Transfiguring "Asia"
Curatorial Discourse in the 20th Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24076/nsjis.v9i1.2923Keywords:
Asian Cinema, Curatorial Discourse, Exclusion, Hierarchies of Recognition, Moral HierarchyAbstract
This article explores how the Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival constructs ‘Asia’ in its curatorial practices. It is about the ways in which films, programs, and institutional narratives produce recognition for some histories and marginalize others. The study employs Critical Discourse Analysis, drawing on postcolonial thinkers such as Said, Fanon, Spivak, Maggio, Chen and Acharya. The analysis is based on the institutional texts of the 20th edition of JAFF. The findings point to three connected levels of hierarchy: relations between the West and Asia, unequal representation among Asian sub-regions, and differences between Indonesia’s curatorial center and grassroots film communities. Central Asian cinema and community-based Indonesian filmmaking receive less institutional framing than other forms of Asian cinema. These absences can be read as political forgetting because they affect which histories are given a place in regional memory. At the same time, JAFF creates room for decolonial practices through Asian symbolic references and curatorial independence. The authors contend that cultural institutions beyond formal political institutions, such as film festivals, can be sites of the reproduction of global hierarchies.
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Data Availability Statement
The data used in this study are derived from publicly available institutional documents, including the official JAFF20 catalogue, festival reports, program descriptions, and official communications. The relevant sources are cited in the manuscript.
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