Professor Song Hwee Lim will be the speaker at an online event–Re-orientating Screen Studies: A Preliminary Reflection on 30 November 2021 (14:00 – 15:30 GMT).
About the event
Three decades since the call to “open the canon” across college campuses in the United States, what is the impetus driving this present call to de-westernize and de-colonize screen studies in the United Kingdom? My intervention in this call will be on two fronts. First, I question the very notions of de-westernization and decolonization and ask if such missions are impossible or even desirable, and for whom. Second, I suggest that the forces of neoliberal capitalism have so deeply penetrated elite universities across the world that the notion of de-westernization has become a moot point even or especially in the so-called non-west. Taken together, this talk argues that the global dynamics and identitarian politics of the twenty-first century demand that any reckoning with de-westernization and decolonization must take into account the legacies of colonialism in both the metropoles and the ex-colonies as well as the basis of knowledge formation as shaped by forces of the Enlightenment and neoliberal capitalism. It will use examples from Singapore, Taiwan, and China and from across the western world to illustrate that the stakes for such a call must lie beyond the academe and be rooted in social justice.
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