Rethinking/Relinking Colonial Ruptures: On Recent Works by Musquiqui Chihying and Hao Jingban

This article analyses recent essay films directed by Musquiqui Chihying and Hao Jingban, which deploy colonial archives and collaboration in the research process. These essay films offer alternative perspectives to reveal previously underexplored narratives - which in this article I call ‘ruptures’. In literatures on postcolonial conditions, the rupture describes the borders separating cultures as a result of colonisation. Colonial ruptures thus cast previous connections among the non-Western world (e.g. Asia–Africa and other sites of exploitation and extraction) into oblivion. The frictions and fissures are not merely discussed in a temporal sense of colonial–postcolonial division here. Such missing links result in the binary system of coloniser/colonised and North/South. These barriers were the architecture of colonial political economic systems, the deprivation and suppression of indigenous cultures, and displacement and disconnections from natural habitats. These ruptures must be fixed and relinked in decolonial discourses.
uptures must be fixed and relinked in decolonial discourses.