Critical Asian Cinemas
About the Book Series
Critical Asian Cinemas features book-length manuscripts that engage with films produced in Asia and by Asian auteurs. “Asia” refers here to the geographic and discursive sites located in East and Central Asia, as well as South and Southeast Asia. The books in this series emphasize the capacity of film to interrogate the cultures, politics, aesthetics, and histories of Asia by thinking cinema as an art capable of critique. Open to a wide variety of approaches and methods, the series features studies that utilize novel theoretical models toward the analysis of all genres and styles of Asian moving image practices, encompassing experimental film and video, the moving image in contemporary art, documentary, as well as popular genre cinemas. We welcome rigorous, original analyses from scholars working in any discipline.
This timely series includes studies that critique the aesthetics and ontology of the cinema, but also the concept of Asia itself. They attempt to negotiate the place of Asian cinema in the world by tracing the distribution of films as cultural products but also as aesthetic objects that critically address the ostensible particularly of Asianness as a discursive formation.
Chinese Women’s Cinema Through a Feminist Lens
1st Edition
By Yang Fan
July 27, 2026
Drawing on extensive research of 153 feature films by 65 female directors, this book examines the dislocation between Chinese women’s cinema and Western feminist theories. The author explores how local feminist discourses in China shape major feminist narratives in contemporary Chinese women's ...
The Transformative Cinema of Lav Diaz: Aesthetics, Resistance and Resilience
1st Edition
Edited
By Corinne Maury, Olivier Zuchuat
March 26, 2026
This collective work brings together contributions from academic researchers and film critics who offer analyses of the singular aesthetics of Filipino filmmaker, Lav Diaz's cinema. The cinematographic work of Lav Diaz is steeped in the hopes and suffering of a people exposed to both state violence...
Representations of Japan in South Korean Cinema of the Park Geun-hye Era: Invaders, Lovers and Demons
1st Edition
By Russell Edwards
March 04, 2026
Providing a rare example of a national cinema that has managed to overturn the prevailing global paradigm of Hollywood dominance, South Korean films are nevertheless still haunted by the peninsula’s earlier colonial history. Focussing on a series of films produced during the administration of ...
The Evolution of Chinese Popular Cinema: Baokuan Film Phenomena under Nationalism, Globalization, and Active Audiences
1st Edition
By Xiao Yang
March 04, 2026
The Evolution of Chinese Popular Cinema provides insights into the Chinese film industry and popular cinema in the past two decades (with a major focus on the films produced since the mid-2010s). The book emphasizes on the film market in mainland China since the mid- 2010s and how it has been ...
Remapping the Cold War in Asian Cinemas
1st Edition
Edited
By Sangjoon Lee, Darlene Espena
January 09, 2026
This book is about cinema and the cultural Cold War in Asia, set against the larger history of the cultural, political, and institutional linkages between the US, Europe, and Asia at the height of the Cold War. From the popularity of CIA-sponsored espionage films in Hong Kong and South Korea to the...
Japanese Filmmakers in the Wake of Fukushima: Perspectives on Nuclear Disasters
1st Edition
By Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano
December 01, 2025
In the ongoing aftermath of the nuclear accident in 2011, filmmakers have continued to issue warnings about the state of Japanese society and politics, which remain mired in refusal to change. Nearly a decade in the making, Japanese Filmmakers in the Wake of Fukushima is based on in-person ...
Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Post-Colonial Phantom, Blockbuster and Trans-Cinema
1st Edition
By Soyoung Kim
December 01, 2025
Offering the most comprehensive analysis of Korean cinema from its early history to the present, and including the films of Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho and Kim Ki-young, Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Postcolonial Phantom, Blockbuster and Trans-Cinema situates itself in the local, Inter-Asian, ...
Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability
1st Edition
By Gerald Sim
December 01, 2025
Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability rethinks theory and style through films that bring the limits of traditional postcolonial frameworks into stark relief. Discover Singapore's preoccupations with space, Yasmin Ahmad's Malaysian soundscapes, and ...
Wang Bing's Filmmaking of the China Dream: Narratives, Witnesses and Marginal Spaces
1st Edition
By Elena Pollacchi
December 01, 2025
This volume offers an organic discussion of Wang Bing's filmmaking across China’s marginal spaces and against the backdrop of the state-sanctioned 'China Dream'. Wang Bing's cinema gives voice to the subaltern. Focusing on contemporary China, his work testifies to a set of issues dealing with ...
Women Filmmakers and the Visual Politics of Transnational China in the #MeToo Era
1st Edition
By Gina Marchetti
December 01, 2025
Manoeuvring around mainland China’s censors and pushing back against threats of lawsuits, online harassment, and physical violence, #MeToo activists shed a particularly harsh light on the treatment of women in the cinema and entertainment industries. Focusing on films from the People’s Republic of ...
The Animist Imagination in East Asian Cinema
1st Edition
By Pao-chen Tang
May 26, 2025
Whispering winds, speeding trains, wandering balloons, and swirling snowflakes—these are the living entities that humans find themselves enmeshed with in their ecological co-flourishing in contemporary East Asian cinema. Pao-chen Tang theorizes and analyzes this animist imagination—a new mode of ...
Chinese Independent Cinema: Past, Present, and a Questionable Future
1st Edition
Edited
By Chris Berry, Luke Robinson, Sabrina Qiong Yu, Lydia Wu
April 15, 2025
Independent cinema in China is not only made outside the commercial system but also without being submitted for censorship. We know that for several decades it has been the crucible out of which China’s most exciting new films have flowed. The essays in this volume interrogate what else we think we...