Theorizing Colonial Cinema Conference

This international workshop brings together scholars and archivists who are seriously engaged in the films of the early twentieth century and their divided legacies and afterlives in Asia. Together we reexamine the lived and imagined experiences of modernity in these tumultuous times of transition from the colonial to the cold war eras and beyond. The gathering asks how prior articulations about film theory, history, form and content, and ideologies might be rearticulated when we put the colonial question at the center rather than the periphery of our concerns. Our distinguished keynote speakers are Zhang Zhen (NYU/NYU Shanghai) and Jane Gaines (Columbia University).