Description

“Transnational Solidarities/Complicities” is the second lecture for the Mediating Race, Reimagining Geopolitics, JHI-UTM Seminar for 2020-2021 co-hosted by the Department of Visual Studies, the Southeast Asia Seminar Series at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and the UTM Collaborative Digital Research Space.   

Mediating Race, Reimagining Geopolitics proposed a series of lectures and film screenings featuring scholars and creators of cinema and media in order to investigate how moving image media contribute to formations of race, racism, and racialization from global perspectives. In a time when racist politics and racial capitalism pose increasing physical and psychical dangers to communities across the world, it is critical to examine the histories, theories and role of cinema and media in shaping the geopolitical imagination of the relations between people and nation-states from micro and macro scales. Mediating Race, Reimagining Geopolitics aimed to create a sustaining conversation among junior, senior scholars and film creators across disciplines, institutions and geographical locations.  

Participants:

Nadine Chan, Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies, Claremont Graduate University

“Asynchronicity and the Time-Lagged Medium: Racializing Space-Time in the Colonial Documentaries of British Malaya.”   

Ryan A. Buyco, Riley Scholar-in-Residence, Asian Studies Program, Colorado College

“Navigating Asian Settler Colonialism: Okinawa-Hawai’i Connections through the Works of Laura Kina and Lee A. Tonouchi.”   

Cheryl Suzack, Associate Professor of English, University of Toronto “Indigenous-Feminist Political Imaginaries in Four Settler-Colonial Countries.”

Jessica Harris, Assistant Professor of History, St John’s University “African-American Women and Love, Italian Style in 20th and 21st Century Media."    

Moderator: Kun Huang, PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell University

Description

Ashley Thompson suggests an engendering of history that bears "the potential to make history, literally and figuratively, insofar as it threatens or promises to upset established notions of the field" (2008:106). This panel took up Thompson’s call to engender history and interrogated dominant conceptions of gender, sexuality, and love in modern Thailand, Lao PDR, and Cambodia. From texts to textiles, classrooms to forests, and wedding photos to state records, the papers focused on particular spaces and materials that vibrated with social and political intensities through the long period of the Cold War in Thailand, Lao PDR, and Cambodia. The panel showed how materiality and spatiality were key aspects that shaped the ideological extremes that manifested in violence and unrest in Southeast Asia, and the panel began its inquiries in the 1950s.  

Alexandra Dalferro – "Weaving Queer Pasts and Futures in Thailand"  

Chairat Polmuk – "Of Eros and the Forest: The Topography of Love in Lao Revolutionary Literature"  Catriona Miller – "Sewing Patterns and Visions of Democracy: Khmer Women Organizing during Decolonization (1948 – 1952)"

Participants’ Bios:

ALEXANDRA DALFERRO is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. She is currently writing her dissertation about the politics and practices of sericulture and silk weaving in Surin, Thailand, and she pays particular attention to the sensory and affective dimensions of these processes. Her fieldwork was supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation and the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program, and for the 2019-2020 academic year, she was a Mellon Graduate Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell. Alexandra likes to weave and to sew and to think about how craft and art intersect with daily life.   

CHAIRAT POLMUK teaches Southeast Asian languages and literature, cultural theory, and media studies at the Department of Thai, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. He received a PhD in Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture from Cornell in 2018. His doctoral project titled, “Atmospheric Archives: Post-Cold War Affect and the Buddhist Temporal Imagination in Southeast Asian Literature and Visual Culture,” received the 2018 Lauriston Sharp Prize for best dissertation.   

CATRIONA MILLER is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her dissertation, Gendering the Cambodian State (1900 – 1970) utilizes transnational feminist methods to recast the political history of Cambodia during the transition from a French Protectorate to a neutral Buddhist nation-state. She conducted this research with generous funding from the NSEP Boren Fellowship and Center for Khmer Studies Fellowship.    

ARNIKA FUHRMANN is an interdisciplinary scholar of Southeast Asia, working at the intersections of the region’s aesthetic, religious, and political modernities. She is an associate professor of Asian Studies at Cornell University and the author of Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Duke University Press, 2016).

Description

For JHI-UTM 2020-2021 Seminar Series, Mediating Race, Reimagining Geopolitics presents "Race and Singapore Short Cinema", co-hosted by the Department of Visual Studies, Jackman Humanities Institute, Southeast Asia Seminar Series at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, UTM Collaborative Digital Research Space, University of Toronto and Objectifs.  

October 1-23, 2020 | The following film screenings are available for viewing via Objectifs Film Library:  "Dahdi" by Kirsten Tan, "Timeless" by K. Rajagopal, "Last Trip Home" by Han Fengyu, "Not Working Today" by Tan Shijie. Link: https://objectifsfilmlibrary.uscreen.io/categories/mediating-race-reimagining-geopolitics-webinar.

Participants’ Bios:

Kirsten Tan is a New York-based Singaporean filmmaker whose debut feature Pop Aye premiered as the opening night film of Sundance Film Festival 2017 and was awarded a Special Jury Prize for screenwriting. It traveled to 50 film festivals around the world, picking up several accolades along the way. Her shorts have collectively received over ten international awards. She was accorded the Young Artist Award by the NAC Singapore and was nominated as a Singaporean of the Year by The Straits Times.  

Han Fengyu graduated with a diploma in Film, Sound and Video from Ngee Ann Polytechnic in 2014. His graduation short film Last Trip Home premiered at the 67th Cannes Film Festival in the Cinefondation category in 2014. Last Trip Home has also competed at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, and the Singapore International Film Festival in 2014. It has won ‘The Best Fiction’ film at the 6th Singapore Short Film Awards in 2015.  

As a filmmaker, K.Rajagopal has won the Singapore International Film Festivalʼs Special Jury Prize for 3 consecutive years. I Can’t Sleep Tonight (1995), The Glare (1996) and Absence (1997) have been featured at international festivals around the world. Other works include Brother (1997), The New World (2008) and Timeless (2010), which won Best Cinematography and Best Editing at the Singapore Short Film Awards 2011. His short film was also part of the omnibus film 7 Letters (2015) which had its Asian premiere at the Busan Film Festival in 2015. He directed a segment in the LUCKY 7 film project with other six prominent Singaporean directors. He has also written and directed television films like Maddy, Two Mothers in a HDB Playground and Heartland. He also worked on stage for over ten years. He has collaborated with many notable theatre directors on projects such as Medea, Beauty World and Private Parts. A Yellow Bird is his first feature film and it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016.  

Shijie Tan studied philosophy before pursuing filmmaking at New York University’s Tisch Asia School. His first school short, For Two, was In Competition for the Short Film Golden Lion at the 66th Venice Film Festival and was acclaimed by the International Film Guide as one of the Top 5 Singapore Films of the year. The Hole won 4 of the 5 awards it was nominated for at the Singapore Short Film Awards that year, including Best Film, Direction and Script. Not Working Today, his third short film, competed at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival and clinched Best Singapore Short Film at the 25th Singapore International Film Festival. It was also selected as one of fifty significant films in Singapore cinema history, showcased at the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris. His next work, The Lake, part of the omnibus feature Distance, was a cross-territory collaboration between Singapore, China, Taiwan and Thailand. It was selected as the Opening Film of the Golden Horse Film Festival in 2015, the premier festival for Chinese-language cinema. He is currently in development for a feature debut.  

Alfian Sa’at is the Resident Playwright of Wild Rice. His published works include three collections of poetry: ‘One Fierce Hour’, ‘A History of Amnesia’ and ‘The Invisible Manuscript’; a collection of short stories, ‘Corridor’; a collection of flash fiction, ‘Malay Sketches’; three collections of plays as well as the published play ‘Cooling Off Day’. In 2001, Alfian won the Golden Point Award for Poetry as well as the National Arts Council Young Artist Award for Literature. His plays and short stories have been translated into German, Swedish, Danish and Japanese.  

Sophia Siddique holds a PhD from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. Her research interests include Singapore cultural studies, representations of trauma and memory in Cambodian, Indonesian, and Thai cinema, and genre (Asian Horror and Global Science Fiction). She has published in the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and the Journal of Chinese Cinemas. She co-edited Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) with Raphael Raphael. Sophia Siddique is completing two manuscripts: Screening Singapore: Sensuous Citizenship Formations and the National (AUP) and Skin Matters: Horror Films and the Phenomenology of the Monstrous.  

Tan Eng Kiong is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of English, and Asian and Asian American Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative and World Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World. His essays have also appeared in publications such as Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Sun Yat-Sen Journal of Humanities, Journal of Modern Chinese Literature, and Journal of Chinese Cinemas. He is currently working on two separate book projects tentatively titled Queer Homecoming in Sinophone Cultures: Translocal Remapping of Kinship, and Mandarinization and Its Impact on Sinophone Cultural Production: A Transcolonial Comparison of Ethnic China, Singapore and Taiwan.