Description:
-- The editors of this volume present diverse academic backgrounds from different geographical locations. Nayoung Aimee Kwon specializes in postcolonial studies and is in the U.S., Takushi Odagiri studies ethics and is in Japan, and Moonim Baek specializes in cinema studies and is in South Korea. Contributors to the volume range from local established film scholars to rising stars overseas. -- The group's shared regional focus on Asia provides an important case study from within a formally colonized area. While scholarship in film studies has made important headways in examining the complex dynamics of colonial cinemas, too much focus is from the POV of Europe's imperial histories and archives about the colonies. The result of that has been devaluation and misrecognition within the region and outside it, which has relegated local voices to the margins. -- This collaborative work is fitting for NDNS because the series emphasizes interdisciplinary and global dimensions of film theory and history. -- Target a global audience in various disciplines, including film studies, area studies, and postcolonial studies.
Review Quotes:
"With this excellent anthology, the history of colonization finally receives the full reckoning it deserves in articulations of film history and theory. By accounting for the legacies, stages, stagings, and afterlives of imperialism writ large and small in cinemas of or about Asia, the authors of this collection teach us how profoundly our historical and conceptual understanding of film transforms when we begin from the time and place of the colony. This is a ground shift that can no longer be ignored."--Priya Jaikumar, author of Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space
"There was a time when writing about cinema was mostly about cinema from Western European countries and the US, spoken in one of the six European languages of Western modernity. No longer. Storytelling in moving images and non-Western languages carries within them praxes of living rooted in colonial legacies absent in the hegemonic history of Western cinematography. Theorizing Colonial Cinema is written by a majority of scholars that inhabits and endures colonial legacies and are embedded in the soundtrack languages of these moving images. This book is a landmark that complements and surpasses Third Cinema's heritage of the '60s and '70s."--Walter D. Mignolo, author of The Politis of Decolonial Investigations
"A brilliant intervention into history, film, and cultural studies that goes far beyond the national cinema rubric and conventional binaries such as colonizer/colonized, white/non-white, East/West, anthropos/humanitas, theory/text, human/animal - this work by leading scholars of colonialism and film excavates cultural production and its political unconscious under colonialism to show not only the entanglements of colonialism and film but also the coloniality of cinema itself and the inevitable return of the repressed through the Cold War and postmillennial moments. A major work that will make many waves across disciplines and areas of specialization."--Takashi Fujitani, author of Race for Empire, University of Toronto