Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability rethinks theory and style through films that bring the limits of traditional postcolonial frameworks into stark relief. Discover Singapore's preoccupations with space, Yasmin Ahmad's Malaysian soundscapes, and Indonesia's investment in genre. These undertheorized films from geopolitically situated cultures narrate colonial identity within a distinctively Southeast Asian story. Gerald Sim's immersive journey nurtures connections between narrative film, commercial video, art cinema, and experimental work with an abiding commitment to self-reflexive theorizing. The book culminates in a reflection on the ethics and politics of conducting knowledge work on world cinema. Sim navigates Singapore's love of maps with the work of Tom Conley and Gilles Deleuze, surveys the city-state's cartographic uncanny, before using the spatial inquisitions in filmmaker Tan Pin Pin's "cinema of hiraeth" to appreciate Singapore's territorial predispositions. The book then revisits a beloved Malaysian director's voice of modernity alongside Jean-Luc Nancy's phenomenologies of listening and globalization. Original readings of Ahmad's oeuvre dwell on the interplay between her ethnic cacophonies and imperfect subtitling. Finally, Sim focuses on the postcoloniality of Indonesia's Cold War alliance with the United States to contemplate the overhang of authoritarian stability within its contemporary cinema's generic recourse.

The Subject of Film and Race is the first comprehensive intervention into how film critics and scholars have sought to understand cinema's relationship to racial ideology. In attempting to do more than merely identify harmful stereotypes, research on 'films and race' appropriates ideas from post-structuralist theory. But on those platforms, the field takes intellectual and political positions that place its anti-racist efforts at an impasse. While presenting theoretical ideas in an accessible way, Gerald Sim's historical materialist approach uniquely triangulates well-known work by Edward Said with the Neo-Marxian writing about film by Theodor Adorno and Fredric Jameson. The Subject of Film and Race takes on topics such as identity politics, multiculturalism, multiracial discourse, and cyborg theory, to force film and media studies into rethinking their approach, specifically towards humanism and critical subjectivity. The book illustrates theoretical discussions with a diverse set of familiar films by John Ford, Michael Mann, Todd Solondz, Quentin Tarantino, Keanu Reeves, and others, to show that we must always be aware of capitalist history when thinking about race, ethnicity, and films.

The Subject of Film and Race is the first comprehensive intervention into how film critics and scholars have sought to understand cinema's relationship to racial ideology. In attempting to do more than merely identify harmful stereotypes, research on 'films and race' appropriates ideas from post-structuralist theory. But on those platforms, the field takes intellectual and political positions that place its anti-racist efforts at an impasse. While presenting theoretical ideas in an accessible way, Gerald Sim's historical materialist approach uniquely triangulates well-known work by Edward Said with the Neo-Marxian writing about film by Theodor Adorno and Fredric Jameson. The Subject of Film and Race takes on topics such as identity politics, multiculturalism, multiracial discourse, and cyborg theory, to force film and media studies into rethinking their approach, specifically towards humanism and critical subjectivity. The book illustrates theoretical discussions with a diverse set of familiar films by John Ford, Michael Mann, Todd Solondz, Quentin Tarantino, Keanu Reeves, and others, to show that we must always be aware of capitalist history when thinking about race, ethnicity, and films.