Cameron L. White

I study Chinese-language cinema and audio media, with an emphasis on audiovisual translation and localization practices. My dissertation project revisits Taiwan's film culture in the late-20th and early-21st century, a turbulent time for production companies as domestic fare lost ground in the box office and audiences increasingly consumed films at home rather than go out to movie theaters. In contrast to area studies film histories that emphasize locally produced works as a means of producing knowledge about place, I situate my narrative from the perspective of distribution and consumption, arguing that the ways spectators engaged with foreignness onscreen is helpful in understanding the evolution of cultural and linguistic identity in Taiwan during the transition out of martial law. In addition to contextualizing the localization and reception of cinematic works from Hollywood, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, I also examine the technologies underpinning spectators' engagement with linguistic difference. 

My writing on film has been published in Chinese Films Abroad: Distribution and Translation (Routledge, 2024), Film Quarterly, Film Appreciation (《電影欣賞》), and Sputnik: Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival Reader. As for audio media, in addition to engaging in ongoing scholarly research into Chinese-language radio stations in East Asia and North America, I am an active proponent of using podcasts as a pedagogical tool. In collaboration with Raymond Pai (University of British Columbia), I co-host and co-produce Chatty Cantonese (粵語白白講), a language-learning program that not only covers the basics of Cantonese but also features interviews with people all over the world who have a relationship with the language, with previous guests ranging from comedians to academics to musicians.

Languages (other than English):

• Mandarin
• Cantonese
• Taiwanese Hokkien
• Korean
• Japanese
• German