In At the Pivot of East and West, Michael M. J. Fischer examines documentary filmmaking and literature from Southeast Asia and Singapore for their para-ethnographic insights into politics, culture, and aesthetics. Women novelists—Lydia Kwa, Laksmi Pamuntjak, Sandi Tan, Jing Jing Lee, and Danielle Lim—renarrate Southeast Asian generational and political worlds as gendered psychodramas, while filmmakers Tan Pin Pin and Daniel Hui use film to probe into what can better be seen beyond textual worlds. Other writers like Daren Goh, Kevin Martens Wong, and Nuraliah Norasid reinvent the detective story for the age of artificial intelligence, use monsters to reimagine the Southeast Asian archipelago, and critique racism and the erasure of ethnic cultural histories. Continuing his project of applying anthropological thinking to the creative arts, Fischer exemplifies how art and fiction trace the ways in which taken-for-granted common sense changes over time, speak to the transnational present, and track signals of the future before they surface in public awareness.

Michael M. J. Fischer is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of numerous books, including Probing Arts and Emergent Forms of Life and Anthropology in the Meantime: Experimental Ethnography, Theory, and Method for the Twenty-First Century, both also published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Reader’s Guide and Manifesto  1
1. Oiled Hinges: Sounds and Silences in Documentary Films of Social Change  47
2. Filmic Stutter, Taped Counter-Truths, and Musical Sutures: Knots of Recovery  76
3. White Ink, Family Systems, Forests of Illusion, and Aging: Knots of Passion  111
4. Miniatures: Small Kindnesses across Poisonous Knowledges  141
5. Blue Widow with Green Stripes: Pivots in Widening Horizons  155
6. Filmic Obsessive Repetitions, Dissociations, and Power Relations  194
7. Meritocracy Blues, Chimeras, and Analytic Monsters  212
Afterword. Portals to the Future: MRT Stations, Universities, and the Peopling of Technologies  243
Exergue. Bangarra Dance Theatre and the Historical Hinge in Australia  257
Notes  269
References  313
Index  337