Singapore's Cartographic Cinema: Mapping an Identity

Singapore brandishes an unusual post-colonial identity. As several of its eminent voices have suggested, the country remembers its colonial past with “no hangups.” Meanwhile the visibility of Singapore’s cinema has surged at festivals and in film criticism. Prof. Sim will argue that the films reflect the city-state’s distinctive location between post-colonialism and globalization. He will show how the films evince a local preoccupation with space, which is desperately scarce on the island nation and thus intensely politicized. He will explore how the films map, organize, and understand Singapore as a place, and Singapore’s place in the world, while retaining the ideological inflections of its post-colonial status.

Existing scholarship on cinema in Singapore dwells on how the films, as texts, respond to social realities, political power, and state ideology. These readings are legitimate and illustrative. But they do not adequately account for Singapore’s postcolonial identity and how that identity is expressed in a mapping impulse. Prof. Sim will go beyond this literature to analyze key films, art and museum exhibits, and other cultural artifacts as symptoms of Singapore’s intriguing but understudied fixation on space and place.

Gerald Sim is associate 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 (2014). His current book-in-progress, tentatively entitled Besides Hybridity: Postcolonial Poetics of Southeast Asian Cinema, is contracted with Indiana University Press. In 2016 and 2013 he was a visiting senior research fellow in the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute.