The editors and contributors to Cultural Studies in the Interregnum mobilize transnational cultural studies as a tool for politically engaged intellectual critique. Alongside the work of emerging and established scholars and activists, they think through massive cultural shifts and explore the possibilities of the in-between.
Covering queer and feminist studies, critical disability studies, and critical race and ethnic studies, the essays in Cultural Studies in the Interregnum reflect on our shared political pasts and futures. Using examples ranging from media and literature to sex work, policing, and university systems, this exciting volume probes what cultural studies means in moments of social transformation.

Contributors include: Sean Johnson Andrews, C.M. Kaliko Baker, Mary Tuti Baker, James Bliss, Jorge E. Cuéllar, John R. Decker, Brian Dolber, Candace Fujikane, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Chris Hall, Rachel Lim, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Anna Karthika, Manu Karuka, Najwa Mayer, Kyle Mays, Andrew Ó Baoill, Yumi Pak, Therí A. Pickens, Sami Schalk, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Tia Trafford, and the editors

A cinematic study of Asian–Indigenous relationality

Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film is an interdisciplinary examination of the stubborn attachment of Asian diasporas to settler-colonial ideals and of the decolonial possibilities Asian diasporic films imagine. Beenash Jafri uniquely addresses the complexities of Asian–Indigenous relationality through film and visual media, urging film scholars to approach their subjects with an eye to the entanglements of race, diaspora, and Indigeneity.

Highlighting how Asian diasporic attachments to settler colonialism are structural, she explores how they are manifested through melancholic yearning within the figure of the Asian cowboy in films such as Cowgirl and Wild West and through the aesthetic and representational politics of body and land in experimental films by Shani Mootoo and Vivek Shraya. While recognizing the pervasive violence of settler colonialism, Jafri maintains a hopeful outlook, showcasing how Asian diasporic filmmakers persistently work toward decolonial worldmaking. This emerging vision can be seen in the radical friendship between Ali Kazimi and Onondaga artist Jeffrey Thomas in Kazimi’s film Shooting Indians, in the queer relational survivance depicted in films such as This Place and Scarborough, and in the sensory disruptions of Jin-me Yoon’s interactive art project Untunnelling Vision.

From film and media studies to diaspora studies and critical ethnic studies, Indigenous studies to queer theory, Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film provides a critical framework for engaging cinematic media to understand and imagine beyond the entrenched settler-colonial dynamics within Asian diasporic communities.

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