Introduction

Sinophone cinemas and image culture create memories of singularities exposing what has become disappeared and invisible, archiving what has been repressed by its diverse political and ideological circumstances. In our usage, the Sinophone is not bound to an arbitrarily delineated geopolitical or cultural specification, but rather, to use a psychoanalytic term, an over-determination of contradictions innate to the Sinitic language-spoken world that is often mutually unintelligible and un-translatable. Altering archives, the central concept of the book, refers to the ability of the archive to initiate a new beginning and a new order, a new history, or a new way of seeing the past, while generating a whole new political space through aesthetic interventions.