Plenary Session: The Postcolonial Pacific & Minor Transnationalisms
Audrey Yue
Professor, School of Culture and Communication
Director, Research Unit in Public Culture
University of Melbourne
The Junior Partnerships of Australia-Singapore Screen Co-productions: Towards a New Model for Transpacific Cultural Research
Singapore and Australia are emergent film centres built on their minor transnationalism. Both create media capital by using screen co-productions to leverage their cultural and geographical proximities to established film centers (such as Hollywood, China, and India). Drawing on a case study, Serangoon Road, a 2014 television detective drama series co-funded by government screen agencies in Australia and Singapore, and produced by HBO-Asia, this paper evaluates the politics and practices of minor transnationalism by tracking the life cycle of the series as a screen object. Through this case study, this paper will identify a junior partnership model for transpacific screen collaborations in particular, and cultural research in general.