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A cinematic study of Asian–Indigenous relationality

Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film is an interdisciplinary examination of the stubborn attachment of Asian diasporas to settler-colonial ideals and of the decolonial possibilities Asian diasporic films imagine. Beenash Jafri uniquely addresses the complexities of Asian–Indigenous relationality through film and visual media, urging film scholars to approach their subjects with an eye to the entanglements of race, diaspora, and Indigeneity.

Highlighting how Asian diasporic attachments to settler colonialism are structural, she explores how they are manifested through melancholic yearning within the figure of the Asian cowboy in films such as Cowgirl and Wild West and through the aesthetic and representational politics of body and land in experimental films by Shani Mootoo and Vivek Shraya. While recognizing the pervasive violence of settler colonialism, Jafri maintains a hopeful outlook, showcasing how Asian diasporic filmmakers persistently work toward decolonial worldmaking. This emerging vision can be seen in the radical friendship between Ali Kazimi and Onondaga artist Jeffrey Thomas in Kazimi’s film Shooting Indians, in the queer relational survivance depicted in films such as This Place and Scarborough, and in the sensory disruptions of Jin-me Yoon’s interactive art project Untunnelling Vision.

From film and media studies to diaspora studies and critical ethnic studies, Indigenous studies to queer theory, Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film provides a critical framework for engaging cinematic media to understand and imagine beyond the entrenched settler-colonial dynamics within Asian diasporic communities.

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This book debuts selected poetry by Kim Nam-ju (1946–1994) in English translation, along with the original Korean. Referred to as the “Che Guevara of South Korea,” and self-described a “warrior poet,” Kim Nam-ju remains, to this day, an enduring voice of the 1970s and 80s cultures of anti-authoritarian resistance in South Korea. Kim was arrested in 1979 for his involvement with the “South Josǒn” National Liberation Front, a leftist underground group organizing against the Yushin regime. Kim wrote prolifically while in prison (1979-1988), at times by etching his poems into scraps of foil, milk carton, or cigarette packages. The work he produced in prison alone totals around 360 poems. This bilingual volume selects 65 poems from Kim's oeuvre, sampling across many different chapters of the poet’s career. Readers will find autobiographical reflections on his childhood, love poems, missives from the prison cell, commemorations of the Kwangju Uprising, the poet’s calls to arms, and more. 

이 책은 김남주 시인(1946~1994)의 시 65편을 한국어 원문과 함께 영문 번역으로 처음 선보인다. ‘한국의 체 게바라’로 불리며 스스로를 ‘전사 시인’이라 칭했던 김남주는 오늘날까지도 한국의 1970·80년대 반독재 저항운동을 대표하는 사라지지 않는 목소리로 남아 있다. 김남주는 유신정권에 맞서 결성된 좌파 지하조직 ‘남조선민족해방전선준비위원회’에 가담한 혐의로 1979년에 체포되었다. 1979년부터 1988년에 이르는 수감 기간에도 꾸준히 창작 활동을 이어갔으며, 때로는 은박지 조각이나 우유곽, 담뱃갑 등에 시를 새겨 집필하기도 하였다. 이 시기에 쓴 작품만 해도 360여 편에 이른다.  이 영역시집은 시인의 전체 작품 중에서 65편의 시를 엄선하여 시인의 생애와 창작 활동의 다양한 시기를 아우르는 시적 여정을 한눈에 보여준다. 독자들은 시인의 어린 시절에 대한 자전적인 회고, 사랑의 시, 옥중 서한,  5·18 광주항쟁을 추모하는 시, 민중의 투쟁을 촉구하는 시 등 다양한 작품을 만나볼 수 있을 것이다. 

English-Korean Bilingual Edition 
영-한 이중언어판

This book is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea)

A sixty-year history of Afro–South Asian musical collaborations

From Beyoncé’s South Asian music–inspired Super Bowl Halftime performance, to jazz artists like John and Alice Coltrane’s use of Indian song structures and spirituality in their work, to Jay-Z and Missy Elliott’s high-profile collaborations with diasporic South Asian artists such as the Panjabi MC and MIA, African American musicians have frequently engaged South Asian cultural productions in the development of Black music culture. Sounds from the Other Side traces such engagements through an interdisciplinary analysis of the political implications of African American musicians’ South Asian influence since the 1960s.

Elliott H. Powell asks, what happens when we consider Black musicians’ South Asian sonic explorations as distinct from those of their white counterparts? He looks to Black musical genres of jazz, funk, and hip hop and examines the work of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Rick James, OutKast, Timbaland, Beyoncé, and others, showing how Afro–South Asian music in the United States is a dynamic, complex, and contradictory cultural site where comparative racialization, transformative gender and queer politics, and coalition politics intertwine. Powell situates this cultural history within larger global and domestic sociohistorical junctures that link African American and South Asian diasporic communities in the United States.

The long historical arc of Afro–South Asian music in Sounds from the Other Side interprets such music-making activities as highly political endeavors, offering an essential conversation about cross-cultural musical exchanges between racially marginalized musicians.

How economic transformation and the spirit world collide in hypermodern Singapore

 

In Singapore, the financial center of Southeast Asia, hyperurbanization and commercial development exist alongside enduring belief in the economic power of ghosts: in their ability to control the flows of money and value and to determine the outcome of investments and wagers. Spectropolis explores the unlikely collusion of these two systems, demonstrating both the productive role of popular beliefs in the modern world and the surprising correlations between “late” capitalism and the workings of the spirit realm.

Detailing the logic and practices of Singapore’s ghost economy—from performing exorcisms on real estate development sites to offering money and commodities to the dead as a hedge against precarious real-world transactions—Joshua Comaroff shows how speculative finance, largely governed by chance and volatility, is understood via its inherently spectral qualities. Through the influence of Chinese Buddhist-Taoist thought, the movement of capital is placed under the sway of cosmology and geomancy, resulting in a built environment that is both technologically advanced and quite literally enchanted.

Based on detailed case studies and years of extensive fieldwork, Spectropolis argues for the power of popular belief systems to theorize contemporary socioeconomic conditions and to give form to collective affect as well as shared aspirations and anxieties. As Comaroff demonstrates, the uniquely all-consuming nature of Singapore’s tightly compressed urban economy is such that it may subsume even that which lies beyond the threshold of life itself.

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Christina Sunardi ventures into the regency of Malang in east Java to study and perform with dancers. Through formal interviews and casual conversation, Sunardi learns about their lives and art. Her work shows how performers continually transform dance traditions to negotiate, and renegotiate, the boundaries of gender and sex--sometimes reinforcing lines of demarcation, sometimes transgressing them, and sometimes doing both simultaneously. But Sunardi's investigation moves beyond performance. It expands notions of the spiritual power associated with female bodies and feminine behavior, and the ways women, men, and waria (males who dress and live as female) access the magnetic power of femaleness.

A journey into understudied regions and ideas, Stunning Males and Powerful Females reveals how performances seemingly fixed by tradition are instead dynamic environments for cultural negotiation and change surrounding questions of sex and gender.