Related Papers
Southeast Asia on Screen
2020 •
Adrian Alarilla
Southeast Asia on Screen From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945-1998)
Southeast Asia on Screen: From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945-1998)
2020 •
Mary J Ainslie
Southeast Asian Media Studies Journal, Vol. 3, No. 3. "Glocalization"
2021 •
Alexander J . Klemm
Editor-in-Chief of Southeast Asian Media Studies Journal, Vol. 3, No. 3., 2021
Cultures at War: The Cold War and Cultural Expression in Southeast Asia
Cultures at War, edited by Tony Day and Maya H. T. Liem
2010 •
Tony Day
Performance in Southeast Asian History (with Tony Day). Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian History
2013 •
Sarah Weiss
Legitimating Visions.pdf
Adrian Alarilla
The Asian Financial Crisis was a tumultuous international event that also resulted in a crisis of faith in the nation and the state in the region, the most dramatic result of which were the anti-Chinese riots in Jakarta and elsewhere in Java in 1998. For the Chinese in Nanyang, or the “South Seas,” who had always occupied an ambivalent space in their adopted homelands, it was only one of the more recent key moments in a long timeline of historical trauma. But just as 危机 (Wei Ji), the Chinese term for “crisis,” consists of two characters that signify ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’, Nanyang Chinese filmmakers found this crisis as an opportunity to critically re-examine the nation, bending time and expanding space in order to reimagine home, family, belonging and nationhood. After a historical survey of the Chinese in Insular Southeast Asia, this study looks at the ideation of a unique Nanyang Chinese culture through a textual analysis of two contemporary semi-autobiographical melodrama films commemorating the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and its after-effects in the years after. Babi Buta Yang Ingin Terbang (Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, 2008), an Indonesian-language film, revolves around the emotionally disconnected members of a Chinese-Indonesian family making sense of the anti-Chinese riots. Ilo Ilo (爸媽不在家, 2013), an English, Tagalog, and Mandarin-language film, explores the relationship between a Singaporean boy and his Filipina nanny whose maternal nature provokes the jealousy of the child’s real mother. This Intra-Asian study will examine the intersections of nationalism and diaspora, as well as of Southeast Asian Cinema and Sinophone Cinema. Despite the differences in style, treatment, and language, these films seem to have a common goal, not as much countering as transcending the nation’s “empty, hom*ogeneous time (and space)” in order to accommodate the Chinese Diasporic Imaginary.
Accessed on Sept
Voices of Malaysian cinema
2005 •
Hassan A Muthalib
Jennifer Lindsay's Heirs to World Culture: Being Indonesian 1950-1965
Ferry Hidayat
Over the next 15 years, until the coup and counter-coup of 30 September-1 October 1965 – the period that frames the research presented in the essays in this volume – Indonesia faced enormous challenges, first and foremost that of forging a sense of nationhood to outlast the euphoria of the achievement of sovereignty. In 1950, there was little holding the new nation together beyond goodwill. Administratively, Indonesia inherited a colonial state with its civil service designed for the efficient management of a colonial economy. Politically, it inherited a Dutch-devised and imposed federal system that in mid 1950 was overturned in favour of the unitary republic long envisaged by the Indonesian nationalist movement. Economically, it inherited an extract economy developed for colonial interests (Taufik Abdullah 2009; Schulte Nordholt 2009) and a huge debt to be repaid to the Netherlands, as stipulated by the Round Table Conference negotiations in late 1949 (Gouda and Brocades Zaalberg 2002). Culturally, Indonesia was held together primarily by its national language, Indonesian Malay, which the nationalist movement had named ‘Bahasa Indonesia’ and declared the ‘language of unity’ back in 1928, but which received its real boost during the Japanese occupation (1942-1945) when the speaking, teaching and publication of Dutch had been prohibited. Socially, the nation inherited from the 1945-1949 period a shared sense of revolution and change, and faith in the future (Reid 1974). But in order to understand what really held the nation together after December 1949, once independence had been finally recognized and the harsh realities of political and economic life set in, one has to look at cultural expression of the time. There, the overriding concern with ‘Indonesianness’ leaps to the fore. Despite various and conflicting ideological approaches about what kind of culture Indonesia should have, there was a common conviction that ‘being Indonesian’ was an issue of culture.
Cosmopolitan Intimacies: Malay Film Music of the Independence Era
Cosmopolitan Intimacies (Preview)
2018 •
Adil Johan
The golden age of Malay film in the 1950s and 1960s was the product of a musical and cultural cosmopolitanism in the service of a nation-making process based on ideas of Malay ethnonationalism, initially fluid, increasingly hom*ogenised over time. The commercial films of the period, and in particular their film music, from national cultural icons P. Ramlee and Zubir Said, remain important reference points for Malaysia and Singapore to this day. This is the first in-depth study of the film music of the period. It brings together ethnomusicological and cultural studies perspectives. Written in an engaging manner, thoroughly illustrated and incorporating musical scores, the book will appeal to dedicated film fans, musicians, composers and film-makers interested in Southeast Asia and the Malay world. But equally, the conceptual framework will be of interest to a broad range of scholars of Southeast Asia, as it brings together ideas of cosmopolitanism and cultural intimacy to narrate a history of nation-making in the region. "The best book on Malay film, bar none." — Tim Barnard, NUS ”a fundamental contribution to the scholarly literature on Malay cinema” – Liew Kai Khiun "A dynamic interweaving of the ‘intimate’ relationships between Malay film music and the paradoxes in the making of postcolonial Malaysia and Singapore." —Tan Sooi Beng, Universiti Sains Malaysia “Cosmopolitan Intimacies is the first overarching study of its kind. It fills an important lacuna and opens a new vista onto the multifaceted world of Malay film music and its ongoing meaning and relevance.”—Anna Morcom, Royal Holloway, University of London Please order the book here: https://nuspress.nus.edu.sg/products/cosmopolitan-intimacies-malay-film-music-of-the-independence-era
Imagining “Indonesia”: Ethnic Chinese Film Producers in Pre-Independence Cinema
Thomas A . C . Barker, Charlotte Setijadi
This paper attempts to reconceptualise a history of Indonesian cinema that takes into serious account the foundational role played by ethic Chinese filmmakers and distributors in the early days of the Indonesian film industry. Although a considerable amount of scholarly literature have been written recently following the post-Suharto ‘(re)appearance’ of ethnic Chinese on Indonesian cinema screens, not many have actually attempted to deconstruct some of the historical ambiguities to do with ethnic Chinese involvements in the establishment of Indonesia’s ‘national’ cinema. Such critical inquiry is important, especially remembering the fact that for more than three decades of New Order rule, ethnic Chinese have been practically erased from the historiography of Indonesian cinema in order to make way for an ideological image of a ‘national’ cinema characterised by the indigeneity of its prominent figures (such as filmmakers Usmar Ismail, Sjuman Djaja, and Ami Priyono). In her seminal work on the role of ethnic Chinese in early Indonesian cinema, Krishna Sen (2006) emphasises on the significance of pioneering Chinese individuals and film enterprises in the establishment of the earliest movie theatres in the Dutch Indies as well as the production of the first locally made ‘Indonesian’ films. Looking further beyond Sen’s analysis, it needs to also be acknowledged that not only did Chinese filmmakers like the Wong brothers lay the commercial foundations of Indonesian cinema, they also introduced cinematic styles, format, and the gradual shift towards the localisation and nationalisation of themes that would be the precursor to later films. Perhaps more importantly, early Indonesian films such as Si Conat (1930) and Terang Boelan (1937) introduced for the first time the use of an early version of Bahasa Indonesia as the lingua franca that in turn helped to promote the use of the new language in the public domain. In this paper, we argue that ethnic Chinese filmmakers played a crucial role not only in the development of Indonesian cinema but also in paving the beginnings of a national cultural consciousness through films.
