The first strand of my research takes shape in my current book manuscript. It draws from my interests in early cinema, questions of modernity and cinema’s relationship to power. Locating these questions in the early cinema of Siam allows me to be in direct conversation with colonial/post-colonial cinema in Southeast Asia, Siam’s semi-colonial status, and methodological challenges of archival culture in the Thai context.
Another strand of my research lies in the diversity of contemporary media practices that inform media theory in the Global South. This includes questions of media infrastructure (legacy of colonial/empire structures, and the rise of authoritarianism), labor, and forms of inequity and uneven development between rural and urban areas. Figures of migrants, contract workers, single-skilled laborers take center in this strand of my research. My work-in-progress, “Exploring the Next Phase of Transnational Co-production: South-South Solidarity in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021),” “Death of Single-screen Theaters: Culture of Obsolescence and Labor Disposal in Southeast Asia”, and “The Phantasm of Remaindered Life: Doubling Deaths in Phantom of Illumination (2017)” problematize labor stratification and unevenness in the rhetorics of diversity and auteurship within the Global South mediasphere. This interest draws attention to Southeast Asia——a geopolitics in which the rise of auteurship often plays a role in Global North’s media economy. I frame the transnational networks of labor within Southeast Asia as an interdisciplinary site to investigate the multifaceted forms of translation, negotiation, and theorization of historical kinship, precarity, and violence in cinema and media studies.
Palita Chunsaengchan 