The fifth chapter discusses how the Singaporean Chinese director Yi Shui created a Malayanised Chinese-language cinema during the 1950s and ’60s and offers a retrospective of the way people in Malaya and Singapore framed their nation-building discourse in relation to anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism after the Bandung Conference in 1955. This chapter rereads Yi Shui’s On
Issues
of
the
Malayanisation
of
Chinese-Language
Cinema, examining its ‘Chinese-language cinema’ against the context of the Third World politics of ‘Malayanisation’ in the 1950s and ’60s. The chapter explores how Chinese-language cinema settles and resolves the diverse linguistic and cultural identities of Singaporean and Malayan Chinese audiences with varying backgrounds. ‘Chinese language’, as a term including both Mandarin and topolects, becomes a bargaining chip for Chinese-speaking peoples to resist the dual political oppression of English- and Malay-speaking groups. This chapter also analyses Yi Shui’s Chinese-language cinema practice through examining contemporary discourse and debates in Singaporean and Malayan periodicals on Malayanised Chinese-language cinema. The semi-documentary Third World film The
Lion
City and the melodrama Black
Gold, set in a tin mine, feature multiple coexisting Chinese languages and attempt to mediate the misunderstandings rooted in the national boundaries and politics of various topolect groups.
Braveboy-Wagner, Jacqueline A., Interpreting the Third World : Politics, Economics, and Social Issues, New York, Praeger Publishers, 1986, 367 p.
