Theorizing Colonial Cinema

"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