Inter-city Cinema in Asia: Imaginative Cartographies and Critical Postcolonial Encounters

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

The imaginative cartography of nation-states continues to frame how political, economic and cultural relations across geographical and historical difference are imagined and critiqued. But what happens when we shift our locus of investigation from the nation to the city? What political, economic, aesthetic, ethical and cultural relations can be examined anew? This panel will consist of papers that variously use cinema and cities and their centrifugal relations (to other cities, other spaces, other times) as critical sites from which to both challenge inherited cartographic imaginaries and project new ones. The concept of inter-city cinema foregrounds the homology between the experience of urban life and the cinema more generally in order to project alternative imaginative cartographies and the ethical and political possibilities that they articulate. The papers in this panel explore the politics of aesthetics that animates inter-city cinema to refract and bring into critical light many of the movements of bodies, capital, ideas and goods within, across and between dispersed cities in Asia. By re-orienting critical analysis to what is increasingly manifest, yet overlooked by dominant cartographic imaginations, inter-city cinema illuminates the micropolitics of urban life and aspects of trans-national and trans-regional relations that often escape analysis.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing-Diaspora

Session Organizer

• Noah Viernes, Akita International University

Individual Presentations

• Kinatay’s Cartography of Violence - Melisa S.L. Casumbal-Salazar, Whitman College

• Rendering the Imaginal City: Uneven Urbanization and the Temporality of Mediation - Rohan Kalyan, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

• Transport and Invisible Asian Immigrants in Inter-City Cinema - David Toohey, Nagoya University

• From Bangkok to Beirut: Disappearance and Workflow in Neoliberal Space - Noah Viernes, Akita International University

Discussant

• Jasmine Nadua Trice, University of California, Los Angeles