Introduction

Abstract

The Introduction situates postcolonial Southeast Asian cinemas within historical, cultural, and disciplinary contexts. With a combination of historical surveys, intellectual mapping, and cultural anecdotes, it recommends a renewal of critical frameworks for the region’s emerging cinemas. It connects Southeast Asia’s unique geopolitical history to cultural and social particularities in three culturally affiliated nations: Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The postcolonial legacy of each surfaces cinematically through locally specific preoccupations. Their films offer readable manifestations of how postcolonial character manifests in Singapore’s spatial imaginary, Malaysia’s aural sensibility, and Indonesian discourses of stability. Finally, the Introduction foregrounds the book’s continual concern with method, and outlines its self-reflective mode of theoretically informed film analysis that accounts for power differentials between knowledge traditions.