Celluloid Singapore

Edna Lim is a Senior Lecturer with the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore where she primarily teaches film in the Theatre Studies Programme. Her research interests and publications span a range of issues in contemporary Hollywood cinema, adaptation studies, Asian and Singapore cinemas.

• Acknowledgments Figures 1. Introduction 2. Merdeka!: Merger, separation and a transnational golden age 3. Influence, hybridity and how the past is a foreign country 4. Nation-building, a nun and a bionic boy 5. Not so foreign: the case of Saint Jack 6. One People, One Nation, One Singapore 7. Revival cinema: ‘other’ Singaporeans in (an)other Singapore 8. Singapore cinema in Singapore

Edna Lim’s Celluloid Singapore: Cinema, Performance and the National explores Singapore’s preoccupation with nationhood, historicity and the performance of both in and through cinema, taking the nation-state up to its screen culture present. The book, as such, provides a great deal more than overview or a history of Singaporean cinema. Instead it offers a theoretically informed exploration of cinema as a site for conflicting representations of and by Singapore on the local, regional and global stage, thus revealing this most astonishing phenomena in the historical complexity it so richly deserves. As such, Lim’s book speaks to those interested in Southeast Asian studies, postcolonial studies and aesthetics as well as cinema studies. It is a rare and welcome addition.