐metropolitan sites of analysis. It aims to look at how cultural texts can embody different modes of sexual politics, as activists struggle to coin strategies to articulate the political possibilities of non‐normative sexual practices in Kerala today.     

Distribution and circulation of Indian films in Singapore

ABSTRACT

Despite the long history of the export and exhibition of Indian films in Southeast Asia, a systematic documentation of how Hindi and Tamil films from India found their way into the region has yet to be undertaken. Theatrical exhibition of Indian films is reported to have sharply declined or ended since the late 1970s in their traditional markets in Malaya, Ceylon, British East Africa, Burma, Persian Gulf Ports, Thailand and South Vietnam. Yet films continued to be circulated through formal and informal networks such as video parlours, CD shops, television and, lately, on the internet. Although Singapore has the unique distinction of being the only Southeast Asian country, which still has a few theatres exclusively dedicated to screening Indian films, theatrical exhibition is not the only medium through which they are circulated. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2008 and 2010, this paper contrasts the formal distribution of Indian films with their informal circulation through which they “leak” into the multi-ethnic spaces of the global city. Drawing on photographs, exhibits, interviews, reports and observations, the essay focuses on television, CD shops, lending libraries and the internet through which Indian films are disseminated in Singapore.     

Cold War and the contested identity formation of Korean filmmakers: on Boxes of Death and Kim Ki-yo˘ng's USIS films

The definition of the Korean national cinema in the course of modern and contemporary history of South Korea has provoked controversy. This article examines the negotiations in the identity formation of Korean filmmakers examining specific objects from years of reconstruction following the Korean War. It pays attention to the time when state-building and nation-building became combined enduring heterogeneity of this process. Kim Ki-yo?ng's films depict such characters. His public information short films reflect the legacy of American war films. However, they also contain self-conscious moments when the director refuses to be identified as a mere successor of American documentary filmmakers. Kim's first commercial film, Boxes of Death (1955), an anti-communist thriller, shows great influence from Hollywood, but also with a strong auteurist impulse, theatrical tradition, and the Japanese colonial legacy. However, the most important aspect is the standing presence of America and the USIS-Korea in the identity of Kim Ki-yo?ng and his film. American agencies intervened in the work of Korean filmmakers in the interest of “Free World” bloc-building, and those filmmakers used such agencies to obtain resources. The heterogeneity in the process of the subject formation in Korean national cinema was one common characteristic of many filmmakers of the post-Korean War era.     

Theorizing difference and difficulty: “wreading” Asian American poetics in South Korea*

ABSTRACT

Reflecting on a personal experience teaching and studying Asian American poetry in South Korea, this paper examines how and why Asian American poetry in South Korea has been marginalized in the academia and argues that Asian American poetry needs to be newly dealt as a frontier that vigorously experiments the role of cultural poetics and humanities in and out of the university programs. The reception of Asian American poets and their poetry in South Korea is inseparable from the interpellation and understanding of Asian Americans as subject. This essay, rather than inscribing Anglo American critical frame that has focused on the reductive reading of essentializing racial traits and minority identities, tries to build a platform for inviting inter/cross-cultural thinking under the umbrella of poetry reading. Through the process of “wreading” Asian American poetry, I argue that difficulty and difference can be reinterpreted as practical monitors for alternative reading of Asian American poetry against the grain of the white Anglican national self of America.     

Konfiden and the promotion of Indonesian short films

Abstract

After the New Order stepped down in 1998 and the Department of Information was closed down in 1999, the Indonesian government loosened their control on film regulation. At that time, theatres rarely screened Indonesian films and there had been no film festivals in Indonesia for a long period. Meanwhile, advanced digital technology had provided a digital film camera – for the non‐professional user – that more people could afford. Some young Indonesians believed that lots of Indonesians had a digital film camera and used them to make films, instead of just recording family gatherings. These youngsters – mostly from big cities – came from different backgrounds and usually met at alternative film screenings in foreign cultures centres or the Indonesian Cinematheque. Most were well‐educated and dreamed of watching films from their own country. They therefore organized a film festival in 1999 under name ‘the Indonesia Independent Film‐Video Festival’. They chose a short‐film format for the festival because it was easier for common people to make a short film than a feature film with a digital camera. The organizer of the Indonesia Independent Film‐Video Festival established an organization in early 2000 named Konfiden. After 2000, Konfiden tried to promote Indonesian short films at international short‐film festivals such as the Oberhausen Short Film Festival and Tampere Short Film Festival. After 2002, Konfiden’s festival was not the only short film festival in Indonesia. Several film communities in Java started to organize short film festivals. The Konfiden’s next step is to build a film market, database, and to shape the quality for Indonesia short films.     

Gender,affect, and landscape: wartime films from Northern and Southern Vietnam

Abstract

Examining two Vietnamese films, one made in the North in 1959, and another produced in the South during the American War in 1971, this article contends that Vietnam's landscape serves as an affective site for a gendered construction of nationalism within key moments in Vietnamese history. In analyzing the attachments that the Vietnamese and Vietnamese diaspora feel towards their country, I explore a topic rarely discussed in US film scholarship and historicize these filmmaking efforts to demarcate a different way of viewing Vietnam in film. This study demonstrates the importance of understanding how gender and affect are projected onto landscapes in a national cinema like Vietnam's. More exactingly, it emphasizes that affects underlying Vietnamese nationhood and war are undergirded by the political economy of film and filmmaking. My arguments point to the modes of production and circulation of film, which shape the making of affect in Vietnam War discourse. My analyses are framed by the questions: how is affect inscribed in Vietnamese film, and what are its effects on notions of belonging and nationhood? In what ways has affect traveled about Vietnam in the past and present moment? Who is able to access such representations, and why does this matter?     

Feeling freedom: Japanese and American wartime films on the liberation of the Philippines, 1943–1945

ABSTRACT

This article juxtaposes the Japanese wartime film Dawn of Freedom and Hollywood films on the Philippines during WWII as a method to analyze the representational strategies by which the U.S. and Japanese empires tried, respectively and in opposition to the other, to nurture the feeling that the peoples of the Philippines and beyond would enjoy freedom under their stewardships. Under pressure from the twin crises of colonialism and capitalism, the two empires sought to establish hegemony in the Asia-Pacific by fashioning a new model of empire that disavowed imperialist intentions and territorial aggrandizement while promising freedoms that included but went beyond national self-determination. The article focuses on four overlapping freedoms that run through the Japanese and Hollywood films: namely, political self-determination/consumerist freedom, freedom of self-sacrifice or the freedom to die, freedom in romance, and freedom from racism. Despite their differences, the author argues that the two sides in the imperial film wars shared much more than what is commonly realized and that the new strategy that advanced and yet disavowed imperialist ambitions while promoting the feeling of freedom, has great relevance for understanding the militarized world today.     

Comment on Hanasaki Kohei: decolonalization and the assumption of war responsibility

Abstract

The first Asian Lesbian Film and Video Festival, held in Taipei in August 2005, brought forth media art, social activism and cultural exchange on one occasion. It provided a rare opportunity to showcase the experience of Asian lesbians, which is vastly different from the experience of those in Western countries. While there were great similarities in their love experiences among the 36 Asian lesbian shorts selected, they also reflected the differences among the Asian countries in terms of local development of tongzhi culture and community as well as the visibility of tongzhis. Among the Chinese communities, Taiwan was seen to be at the forefront of the development of tongzhi culture, Mainland China was new to the movement, and Hong Kong was somewhere in‐between. Japanese and Korean videos took a critical and reflective attitude towards social regulations and mainstream thoughts, although witty and farcical at times. While the Filipinos show a more tolerant attitude to the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) community, the major oppressive forces on lesbians were poverty, gender inequality and sexual violence. Only one Israeli documentary was shown at the film festival, which focused on lesbians living in the Jewish Orthodox traditions. The film won international acclaim and attracted much public attention to the issue. Films and videos were found to be an effective means to transcend language barriers and cultural differences for a true cross‐cultural exchange among Asian lesbians. During the few days of festival, a ‘queer nation’, not defined by nationalities or languages, but by the pursuit of love expressions, was constructed around The Taipei House.     

Malayanized Chinese-language cinema: on Yi Shui’s Lion City,Black Gold,and film writings

This article discusses how the Singaporean Chinese director, Yi Shui, created a Malayanized Chinese-language cinema during the 1950s and 1960s, and offers a retrospective of the way people in Malaya and Singapore framed their nation-building discourse in terms of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism after the Bandung Conference in 1955. This article holds that the term huayu dianying (Chinese-language cinema) was not first used in the 1990s by scholars in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but that its origins can be traced to Singapore and Malaya in the 1950s where Yi Shui promoted Malayanized Chinese-language cinema in the Nanyang Siang Pau. This earlier use of the term “Chinese-language cinema” overlaps with its current academic usage, including films in Mandarin and Chinese dialects. In 1959, Yi Shui’s essays were collected in On Issues of the Malayanization of Chinese-Language Cinema. Yi Shui also directed several Malayanized Chinese-language films. This article analyzes his “Chinese language cinema” film practice by examining the discourses surrounding the “Malayanization of Chinese-language cinema” in order to show that his semi-documentary Lion City and the melodrama Black Gold attempted to mediate the misunderstandings rooted in the national boundaries and politics of various dialect groups through a “multi-lingual symbiosis” of Chinese languages.     

Hollywood domination of the Chinese kung fu market

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the cultural significance of three emerging Chinese kung fu films in their recent box office success in global film market. The paper aims to provide an integrative framework that shows how Hollywood’s global dominance in both film consumption and production contributes to the success of the newly Chinese Kung Fu films. Focusing on marketing strategies of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero and House of Flying Daggers, this study argues that the economic success of the three films represent further regulation of Hollywood. In production, the NICL thesis is at work with a particular collaboration pattern among the transnational Chinese film talent communities. In distribution and exhibition, this paper contends that global box office achievement fails to contribute directly to any Chinese film industry. Autonomy is seen between Hollywood film majors and Chinese filmmakers when consumption of these films becomes a global phenomenon.     

Postcolonial film historiography in Taiwan and South Korea: The Puppetmaster and Chihwaseon

Abstract

This essay is concerned with the ways in which postcolonial historiography is inscribed in cinema. Two representative films of Taiwan and South Korea, The Puppetmaster by Hou Hsiao‐Hsien ¹ 1. Names in Chinese, Korean and Japanese are written in the order of family name followed by given name. For example, Hou Hsiao‐Hsien, Im Kwontaek. and Chihwaseon by Im Kwontaek are compared, not only to understand the working of de‐colonization in the cinematic apparatus but also to understand the impact, effects of colonial history. The notion of postcolonial filmmaking as an alternative construction of the archive is evoked to locate film practice in the intersecting spaces of repository, historiography, cinematic representation and social memory. Hence, these two films are cited as instances of illuminating retrospection on fractured pasts, the almost‐invisible archive and the future cinematically envisioned by suggesting a sustainable postcolonial episteme in the age of global spectatorship.     

“Uncultural” Asian Americans in ABC’s Dr. Ken

In this essay, we interrogate the ways in which the uncultural masks the cultural in ABC’s Dr. Ken. We analyze Dr. Ken’s first season, through the conceptual lens of strategic whiteness, to identify and critique the ambiguous and nuanced positions of Asian Americans. By repeatedly demonstrating the simultaneous functions of Asian Americans both as almost Whites and as (nonthreatening) Others, Dr. Ken resecures invisible territories of whiteness as property. Our goal is to disrupt the uncultural assumptions about Dr. Ken as it strategically draws attention away from its reproduction of norms of whiteness at the expense of Asian Americans.     

Embodied inter-referencing: encounters with and among “Asian” students in the Australian classroom

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the pedagogical practice of referencing my experiences as a transnational Korean American woman in the classroom and considers how it opens up space for domestic and international students of East, Southeast, and South Asian backgrounds to reflect on their different identities, histories, and cultures. In particular, it focuses on how this practice enables Asian students to share their experiences of and insights about racial difference, racism, and whiteness in Australia and other parts of the world. Building on the concept of Asian “inter-referencing” from Chua Beng Huat (2015), I coin the term “embodied inter-referencing” to describe the strategic ways I use autobiographical narrative to create an inclusive, interactive, and mutually respectful learning space. I centre here on how some Asian students respond to this strategy by telling their own stories and in the process, create transnational, diasporic, and inter-Asian affective communities inside and outside the classroom.     

Transformation and job creation in the cultural and creative industries in South Africa

The cultural and creative industries (CCIs) have been hailed as offering great potential to create jobs and to be socially inclusive. Since artistic success is defined by individual talent, or merit, the CCIs should be one sector that is especially open to, and appreciative of, social diversity in terms of race, class, cultural group and gender. However, as expected, recent studies in both the UK and the US have revealed that employment in the CCIs is heavily dominated by the middle classes, and is not as diverse in terms of other characteristics. Since the advent of democracy in South Africa in 1994, transformation of firm ownership, previously dominated by white people, to include more black, coloured and Indian/Asian-origin South Africans, has been an important part of achieving greater economic equality and social cohesion, as well as being more representative of the cultures of the majority of the population. Using data from a survey of 2400 CCIs firms in South Africa, this paper examines the extent to which the CCIs in South Africa have transformed in terms of ownership and employment. Comparisons are also made across the six UNESCO [(2009). Framework for cultural statistics. UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Retrieved from http://www.uis.unesco.org/culture/Pages/framework-cultural-statistics.aspx] “Cultural Domains” in terms of ownership, average monthly turnover and the number of full-time, part-time and contract employees. Results show some diversity in the industry, but significant differences between the Domains. Statistical analysis demonstrates that CCI funding policy in South Africa is sensitive to advancing the transformation agenda in that more transformed firms were shown to be more likely to have received some form of government grant as part of their income.     

Murakami Haruki and the historical memory of East Asia

Abstract

In this article, I would like to focus on an analysis of internal logic of the ‘Haruki phenomenon’ as a symptom in current East Asian public culture. In particular, I will discuss how Haruki searches for the healing method for the ‘60s complex’ among Japan’s ‘Sixties’ Kids,’ including Haruki himself, through an analysis of his novels Norwegian Wood (2000[1987]) and Kafka on the Shore (2005[2002]). In the process of analysis, we can witness that Haruki abandoned his task of ‘reconciliation with the 1960s’ through faith, rather than facing it directly, and fiznally stripped the 1960s of historicity and reality. He regarded the ‘reconciliation with the 1960s’ as something beyond an individual’s ability. Transforming the 1960s from a history of postwar Japan into an object of abstract and universal nostalgia, which is closed to the present, Haruki effectively met the latent desire of the East Asian people, who were experiencing the dissolution of their ideologies, at the right time. This is the essence of the Haruki phenomenon that emerged in East Asia over the last decade. I use the phrase ‘nostalgia that lost its nationality’ to describe the uncanny cultural phenomenon of East Asian readers longing for the 1960s pictured in Haruki’s novels as if this were their own past, despite their very different national memories. Nostalgia, a cultural symptom of the postmodern society, where remembering the nation’s past totally is impossible, is a blank imitation deprived of its original source. In short, the substance of the Haruki phenomenon is nostalgia that developed from a desire to forget the traumatic memories of the national histories in individual East Asian countries.