CIN408H5

Potential Cinema: Theories, Visions, and Practices of Decoloniality from East and Southeast Asia

Inspired by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, this course investigates films from East and Southeast Asia and considers the ways in which we might recognize theories, visions, and practices that might constitute "cinemas of decoloniality." In this course, we will look to filmmakers' aesthetic engagement with archival and imagined time and the collision of pasts, presents, and futures in order to consider how contentious histories of memory and forgetting can have effects on the politics of the present. How, through and with cinema, could there be space not only to retell and reframe histories of coloniality and decolonization but also to experience and practice the potential decolonization of ways of being, seeing, and thinking?