From Contested Histories to Ethnic Tourism: Cinematic Representations of Shans and Shanland on the Burmese Silver Screen

Burma, or the Union of Myanmar, is internationally known for possessing one of the longest-running internal conflicts in modern history. In 1947, on the brink of the country’s independence from Britain, ethnic Karen insurgents first took up arms against the soon-to-be-installed Yangon government. The considerable dearth in international scholarly attention on the subject of Burmese cinema belies the fact that Burma has a nine-decade history of motion picture production, and active cinema production. Burmese film production dates back to 1920, and by the time of the Japanese occupation during the Second World War, the handful of Burmese motion picture studios, in varying degrees of cooperation with Indian studios, had produced approximately 640 films. The chapter discusses the historical inter-relationship between the Burmese and the Shan, and the ways in which the vision for the Union of Burma crucially depends upon a notion of ethnic pluralism, yet asserts and privileges the Burman majority.