Cinematic animism and contemporary Southeast Asian artists’ moving-image practices

Abstract

The concept of the Capitalocene is, I believe, especially relevant for contextualizing how contemporary Southeast Asian film and artists’ moving-image practices respond, allude or relate to climate and ecological change. As the introduction to this dossier suggests, the Capitalocene draws attention to the relationship between climate change, the long history of the region’s colonization by western powers, and the continuing structural dynamic of coloniality.1 Within this regional context, coloniality signals the structural continuity of regimes and practices of capitalist extraction and necropolitics, thereby connecting the long history of colonization to the aftermath of official national independence. Various post-independence forms of disaster-capitalist regimes in the region are underpinned by political systems of authoritarianism and impunity, whose foundational institutions, mechanisms and ideologies – such as developmentalism, patriarchy, racialization and racial hierarchy – are traceable to the longue durée and legacies of colonization.2 Instead of resorting to the generalizing language of...