ABSTRACT
This book is concerned, with how cinematic space can be used to study, understand and reveal new perspectives on Asian cinemas, and to reciprocally employ these cinematic spaces as a means to understand the construction and production of physical spaces within a national milieu. In this volume, space is projected as a conceptual tool that allows access, consciously or unconsciously, to the latent political, social and cultural ideologies underpinning a geopolitical region. Such contradictions revolve around the persistent dialectic of the national and the transnational, with their attendant sites and spaces, as these ideologies and identities are played out in the cinematic spaces of Asian films. Current research on Asian cinemas tends to involve what Mette Hjort calls 'the transnational turn in film studies'. Following on from Abbas' chapter, the subsequent chapters in the book are structured around three spatial themes that deal with the struggles for identity, belonging, autonomy, and mobility within different national and transnational contexts across Asia.
