Gerald Sim: Raffles is the colonial administrator recognized as the founder of modern Singapore. Some were asking why their identities needed to be defined in relation to the history of colonialism? Can you tell me your understanding of what's going on here? Two particular statues of figures from the 19th Century were under contention recently, Stamford Raffles in Singapore and Francis Light in Malaysia. Steve Choe: The book also interfaces with events happening right now, sparked by the killing of George Floyd, followed by the protests about systemic racism and ultimately, political contestations of statuary in the U.S. It’s too easy to assume that any sympathy or positive emotion within that subject’s understanding of their colonial identity is necessarily implicated in complicity, collaboration, or passivity. Gerald Sim: That’s another thing I wanted the book to think about, to complicate what being a subaltern is commonly taken to mean, and to hopefully add nuance to the definition of a postcolonial subject. You reconfigure the question when you ask whether the subaltern wants to speak at all. For example, when Spivak asks if the subaltern can speak, the question is philosophically bound to Europeanism in a way.
Steve Choe: I was drawn to that interest in postcolonial theory’s inadequacies and how Southeast Asian audio-visual media forces us to reconsider its deconstructive efficacy and epistemological limits. The usual suspects in the canon could never fully account for local conditions and textual nuances, because the nature of colonial memory and postcolonial nostalgia in the region is singularly unique. The dominant postcolonial theoretical approaches to these types of films never seemed to fit. You remind me of the need I felt to write the book. It’s very timely and deals with issues that have been long overdue within film studies and certainly within Southeast Asian film studies. Steve Choe: Congratulations on your book Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability, I'm really thrilled that it's coming out. Academica University of Applied Sciences.
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