In this SEAC Seminar, Prof Gerald Sim presented his research, focusing on how Singapore has retained its longstanding identity as a gateway to Asia through various moves to diversify its economy. Evolving from a colonial port city into a shipping and transportation hub, the country also initiated massive infrastructural investments to support emerging sectors in financial services, petrochemical refining, telecommunications, marketing, e-commerce, and data colocation. In that context of the city-state’s concerted strategy to position itself as an infrastructural hub in global supply chains, Singapore’s national cinema of the last decade has reified deeply felt social effects resulting from those decisions. Informed by Anna Tsing’s innovative work on supply chains and labor, this talk expounds on how eminent examples from recent filmmaking thematize mobility, transience, transition, and an openness to engaging with the outside. The presentation highlighted a corpus of fiction and non-fiction works proximal to Singapore’s golden jubilee celebrations to show that visually, the cinema fashions images of an infrastructural sublime. Narratively meanwhile, the films negotiate social realities that accompany the island’s socioeconomic positioning. In the midst of Singapore’s perpetual struggle at self-definition, and a prior phase of filmmaking that gazed inward for an essential identity, this cycle of films represents a phenomenological shift as well as the makings of an infrastructural aesthetic. The presentation was be followed by remarks from Prof Rosalind Galt.
This event was recorded and the video can be watched here.
Speaker, Discussant, and Chair Biographies:
Gerald Sim is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University, and the author of The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2014), and Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability (Amsterdam UP, 2020). His research on Southeast Asian cinema can also be found in positions, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and Film Quarterly. This work been supported by Visiting Senior Research Fellowships at the Asia Research Institute and a Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellowship on Contemporary Southeast Asia. He is currently writing a book on the films that shape our algorithmic literacy.
Rosalind Galt is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of Alluring Monsters: the Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization (Columbia UP, 2021), Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (Columbia UP, 2011), The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (Columbia UP, 2006), as well as co-author of Queer Cinema in the World (Duke UP, 2016), and co-editor of Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (OUP, 2010). In 2019-20, she was the recipient of a Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellowship on Contemporary Southeast Asia and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. She publishes widely on world cinema, gender, sexuality, and political histories.
Prof. Hyun Bang Shin (@urbancommune) is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of speculative urbanisation, gentrification and displacement, urban spectacles, and urbanism with particular attention to Asian cities. His books include Planetary Gentrification (Polity, 2016), Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience (Routledge, 2021), and The Political Economy of Mega Projects in Asia: Globalization and Urban Transformation (Routledge, forthcoming). He is Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation.