Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability by Gerald Sim (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability by Gerald Sim Nadine Chan Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability. By Gerald Sim. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 254 pp. ISBN 9048551161. Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema begins with the premise that not every postcolonial society harbours a relationship of antagonism or disavowal for its colonial past. The author recounts a remark that a taxi driver in George Town, Malaysia, once made to two of the author's British colleagues. After pointing out that Malaysia was once a Crown colony, the cab driver assuaged them of their guilt by saying 'Oh don't worry. […] You [the British] were not as bad as the Japanese.' (p. 23) This is one of the examples that Sim uses to introduce us to the phenomenon of 'postcolonial nostalgia' (p. 24)—a bizarre condition (or affliction?) 'of unconflicted warmth with which some independent Southeast Asian countries remember colonialism' (p. 25). Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema takes issue with what the author understands to be postcolonial theory's fixation on a politics of resistance. Instead, and contentiously, Sim calls for a new framework for the cinemas of formerly colonized Southeast Asian nations that makes room for ambivalence, and even nostalgia, around colonized pasts. This book, in the author's words, is meant to be read as 'a supplementary and corrective effort to vary and renew postcolonial film studies' (p. 33). Sim explores how the psychic, spatial, and political resonances of Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia's colonialization extends into the cinemas of recent decades and articulates with the emergent pressures of global capitalism. The poetics of 'space', 'sound', and 'stability' are the three key ideas around which Sim structures the book—and they are indeed rich and appropriate frameworks. Each of the four chapters showcases Sim's conceptual interventions via illuminating analysis, an extensive filmography, and gripping writing. Despite what the title may suggest, the book's chapters focus on a few countries within maritime Southeast Asia, namely Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Chapters 1 and 2 look at Singapore film from the Golden Age to the New Wave. In Chapter 1, 'Postcolonial Spatiality', aerial cartography, affective maps, colonial atlases, and their topographical imaginaries trace a fascinating postcolonial poetics of space, power, and history through Singapore film. Chapter 2, 'Reorienting Film History Spatially' extends Sim's generative ideas around postcolonial spatial epistemology to consider a politics of ambivalence and uncertainty in Tan Pin Pin's films which he reads as a symptom of the manufactured 'ahistoricality' of Singapore's late capitalist identity. Chapter 3, 'Postcolonial Cacophonies: Malaysia Senses the World' takes on the soundscape of Yasmin Ahmad's Orked trilogy as telling of Malaysia's postcolonial-global nexus. Chapter 4, 'Postcolonial Myths: Indonesia Americanizes Stability', looks at the psychic resonances of the reformasi era through the fiction of predictability in what the author identifies as the country's 'genre-dominated' cinema. Each of these chapters, particularly Chapter 1, offer thought-provoking analysis that couple critical theory with an intimate appreciation for cinema in the region that comes across clearly in the writing. Left slightly wanting in the introduction however is a stronger explication of how these poetics of 'space', 'sound', and 'stability' offer us a theoretical framework [End Page 224] that fulfils the author's promise for a renewed framework for postcolonial cinema in any definitive way. The book's critique of postcolonial criticism, while well taken, does appear somewhat unforgiving toward a field that has since evolved beyond the polarizing politics of the likes of Solanas and Gettino's 'Third Cinema' (which the author cites as a point of departure). Recent thinking in the larger field of empire/imperial studies has entwined the politics of late capitalism, globalization, and neoliberalism in ways that the author, building on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire, seems not to give sufficient credit. Surely it is of little debate that the pressures of our global neoliberal present are extensions of, rather than ruptures from, colonial pasts. Relatedly, certain important premises of the book leave room for doubt; for example, the statement that the sovereignties of Malaysia and...