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Jason Coe

The University of Hong Kong, Comparative Literature, Faculty Member

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Jason is a Full-time Lecturer in the Dept. of Comparative Literature and MA in Literary and Cultural Studies Programme at the University of Hong Kong.

He is co-chief editor of Asian Cinema.

His research interests include transpacific, Sinophone, and Asian/American film and media, focusing on genre and memory.

He has published in Film Quarterly, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Asian Cinema, Journal of Canadian Literature, Journal of Asian American Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, CHA: An Asian Literary Journal, and American Journal of Chinese Studies.
Supervisors: Esther C.M. Yau and Gina Marchetti

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Papers by Jason Coe

Divergent Movements — Asian American Politics with Chinese Characteristics in Down a Dark Stairwell

Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 2023

This Field Trip consists of five essays written by scholars studying left internationalist imagin... more This Field Trip consists of five essays written by scholars studying left internationalist imaginaries within Asia and in transpacific relation to the Americas. Our impetus for collaboration was a series of Verge-sponsored panels on “Transpacific Socialisms” at the 2021 Association for Asian American Studies conference. In our call, we asked, “What might happen if we stop assigning sole determinative force to the imperial imaginaries of capitalist powers, and viewed socialist labor networks and revolutionary itineraries as integral to the formation of the ‘transpacific’?”

Regenerative Remembering: Reconciliation and Recuperation in Transpacific Cambodian Documentary

Canadian Literature, 2021

This essay examines examples of transpacific Cambodian cultural memory in The Roots Remain (2015)... more This essay examines examples of transpacific Cambodian cultural memory in The Roots Remain (2015) and Daze of Justice (2016) that approach the afterlife of the Cambodian Genocide with mutual affection, commemoration, and creative adaptation. The stakes of memory in these two documentaries are different than in the Cambodian documentary films of Rithy Panh (S21, The Missing Picture) or Thet Sambath (Enemies of the People) that bear personal witness (through the testimony of victims and perpetrators) to trauma in order to resist forgetting. These films also differ from Asian American documentaries about 1.5 generation SE Asian refugees resettling in North America such as AKA Don Bonus (Spencer Nakasako/Sokly Ny, 1995), Kelly Loves Tony (Nakasako, 1998), or returnee documentaries about subjects uncovering family memory in order to understand and reshape their own identifications as seen in Refugee (Nakasako, 2003). Both Daze of Justice and The Roots Remain are not fact-finding missions like their predecessors in New Cambodian Cinema and Asian American film and media. Through a process of reconciling and recuperating collective memory that I describe as regenerative remembering, the Cambodian Canadian and Cambodian American subjects of these films work to restore communal relations severed by generational difference, transpacific migration, and silence.

The Spy Who Ought to Love Me: Lust, Caution (Ang Lee, 2007) and the Melodrama of Shame Nationalism

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2020

This article examines manifestations of “shame nationalism”—a learned emotional script prevalent ... more This article examines manifestations of “shame nationalism”—a learned emotional script prevalent in discourses of modern Chinese national identity—in Se, jie (Lust, Caution; Ang Lee, 2007) and its reception. The essay argues that this affectively charged response to perceived national humiliation functions as a form of communal identification that performs and interprets shame as a signal of moral virtue and national devotion. Analyzing performances of shame and humiliation in the film, the article demonstrates how the emotional script for shame nationalism employs the melodramatic mode for its narrativization and dissemination.

Serial authentication: Gamifying Hong Kong action cinema in Sleeping Dogs

Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 2019

This essay investigates how the open-world action adventure video game Sleeping Dogs constructs c... more This essay investigates how the open-world action adventure video game Sleeping Dogs constructs cultural authenticity as a feature of its narration and digital game play. Not only does the game avoid accusa- tions of racial insensitivity but also producers and fans promote the game as an ‘authentic’ Hong Kong experience. Using digital seriality to analyze Sleeping Dogs, which occupies a fertile intersection between game studies and film studies, I argue that Sleeping Dogs justifies its appropriation of Hong Kong action cinema by subjecting the player to serial authentication.

Modernizing primordialism: Deterritorializing Chineseness and reterritorializing the sinophone in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Asian Cinema, 2018

The wuxia tradition in cinema constructs primordial 'Chineseness' and 'cultural China' as identit... more The wuxia tradition in cinema constructs primordial 'Chineseness' and 'cultural China' as identities to be transmitted and deployed around the world. The article critiques frameworks that take cultural identities such as 'Chineseness' or 'Americanness' for granted. Such frameworks engender reduc-tive views of culture as an essential substance, with the cinema of said culture expressing or conveying that cultural essence, or imitations thereof, around the world. Such arguments falsely assume that cinemas either 'authenti-cally' represent the national or ethnic origin of their producers or signify the coming together of two vaguely defined cultures in hybrid form, typically east meeting west. This article demonstrates how cinema generates cultural identities, using Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to illustrate how the wuxia tradition creates imagined worlds that connect disparate peoples, including populations traditionally regarded as diaspora. Wuxia uses imagined histories of mythical places to enable imagined community, while transmitting

Left behind by history: complicating narrative, modernity in the mundane, and reading history through women in "feeling of life films"

Citation Issued Date 2012 URL http://hdl.handle.net/10722/180066 Rights The author retains all pr... more Citation Issued Date 2012 URL http://hdl.handle.net/10722/180066 Rights The author retains all proprietary rights, (such as patent rights) and the right to use in future works.

Abstract: This dissertation scrutinizes a corpus of films considered to be the stylistic and thematic descendants of Yasujiro Ozu, which I call " feeling of life films. " Focusing upon common themes such as female narrative and the portrayals of the quotidian, this dissertation identifies various methods used in specific films of Ozu, Hou Hsiao Hsien, and Tran Anh Hung that complicate narrative meaning and engage in the discourse of national modernity and history. The female protagonists of these films can be considered " left behind " by the narrative progression of history, serving an allegorical function that critiques standard notions of time and official history. The basis for understanding this phenomenon will be scholarly discourse primarily concerning Ozu's " Noriko Trilogy, " which marks the transitional period of postwar Japan through the narrative of a woman's path to marriage. This dissertation seeks to complicate the discourse of reading women in these films by introducing different methodologies of formalist analysis, cultural analysis, theoretic discourse, historiography, and phenomenology. In doing so, this dissertation demonstrates the cinematic importance of these films through their unique formal characteristics and their cultural and historical meanings. Abstract of dissertation entitled Left Behind by History: Complicating Narrative, Modernity in the Mundane, and Reading History through Women in " Feeling of Life Films. "

Competing Narratives: Choosing the Tiger in Ang Lee's Life of Pi

American Journal of Chinese Studies, 2014

Life of Pi’s global resonance, international production team, and cos- mopolitan director are mai... more Life of Pi’s global resonance, international production team, and cos- mopolitan director are mainstream Hollywood’s answer to the de- mands of a “world cinema” marketplace. Having grossed over $600 million at the box office, with $482 million coming from theaters outside North America, Life of Pi earned more in mainland China than the United States and was Hollywood’s highest earning release in India for 2012. Ignoring these notable facts, reviewers often focus upon the film’s spiritual themes and impressive visual effects, but Lee’s interpretation clearly resonates in the global political climate. Though his films speak to an international audience, for whom does Ang Lee speak? Scholars such as Rey Chow, Emilie Yeh, Darrell Da- vis, Shu-mei Shih, and Gina Marchetti examine Lee’s work through a transnational lens, though much of this work remains framed within a regional discourse. By reviewing this scholarship, this paper dis- cusses the critical connections between these interpretations and my own reading of Life of Pi as a cosmopolitan allegory of migration and survival.

Reviews by Jason Coe

Daze of Justice by Michael Siv (review)

Journal of Asian American Studies, 2020

A review of Michael Siv's Daze of Justice (2016) about Cambodian American survivors attending the... more

Book Reviews by Jason Coe

[REVIEW] SYSTEMS OF IDENTIFICATION: CHRISTOPHER B. PATTERSON’S TRANSITIVE CULTURES: ANGLOPHONE LITERATURE OF THE TRANSPACIFIC

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 2018

Book Review for Cha Review of Books, Issue 40: Writing the Philippines

Divergent Movements — Asian American Politics with Chinese Characteristics in Down a Dark Stairwell

Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 2023

This Field Trip consists of five essays written by scholars studying left internationalist imagin... more This Field Trip consists of five essays written by scholars studying left internationalist imaginaries within Asia and in transpacific relation to the Americas. Our impetus for collaboration was a series of Verge-sponsored panels on “Transpacific Socialisms” at the 2021 Association for Asian American Studies conference. In our call, we asked, “What might happen if we stop assigning sole determinative force to the imperial imaginaries of capitalist powers, and viewed socialist labor networks and revolutionary itineraries as integral to the formation of the ‘transpacific’?”

Regenerative Remembering: Reconciliation and Recuperation in Transpacific Cambodian Documentary

Canadian Literature, 2021

This essay examines examples of transpacific Cambodian cultural memory in The Roots Remain (2015)... more This essay examines examples of transpacific Cambodian cultural memory in The Roots Remain (2015) and Daze of Justice (2016) that approach the afterlife of the Cambodian Genocide with mutual affection, commemoration, and creative adaptation. The stakes of memory in these two documentaries are different than in the Cambodian documentary films of Rithy Panh (S21, The Missing Picture) or Thet Sambath (Enemies of the People) that bear personal witness (through the testimony of victims and perpetrators) to trauma in order to resist forgetting. These films also differ from Asian American documentaries about 1.5 generation SE Asian refugees resettling in North America such as AKA Don Bonus (Spencer Nakasako/Sokly Ny, 1995), Kelly Loves Tony (Nakasako, 1998), or returnee documentaries about subjects uncovering family memory in order to understand and reshape their own identifications as seen in Refugee (Nakasako, 2003). Both Daze of Justice and The Roots Remain are not fact-finding missions like their predecessors in New Cambodian Cinema and Asian American film and media. Through a process of reconciling and recuperating collective memory that I describe as regenerative remembering, the Cambodian Canadian and Cambodian American subjects of these films work to restore communal relations severed by generational difference, transpacific migration, and silence.

The Spy Who Ought to Love Me: Lust, Caution (Ang Lee, 2007) and the Melodrama of Shame Nationalism

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2020

This article examines manifestations of “shame nationalism”—a learned emotional script prevalent ... more This article examines manifestations of “shame nationalism”—a learned emotional script prevalent in discourses of modern Chinese national identity—in Se, jie (Lust, Caution; Ang Lee, 2007) and its reception. The essay argues that this affectively charged response to perceived national humiliation functions as a form of communal identification that performs and interprets shame as a signal of moral virtue and national devotion. Analyzing performances of shame and humiliation in the film, the article demonstrates how the emotional script for shame nationalism employs the melodramatic mode for its narrativization and dissemination.

Serial authentication: Gamifying Hong Kong action cinema in Sleeping Dogs

Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 2019

This essay investigates how the open-world action adventure video game Sleeping Dogs constructs c... more This essay investigates how the open-world action adventure video game Sleeping Dogs constructs cultural authenticity as a feature of its narration and digital game play. Not only does the game avoid accusa- tions of racial insensitivity but also producers and fans promote the game as an ‘authentic’ Hong Kong experience. Using digital seriality to analyze Sleeping Dogs, which occupies a fertile intersection between game studies and film studies, I argue that Sleeping Dogs justifies its appropriation of Hong Kong action cinema by subjecting the player to serial authentication.

Modernizing primordialism: Deterritorializing Chineseness and reterritorializing the sinophone in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Asian Cinema, 2018

The wuxia tradition in cinema constructs primordial 'Chineseness' and 'cultural China' as identit... more The wuxia tradition in cinema constructs primordial 'Chineseness' and 'cultural China' as identities to be transmitted and deployed around the world. The article critiques frameworks that take cultural identities such as 'Chineseness' or 'Americanness' for granted. Such frameworks engender reduc-tive views of culture as an essential substance, with the cinema of said culture expressing or conveying that cultural essence, or imitations thereof, around the world. Such arguments falsely assume that cinemas either 'authenti-cally' represent the national or ethnic origin of their producers or signify the coming together of two vaguely defined cultures in hybrid form, typically east meeting west. This article demonstrates how cinema generates cultural identities, using Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to illustrate how the wuxia tradition creates imagined worlds that connect disparate peoples, including populations traditionally regarded as diaspora. Wuxia uses imagined histories of mythical places to enable imagined community, while transmitting

Left behind by history: complicating narrative, modernity in the mundane, and reading history through women in "feeling of life films"

Citation Issued Date 2012 URL http://hdl.handle.net/10722/180066 Rights The author retains all pr... more Citation Issued Date 2012 URL http://hdl.handle.net/10722/180066 Rights The author retains all proprietary rights, (such as patent rights) and the right to use in future works.

Abstract: This dissertation scrutinizes a corpus of films considered to be the stylistic and thematic descendants of Yasujiro Ozu, which I call " feeling of life films. " Focusing upon common themes such as female narrative and the portrayals of the quotidian, this dissertation identifies various methods used in specific films of Ozu, Hou Hsiao Hsien, and Tran Anh Hung that complicate narrative meaning and engage in the discourse of national modernity and history. The female protagonists of these films can be considered " left behind " by the narrative progression of history, serving an allegorical function that critiques standard notions of time and official history. The basis for understanding this phenomenon will be scholarly discourse primarily concerning Ozu's " Noriko Trilogy, " which marks the transitional period of postwar Japan through the narrative of a woman's path to marriage. This dissertation seeks to complicate the discourse of reading women in these films by introducing different methodologies of formalist analysis, cultural analysis, theoretic discourse, historiography, and phenomenology. In doing so, this dissertation demonstrates the cinematic importance of these films through their unique formal characteristics and their cultural and historical meanings. Abstract of dissertation entitled Left Behind by History: Complicating Narrative, Modernity in the Mundane, and Reading History through Women in " Feeling of Life Films. "

Competing Narratives: Choosing the Tiger in Ang Lee's Life of Pi

American Journal of Chinese Studies, 2014

Life of Pi’s global resonance, international production team, and cos- mopolitan director are mai... more Life of Pi’s global resonance, international production team, and cos- mopolitan director are mainstream Hollywood’s answer to the de- mands of a “world cinema” marketplace. Having grossed over $600 million at the box office, with $482 million coming from theaters outside North America, Life of Pi earned more in mainland China than the United States and was Hollywood’s highest earning release in India for 2012. Ignoring these notable facts, reviewers often focus upon the film’s spiritual themes and impressive visual effects, but Lee’s interpretation clearly resonates in the global political climate. Though his films speak to an international audience, for whom does Ang Lee speak? Scholars such as Rey Chow, Emilie Yeh, Darrell Da- vis, Shu-mei Shih, and Gina Marchetti examine Lee’s work through a transnational lens, though much of this work remains framed within a regional discourse. By reviewing this scholarship, this paper dis- cusses the critical connections between these interpretations and my own reading of Life of Pi as a cosmopolitan allegory of migration and survival.

Daze of Justice by Michael Siv (review)

Journal of Asian American Studies, 2020

A review of Michael Siv's Daze of Justice (2016) about Cambodian American survivors attending the... more

[REVIEW] SYSTEMS OF IDENTIFICATION: CHRISTOPHER B. PATTERSON’S TRANSITIVE CULTURES: ANGLOPHONE LITERATURE OF THE TRANSPACIFIC

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 2018

Book Review for Cha Review of Books, Issue 40: Writing the Philippines