The Bugis Chronicle of Bone transed. by Campbell Macknight, Mukhlis Paeni, and Mukhlis Hadrawi (review)

Abstract

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 Singapore ‘did not arise from gunshots or out of revolutions’ (p. 26) seems to be an odd claim given the fact of the Malayan Emergency and other leftist energies that shaped the political identities of the region. While the in-depth and relatively comprehensive coverage of the cinemas of Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia is a definite strength of the chapters, one wonders if there was a missed opportunity to parse out a ‘poetics’ of cinema (as the author puts it) particular to the region’s archipelagic and maritime geo-politics, which differs significantly from that of Mainland Southeast Asia (and is only briefly touched upon in Chapter 1 in the analysis of Charles Lim’s work). As a deeply diverse region, Southeast Asia is deserving of not only new ways of theorizing post coloniality (as Sim rightly points out), but also of heterogenous possibilities within these approaches. Perhaps doing so may have enabled the author to outline a more clearly articulated framework for what they describe as ‘a playbook for theorizing Southeast Asian cinema’. (p. 213) Indeed, much of the book’s introduction and conclusion is spent in defence of the use of critical theory (and other forms of authorial self-reflection) where the argument may have been better served by offering readers a roadmap through the book’s concepts via critical theory instead. Nevertheless, these chinks in the book’s overall framing, which appear mostly in the Introduction, should not detract from the appeal of its individual chapters and the book’s overall contribution to the field of Southeast Asian Cinema—of which there is no doubt. This book would appeal to specialists in Southeast Asian cinema and visual culture, as well as to scholars of postcolonial cinema. Individual chapters would also work well when assigned as reading material for courses on Southeast Asian Cinema.