Postcolonial Cinema Studies

This collection of essays foregrounds the work of filmmakers in theorizing and comparing postcolonial conditions, recasting debates in both cinema and postcolonial studies. Postcolonial cinema is presented, not as a rigid category, but as an optic through which to address questions of postcolonial historiography, geography, subjectivity, and epistemology.

Current circumstances of migration and immigration, militarization, economic exploitation, racial and religious conflict, enactments of citizenship, and cultural self-representation have deep roots in colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial histories. Contributors deeply engage the tense asymmetries bequeathed to the contemporary world by the multiple,diverse, and overlapping histories of European, Soviet, U.S., and multi-national imperial ventures. With interdisciplinary expertise, they discover and explore the conceptual temporalities and spatialities of postcoloniality, with an emphasis on the politics of form, the ‘postcolonial aesthetics’ through which filmmakers challenge themselves and their viewers to move beyond national and imperial imaginaries.

Contributors include: Jude G. Akudinobi, Kanika Batra, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Shohini Chaudhuri, Julie F. Codell, Sabine Doran, Hamish Ford, Claudia Hoffmann, Anikó Imre, Priya Jaikumar, Mariam B. Lam, Paulo de Medeiros, Sandra Ponzanesi, Richard Rice, Mireille Rosello and Marguerite Waller.

Sandra Ponzanesi is Associate Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Critique, department of Media and Culture Studies/Gender Programme at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Among her publications are Paradoxes of Post-colonial Culture (2004), Migrant Cartographies (2005) and Deconstructing Europe: Postcolonial Perspectives (Routledge, 2011).

Marguerite Waller is Professor of Women's Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside. Among her publications are Frontline Feminisms (Routledge, 2001), Federico Fellini (2002), Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization (2005), and The Wages of Empire (2007).