CHAPTER I

Theorizing New Asian Cinemas: the Historicist Approach and other

Relevant Debates

The rise of New Asian cinemas has paved a new path for the critics and scholars of Film

Studies all over the world. These new cinemas, particularly from the East-Asian

countries, not only boost up the industrial-economic aspects in the form of transnational

circulation of East Asian films in the global market, but also inspire a new theoretical

approach to Film Studies. There is an urge to construct a set of new theoretical tools that

can address the new Asian cinemas.

1. Historicism and the construction of ‘Asian Cinema’

As a researcher of new Asian cinemas, I encounter a problem of the inadequacy of

theoretical tools. I will just give an example: Nick Browne, in the ‘Introduction’ to New

Chinese Cinema: Forms Identities Politics, writes, “In the People’s Republic [of China]

the mutation of aesthetic and ideological cinematic forms is the consequence of an effort

by a range of filmmakers to conceive anew the relation of aesthetic and politics…”1 In

the next paragraph he says, “Two fundamental aesthetic poles mark the dominant cultural

tendencies enacted across the films of the new period in both Taiwan and Hong Kong –

the traditional (nostalgic) and the modern (the cynical, the discontinuous).”2 Two things

are clearly reflected here: the New Chinese Cinema is a ‘new’ object of study and in

order to read it one must encounter the ‘new’ relationship of aesthetic and politics

invoked by the fifth/sixth generation Chinese filmmakers. And then comes an explanation

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that tries to solve the riddle in order to fit it into the given paradigm of ‘Film Studies’..

Browne observes that the Chinese cinema in the 1980s produces a ‘continuing and

convulsive effort’,3 which he identifies as the enactment of ‘cultural dilemma’ of the

post-maoist Chinese society. The use of expressions like “convulsive effort” and “cultural

dilemma” indicates that the Chinese cinema of the 80’s is an exception as opposed to a

‘norm’ that dominates the theoretical paradigm, that is, this cinema is a phantom entity in

the realm of Western paradigm of World Cinema.

Now, the question is how to study these conceptual relations of representation, politics

and history in a time of intellectual crisis of older historiography. Particularly when the

nation-state that holds these relations as an institution is undergoing a functional and

conceptual change, it is not very easy and convincing to offer a solution by working out

the problem with the common theorem of the (bi)polarity of tradition and modernity.

Even if they are not considered as constituting the universal binary, rather as two forces

operating on the same plane in a modern society, the temporal frame of understanding

these two terms seems problematic in this particular context. And the context, i.e. the new

East-Asia, is in a very complicated state where the application of these categories nation-

state, modernity, tradition, postmodernity, globality or nativism cannot be seen as

unproblematic.

One must acknowledge that the ‘newness’ of the new Asian cinemas lies in its location

outside the old geopolitical frame of understanding ‘modern cinema’. The phrase

‘modern cinema’ in Film Studies means — the national cinemas labeled either as so-

called art films made for the release in international festival circuit of Europe and

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America, or popular films which earn revenue, more or less within a national market. The

rubric of ‘national cinemas’ has helped Film Studies to conceptualize the socio-political

and economic ground as well as the cultural specificities from which a (national) cinema

emerges. Now the issues regarding the methods appropriated for the understanding of so-

called cultural specificity, it’s historical and epistemological construction, is there to be

addressed in Film Studies.

“In Film Studies”, Vitali and Willemen write in the ‘Introduction’, to Theorising National

Cinema, “the notion of cultural specificity that may be deployed against the

universalizing ethnocentricity at work operates at the level of this geo-temporal

construction of the national.”4 This ‘geo-temporality’ that constructs the theoretical

framework in Film Studies finds unease in applicability in the context of new Asian

cinemas. The newness, if we just follow the apparent logic, lies in its transnational

features which make it really difficult to locate the new Asian cinemas in the framework

of national cinema. The flow of the capital across national boundaries reshapes the

culture industry which is often explained as ‘the realm of uncertainty’. This newness has

been already widely appreciated both by the cinephiles and by the practitioners over the

last one and half decade. But a radical shift in film practice and film viewership has not

ensured a radical shift in the theoretical plane as such. The critical understanding of the

newness is often hindered by the limitations of the earlier theoretical premises. Perhaps

the remnant of a ‘geo-temporal’ approach, which film theories should rework, if not give

up, still dominates the unconscious of the theoretical framework. In the era of the modern

the theoretical approach to cinema, like all other disciplines, is directly or indirectly

based on the geo-politics which primarily is the yield of conceptualizing Europe as the

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origin of the discourses of modernity. A certain understanding of the development of

capital all over the world provides the basis of the division of the ‘developed’ West and

the ‘developing’ non-West. Dipesh Chakrabarty terms this way of understanding the past

as ‘historicism’.5

The West experienced the development of capital in such a way that fixes the notion of

the ‘ideal’ journey of the past/history. The non-West, in comparison with the ‘ideal’

Western past, constructed its modernity with the experience of the ‘uneven, imposed and

incomplete development’ of the capital – and thus is deemed as developing.

“Historicism”, Chakrabarty writes, “thus posited historical time as a measure of the

cultural distance that was assumed to exist between the West and the non-West.”6 The

inevitable teleology which informs historicism as the foundation of theories led to a

conclusion that the West is the domain assigned to the culture of ‘real subsumption’ and

the non-West, the Other, manifests the culture of the ‘formal subsumption’.

The identity of Asian cinemas in the Western eyes, as a non-Western cultural product,

was long connected to this historicist approach. Since the 1950s, with the discovery of

Japanese cinema by the European audience, Asian cinema had been ghettoized within the

boundary of a geo-cultural specificity. The idea of the ‘cultural distance’ triggered by the

historicist approach helped the critics to identify Asian cinemas as the cinematic

manifestation of a rather obscure but over-used construct called ‘Asian mode of

representation’. Even, a critic like Donald Richie, who knew Japanese culture thoroughly,

discovered a certain ‘Asian morality’ in Ozu’s films, which he claimed was the driving

force of Ozu’s narrative.7 Asian cinema, which was understood as archaic though not

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truly exotic, obtained its position in modern cinema as an endless source of the cultural

production of the traditional and the transcendental.

The appreciation of the new Asian cinemas in the post-Cold War era as ‘global’ cinema

indeed follows a different logic. Earlier Asian cinemas had two very distinct identities:

one, as a significant contributor to the World Cinema, and two, in a more radical

appreciation, as a significant non-Western cinematic mode. The first follows the logic of

national cinemas and the second follows the differential logic, of being distinctly

different from the dominant mode of representation of Hollywood as well as European art

cinema. However, postcolonial theories have taken a radical step in the process of

‘unthinking Eurocentricism’. Postcolonial thinking has not confined itself either to the

conventional approach to ‘national culture’ or to the ‘world view’ of universal culture,

and has provided Film Studies, particularly in the non-Western countries, the necessary

theoretical and methodological tools to encounter the imposed division of the ‘developed’

and the ‘developing’. Having been equipped with Postcolonial theories, Film Studies

could argue that the Western mode of representation should no longer be considered as

the ‘pure’ and ‘ideal’ form which the non-Western modes ideally strive to attain.

The realism debate in non-Western cinema in the last two and half decades is the very

example of this kind of approach. The realism in Asian cinema has been considered as a

Western form adopted here by the middle-class filmmakers and the aspirant auteurs. On

the other hand melodrama has been considered a form directly related to people’s culture

in the non-West. Postcolonial thought, as a critic of historicism, extend the realism debate

into the realm of art/popular dialectics. The art cinema as the example of ‘less popular’

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approach has been treated as aestheticism or often as a mimicry of the Western form. It’s

true that this critique of realism and art cinema in a way opened a whole gamut of new

research in popular cinema and located Film Studies in the map of Cultural Studies, but

the new Asian cinemas have been taking film culture, at least partially beyond the

art/popular and realism/melodrama debates. The rapidly growing numbers of cinephiles,

who previously looked out for art films and auteur cinema, as well as the large audience

who fed revenue to the film market, have found overlapping interests. The rapidly

increasing popularity of these films is blurring the boundary between ‘art’ and ‘popular’.

The sharp elevation of the economic status of the East-Asian countries in the recent past

and the subsequent massive growth of consumer culture have created a situation that

erases the non-Western identification marks from the East-Asian cities. The qualification

‘higher form’ was assigned to realism as it was the standard practice of the cinematic

form of Hollywood and Europe. The departure of Hollywood (and European cinema)

from the center of the economy of cinema definitely problematizes the legitimacy of

adding a historical value to the realist practices in the case of recent East-Asian films, and

thus problematizes the understanding of the non-realist forms as ideological ‘difference’

to the dominant mode of representation.

Understanding new Asian cinemas in terms of formal aspects is also becoming very

difficult, as the application of forms is losing its consistency very rapidly. For example,

the high degree of dissonance and reflexivity in the body of the realist texts produced by

the Taiwan filmmakers, the flamboyant and high-tech costume dramas made by the

Chinese fifth generation filmmakers, the Hong Kong thrillers and bizarre love stories

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destroy “the appearance of coherence” of the form. It’s really difficult to identify one or

any definite number of common threads in the narrative forms in these films so that the

langue of a social discourse can be identified. This extremely contingent, as opposed to

coherent and consistent, nature of the use of the formal devices is witnessed in the works

of the globally acclaimed filmmakers from the East-Asian countries. The modernist tools

of explaining the individual creation in cinema whatever it is called - auteur policy,

authorial stance or auteur study - does not prove satisfactory. Hence the auteur, as a

historical production, has to be approached with some new theoretical interventions since

the ‘coherence’ in form as the identity of the auteur visibly disappears.

The focus, in recent times, has shifted from form to a much more inclusive category i.e.,

narrative. The system of narrative, as Stephen Heath says, is a “subject-producing

machine”. His position on narrative is that the human subject is not first of all constructed

and then placed within social and ideological formations, but that constructing and

placing are one and same process, which continues interminably.8 Narrative, in

comparison to form’s concrete structure, is more contingent in nature. The narrative,

formation of a subject where the possibilities of development are not pre-given may get

rid of the a-priori and consequently opens the text out. For example, Fredric Jameson’s

seminal article ‘Remapping Taipei’9 is an attempt to address East-Asian cinema through

narrative.

In ‘Detouring Korean Cinema’, Paul Willemen also addresses this new situation through

narrative, but in a much more complicated conjectural fashion.10 As Madhava Prasad

argues, Willemen in this essay suggests that any film text is a composite of pre-modern

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and modern, which are orchestrated by the narrative voice.11 Having borrowed from
12
Franco Moretti’s formulation of ‘narrative voice’, which emerges as the result of a

compromise between the “foreign form” – the modernizing forces, and “local material”–

the traditional and archaicising forces, Willemen argues that the “narrative voice” that

can also be identified as “local form”’ is a correlation of “subject constellation” offered

by a narrative. Willemen argues that the mode of address of Korean cinema orchestrates

the ‘traditional’ (constructed/imagined) and ‘modern’ articulated through ‘narrative

voice’. He identifies the influence of two modernities in colonial and post-colonial South

Korean society. Japanese modernity came in the form of colonialism in Korea and

Western modernity has come mainly in the form of US modernity. Though modernity is

desirable, South Korean society often opposes Japanese modernity as it was introduced

by colonial power. But it does not mean that its attitude toward Western modernity is

uncritical. Contemporary South Korean society often opposes and criticizes the US

modernity as hegemonic. What is important in his approach is that consciously avoiding

the historicist traps of the binary of tradition /modernity, he proposes the agency of

‘tradition’ still operative and thus no longer lost in the history of the triumph of the

modernity. He proclaims, “[T]he modernizing and the archaicizing forces orchestrated in

modes of address are not peculiar to non-Western practices”.13

The discomfort that I feel with this model is twofold – one, Willemen never makes clear

the interfaces among different modernizing forces themselves that may produce the

complicated crosscurrents of the formation of subjectivity in a (cinematic) narrative. The

contemporary phenomenon of the Globalization, which appears as the principal

‘modernizing force’, is being confronted by ‘modernity’ itself. Willemen addresses this

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question obliquely as “the tension of subjectivity and identity” where ‘modernizing force’

is associated with subjectivity and ‘modernity’ is associated with identity.14 It seems as a

rather simplistic division of two components of a complicated whole. As modernity is not

only a question of identity; it is a question of being, or at the organic level, managing

livelihood also. The transition from modern to postmodern, or from one aspect of the

modern (dominated by the national industrial capital) to the other (dominated by the

global finance capital), is not a blissfully ignorant process. The transition is a painful and

eventful one because the changes of habitation, profession, and the economics of rural-

urban relationship give rise to discontent and discomfort, particularly in the non-Western

countries. Identity politics hardly informs these crosscurrents within modernizing forces

in operation, as it generalizes the subjective positions and misses the nuances and minor

elements in the formation of an experiencing subject in a film narrative. Rey Chow

expresses her resentment with this, as identity politics to her is “politically retrogressive”.

She says, “By insisting that artificial "images somehow correspond to the lives and

histories of cultural groups, identity politics implicitly reinvest such images with an

anthropomorphic realism […..] If we , however, remember that what are on the screen are

not people but images, the conventional, identity-politics-driven understanding of

cinematic identification will have to be abandoned.”15 It is evident from the

contemporary political history that modernity in different parts of the non-West resists

the modernizing forces of global capitalism. But it cannot be that the resistance is an

attempt to restore identity. In a number of East-Asian countries capitalist modernization

is enhanced under the guardianship of quasi-dictatorial political system, as Samir Amin

has shown.16 People’s agitations in these societies are demanding democratic rights and

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building resistance against capitalist globalization – this cannot be translated as mere

identity politics.

These crosscurrents in Asian cinemas, which Willemen has misunderstood as identity

politics, are often manifested in cinema in the form of melodramatic imagination. It is

evident that the most popular form of cinematic representation in Asian cinemas is

melodrama. Wimal Dissanayeke observes that melodramatic forms are still functioning in

different Asian cinemas as prevailing modes even though melodrama functions

differently in different cultural contexts.17 Once film criticism saw melodrama as a form

that emerges from traditional milieu, placing realism as its binary opposite. Later, both in

Europe and non-West, melodrama has been found to be a historically modern form of

popular cultures. M. Madhava Prasad, for instance, studied the role of melodramatic

imagination in Asian cinema in general with special reference to Hindi cinema, and his

seminal work investigates how melodramatic forms originate and function as the

expression of cinematic modernity in Indian popular culture.18

He argues that the liner historical narrative of aesthetic periods – melodrama, realism,

postmodern forms – was conceptualized according to the experience of the First world.

“These differences”, says Prasad “have the synchronic spatial distribution based on a

socio-political logic that must be investigated.”19 What I find more interesting is Prasad’s

contention that realism and melodrama are the “twin cultural modes of capitalism,

emerging more or less in parallel in Europe”, and hence “realism and melodrama were

two complimentary as well as contradictory aesthetic expressions of a single social

form”.20

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A large number of critics have produced research on the melodramatic imagination in

different Asian cinemas. They are helpful for the research in national cinemas in Asia.

But as far as the history of the development of cinema from early to national, and

national to global, in Asian nations is concerned, we need to address some missing links

to map this journey. Otherwise there is a danger that Asian cinemas are essentialized as

melodramatic. In order to elucidate my point I would like to draw example from Japanese

cinema.

The research in early cinema in Japan reveals that the Japanese silent cinema, till the

early 1930s, used fast movement, dynamic montage and gags. Peter Rist writes, “The

most striking observation to be made of this event was the incredible dynamism of these

films in contradiction to what is normally regarded as the distinctive ‘stillness’ of

Japanese cinema”.21 He observes incredible fast pace of the action sequences in the

editing, camera movement and character movement, particularly in the sword-fighting

sequences in the chambara films made between 1925 and 1931. In jidai-geki, gendai-geki

and keiko eiga - the other silent cinema genres in Japan - we find the same tendency for

fast movement. Rist observes ‘realist’ camera movement in gendai-geki films and

Eisensteinian montage in “left tendency (keiko eiga)” films.22 But as Japanese cinema

switches over from silent to sound, we find it, unlike Hollywood, developing a slow-

paced melodrama, shunning the fast realist and constructivist tendencies of silent films.

The slow movement in Japanese melodramas was later identified largely as the national

cinematic style of Japan. How and why did this quick transformation from fast realism to

slow melodrama take place in Japanese cinema? One simple answer can be that this is an

aesthetic choice encountered on the way from silent to sound. But this answer does not

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satisfy the critical query. If one takes stock of the amount of works produced on Japanese

cinemas, it is found that the bulk is invested to the slow-paced melodrama films. But very

little work has been done on the transformation of cinematic mode of address in the

1930s. What I see as a missing link is this lack of knowledge production in certain

historical aspects of Asian cinemas. The missing link is there in the historical

understanding of Chinese and Korean cinemas too.

The problem lies in the long history of West’s epistemological encounter with the non-

West. There is a tendency to identify non-Western culture as national culture without an

investigation of the construction of the national, which Prasad calls, ‘synchronic spatial

distribution [of culture] based on the socio-political logic’. Following this logic it is very

easy to believe, say, Japanese Cinema as a concrete, if not homogeneous, form, but it is

hard to acknowledge the heterogeneity in that cinema. In the non-West the

comprehensive milieu of modernity and the functional aspect of modernization rarely

have a straight and simple correlation. It is true that the increasing influence of modernity

is related to modernization. But there is a difference between technological

modernization and cultural modernity. Technological modernization directly reciprocates

capitalist development and industrial development, whereas, cultural development is

engendered by the historical encounter of the experiencing subject with the capitalist and

industrial growth. Willemen’s take on the Moretti model, and the way he applies his

formulation in the case of Korean cinema in order to inaugurate the new framework of

reading new Asian films, attempts to address the complicated nature of cultural

development in Asian cinemas.

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Let us revisit the form/content and modernity/tradition debates - as they occupy a central

position in the discussions of Asian cinemas.

2. Postcolonial approaches to the meaning of tradition

The form/content division played a very important role in the Western scholars’ critical

understanding of non-Western cinemas. A number of Western critics have drawn on this

division while addressing Asian cinemas. Noel Burch and Roland Barthes in their

significant writings on Japanese cinema and culture employed the formalist division of

form/content in their approaches. Later, David Desser and David Bordwell, accepting the

same “formalist reification of a form/content division” presented their cases criticizing

the positions taken by Burch and Barthes.23 Along with this formalist tendency,

form/content division, as a critical tool has also been addressed by a number of Western

critical schools for a broader purpose of the historical understanding of

tradition/modernity division in the non-West. Cultural critics influenced by Marxist

thought both in West and non-West apply this division in order to approach dialectically

the role of tradition/modernity in the formation of modern cultures in the non-Western

societies.

Franco Moretti attempts to read the cultural ramification of the colonial encounter

between modernity and tradition with the help of form/content division. His subject

matter is the novel. Willemen accepts Moretti’s conjecture that modernity introduced

itself as a foreign form and encountered traditional native cultures. When modernity

comes, it appears, as a new mode of production in the sphere of the economic and the

political; and that finally results in a set of production relations, which are ‘social’. We

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cannot be sure, whether the (Western) modernity, which was introduced as a ‘foreign’

economic and political concept to a native land, develops specifically as a form. Later in

another article (‘For a Comparative Film Studies’) Willemen re-worked Moretti’s model

and proposed that the compromise takes place more precisely between “local material”

and “capitalist modernization”.24 But even in this later essay he left the national question

in colonial and post-colonial cultures unaddressed. The advent of the colonial modern

must have generated an unease and subsequent resistance in the colonized society. In the

primary phase it was a battle between the pre-modern (read pre-colonial) and the modern.

But as nationalism emerges as the major mobilizing force after the battle has been

generally resolved in favour of the colonial mode of production, the latter is challenged

not by the pre-modern but by a new discourse related to a modern production system that

first tries to jeopardize the colonial or dominant mode of production and then assert an

alternative mode of production in economy, and finally generate subsequent production

relations as the new social. And all this takes place within the domain of modernity.

My understanding of Moretti’s conjectures is that the historical moment of the coming of

modernity is decisive. Decisive – because this is the moment when modernizing forces,

as forms of colonialism and capitalism, face resistance from the pre-modern native modes

of production, which we later understand as traditional force. But the problem of

counting this historical moment as ‘decisive’ in cinema is that cinema came into being as

a courier of twentieth century when even the colonized countries in Asia and Africa had

advanced to the peak of (colonial) modernity. That moment must be important to an art-

historian, even to a literary critic, as those media existed before that moment and as a

result they might reflect the initial clash between the two modes of production. For

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example, Janaki Nair identifies the moment of the victory of British colonialism over an

Indian emperor Tipu Sultan as the triumph of western Perspectivalim over the practice of

multiple perspectives in paintings.25 Or as in Ghalib’s poetry one can find the

contradiction of pre-colonial tradition and the colonial modern. But cinema is a gift of

high modern technology and society; and it was an industrial product, not an art-form in

the classical sense. Cinema had missed the historical moment of coming of modernity,

and could only experience the tradition that was encapsulated in the modern discourses.

One cannot get back to tradition; one can only articulate it by naming it. And it lacked the

symbolic system that once upon a time could express the lived experiences of tradition

beyond modernity. So the discourse always slips from ‘naming the tradition’ to ‘re-

naming the tradition’ in cinematic language.

Moretti invokes the model to understand a historical moment, not geopolitics. A problem

crops up as Willemen arbitrarily places ‘foreign form’ and ‘local content’ as two

mutually interactive categories without considering their historicity. The geo-politics of

‘foreign’ and ‘local’, one should note, is less about spatiality and more about temporality

– as the earlier is associated with ‘form’ and the later is associated with ‘content’. My

point is when one thinks about a form (s)he reflects on the development and

consolidation of a certain use of a set of artifices, and it’s ideological ramifications.

Madhava Prasad calls this the “content of the form”.26 In this formulation ‘foreign form’

indicates the diachronicity of its evolution and its geo-temporal dissemination from West

to the non-West through historical time. The ‘local content’ which is deemed to be

immobile and sluggish in respect of time, notwithstanding its existence and change in

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very complicated national and pre-national modern histories, is assumed as a cultural

object that is ‘ossified’.

It seems as if the articulation of the ‘narrative voice’ is awaiting the moment ‘local

content’ encounters the ‘foreign form’. Form, by default, invites a scientific study of its

structure, justifies itself in terms of its historical origin; and content, more specifically,

local content, has been always studied as culture located spatially. So what we need in

order to explain the cinematic modern in the non-West is to historicize the emergence and

development of the cinematic form in the context of national culture. The non-West

encountered cinematic form not in the wake of colonialism but in early 20th century when

technological, scientific and political modernity had already been globalized by

colonialism and nationalism. As we consider the temporality of the development of

cinema in the late 19th century, we find that cinema as technology reached, say, a Belgian

photographer and an Indian painter almost at the same time, i.e. by 1896. Cinema as a

medium of expression, unlike the novel, has not travelled from West to the non-West

temporally. The novel can be considered a derivative form in the non-West, but cinema

emerged as a global medium of expression from the very beginning. Actually, the

moment the cinematic form emerges in a non-Western country it immediately encounters

not tradition but a new form of modernity tending towards the national-modern.

This new modernity in a colonized country, fostered by nationalism and/or socialism in

opposition to the colonial modern, often re-invokes tradition, as Frantz Fanon has shown

in his ‘On National Culture’. This is done in order to historicize the native past as

national history.27 It is to be kept in mind that historicizing the national past is out and out

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a modern project. This project of reinventing tradition appears most strongly in the field

of culture. (The postcolonial histories written by Fanon, Benedict Anderson and Partha

Chatterjee have produced substantial arguments how ‘tradition’ is subsumed by the

‘nationalist modern’).28 But this emerging nationalist discourse never attempts to invert

the mode of production in order to get back to the pre-modern order. Rather, the opposed

colonial modernity, the desired nationalist alternative and the invented tradition all

contribute to a prognostic vision of the imagination of nation.29 And the ‘reinvented

tradition’ which is manifested in the colonial and post-colonial art and culture no longer

functions as archaicizing force but is a part of the same prognosis that imagines the

(future of ) the nation.

The Moretti model, constituted with the idea of ‘foreign form’ and the ‘local content’,

might indicate its resemblance to the Marxist model of base and superstructure. It sounds

like, foreign form introduced by the colonial force encounters the local content (i.e. pre-

colonial material life) and finally gives rise to the synthesized local form as the new

relations of production in the sphere of culture. But Marxists understand colonialism in a

much more complicated way. As Marxists studied colonialism or imperial aggression and

dominance in a native country like India or China, they emphasized the mode of

production, its transformation and the production relations that affect the material life of

people. It is not wise to draw the inference that Marxism holds a fixed and simplistic

framework that the industrial mode of production is foreign and the artisanal modes of

production, which Marx describes as ‘Asiatic mode of production’,30 are local. This

framework only explains the early phase of colonialism. The synthesis or compromise,

whatever one prefers to call it, takes shape in time. The whole scenario becomes

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complicated with the emergence of the bourgeois class in a colonized country and with

the rise of nationalism and in some cases germination of socialist movements. The clash

of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ with industrial modernity is only a basic idea in

Marxism to understand the colonial condition in the non-West.

3. Marxist approaches to the meaning of modernity

Marx’s methodology, in comparison to his contemporary thinkers, looked relatively

precise, scientific and politically more correct, particularly when he discussed the

political economy of Asia in the light of the proliferation of (colonial) capitalism as

‘global system’. By 1858 he was writing A Contribution to the Critique of Political

Economy and here he conceptualized AMP or the Asiatic Mode of Production as a pattern

which Capitalism with the help of Colonialism had destroyed all over the world – and the

last and most recent case had been the case of Asian countries.31

Marx identifies ‘three departments of governments’ in the Asiatic system – Finance, War

and Public Works. He observes that the British Colonialism in India was likely to destroy

not only agriculture but the whole public works system. Marx says, “There have been in

Asia, from immemorial times, [till early 19th century] but three departments of

Government.”32(my emphasis). Though his tone of the analysis of political system is

pretty discursive, his sense of time/history is seen influenced by the remnants of Hegelian

concepts. Hegel described pre-modern Asia as an ‘a-historical’ entity.33 And Marx

believes that Asiatic system of Governance exists ‘from immemorial times’. He writes:

“The Hindu […] leaving like all Oriental people […] to the care of great public works,

the prime condition of his agriculture and commerce […] and agglomerated in small

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centers by the domestic union of agricultural and manufacturing pursuits […they built] a

social system of particular features – the socalled village system, which gave to each of

these small unions their independent organization and distinct life.”34(my emphasis).

Indeed ‘all Oriental people’ here indicates that primarily Marx had a geopolitical idea of

Asia in his mind. But it would be unproblematic to infer that Marx’s view about Asia was

conventionally Eurocentric; as he addresses the discontinuity of macro and micro

economics of Asiatic system too in the political plane. Marx comments that the relative

independence of the ‘village system’ and at the same times its dependence on Public

Works of the imperial Central Government show a complicated system in the political

economy of Asiatic empires.

Marx understands Asiatic Mode of Production in his writings with the example of social

labour of production of clothes. He rightly says that spinner and weaver belonged to the

same family and the family used to manage its livelihood by selling their product in an

intra-dependent cum independent village system. He writers, “English interference having

placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindu

spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities,

by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the

truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.”35 No doubt Marx is wise enough

in comprehending the role of Colonialism in the political economy of the non-West and

its consequent social impact on the Asian population. But one cannot be very sure that

Marx’s attributes i.e. ‘semi-barbarian’ and ‘semi-civilized’ are merely used to define two

different systems; we cannot be very sure that they are not value-added terms. He may be

- 19 -
quoted, “We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by

distinctions of Caste and by Slavery […] they transformed a self developing social state

into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of

nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman, the monkey and the Sabbala, the

cow.”36

This remark clearly indicates that Marx’s vision, to a large extent if not entirely, is guided

by the notion of Enlightenment. The Hanuman and Cow worshipping Hindus divided

into caste and creed, to Marx, is a degenerated community which once had been a ‘self-

developing’ society. It should be investigated, to what extent Marx was influenced here

by the Hegelian historicism; that is, to divide history into Ancient, Medieval and Modern.

But the strongest point in Marx’s argument is that he could have rightly identified two

hegemonic forces in Asiatic society of the early 19th century – the decadent priest system

and the emerging colonial order.

In three volumes of Capital: a Critique of Political Economy he explains, in the light of

political Economy, what has actually been meant by the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’.

The AMP as observed by Marx depends mainly on agriculture and handicraft. The

division of labour, rent system, character and function of social labour and definitely the

means of production in Asiatic Modes are completely different from Western Capitalist

Mode of Production. To Marx Asiatic Mode of Production and Capitalist Mode of

Production are economically two different and politically two contesting systems. Marx

accepts political economy of India, China and Japan as examples of Asiatic Mode of

- 20 -
Production. But it is not confined to Asia only and thus should not be considered as

purely a geopolitical concept. That Asiatic Mode of Production has existed, as Marx

mentioned, in Slovak and Russian peasant societies too.

Marx explains, “Indian Communities […] are based on possessions in common of the

land, on the blending of agriculture and handicrafts and as an unalterable division of

labour, which serves, whenever a new community is started, as a plan and scheme ready

cut and dried. Occupying areas of 100 upto several thousands acres, each forms a

compact whole producing all it requires. The chief part of the products is destined for

direct use by the community itself and, does not take the form of commodity.”37 The part

of the surplus which was not ‘destined for the direct use by the community itself’ goes to

the market and takes the form of commodity. But the commodity is hardly exchanged

with money but with commodity itself. And the lion-share of the surplus product goes to

the fund of the state as revenue and tax. Marx elucidates, “In Asia, […] the fact that the

state taxes are chiefly composed of rents payable in kind, depends on conditions of

production that are reproduced with the regularity of natural phenomena.”38 He argues

that this form of taxation is one of the secrets of the stability of the Ottoman, Indian and

Chinese empires. The direct Colonialism in India, European dominance in Japan and

China in the form of trade are likely to jeopardize and destroy this form of production

relations in order to introduce (forcefully and diplomatically) the industrial mode of

production and the ‘world market’.

- 21 -
Though “the constitution of these communities varies in different parts of India the land

is tilled in common and the produce divided among the members”39 the ‘simplest form’ is

constituted with peasant (at the same time, spinning and weaving are carried on in each

family as subsidiary industries), artisans, police, tax-gatherer, book-keeper, water

overseer, Brahmin and calendar Brahmin, smith, carpenter, barber, washer man,

schoolmaster and poet. Marx concludes, “ –this simplicity supplies the key to the secret

of unchangeableness of Asiatic societies, an unchangeableness in such striking contrast

with the constant dissolution and re-founding the Asiatic states.”40 Marx’s concept of

‘unchangeableness” is not as concrete as he assumes. The series of works of Indian

historians, who studies the political economy of the Mughal era in India, like Irfan

Habib’s and Goutam Bhadra, differ with Marx on this issue.

But Marx’s analysis of the transformation of political economy in Asian people with the

encounter of Colonialism and with the mission of European capitalism seems quite

useful. Marx writes, “The whole mechanism [of Asiatic societies] discloses a systematic

division of labour; but a division like that in manufacturers is impossible, since the smith

and carpenter and etc, find an unchanging market […] according to the sizes of the

villages”.41 Marx further explains, “On the whole, the labourer and his means of

production remained closely united, like the snail and its shell, and thus there was

wanting of principal basis of manufacture, the separation of the labourer from his means

of production and the conversion of these means into capital. [….] Division of labour in

the workshop, as practiced by manufacturer, is a special creation of the Capitalist Mode

of Production alone”.42 Historically speaking, transformation of the Asiatic Mode of

- 22 -
Production into the capitalist mode of production takes place in the plane of social labour.

In the Asiatic societies the traditional form of social labour was largely destroyed by the

use of political dominance and was partly converted into wage-labour. Marx’ analysis of

the political economy of the 19th century Asian societies helps the critics to understand

the traditions of Asian societies as well as the various forms of modernity introduced

there; particularly where Marx says, “Peasant agriculture on a small scale, and the

carrying on of independent handicrafts, which together form the basis of the feudal mode

of production, and after the dissolution of that system, continues side by side with the

capitalist mode”.43

And the Marxian discourse on the origin of oriental art is the first major instance which

explains the political economy of the construction of gigantic splendors like Pyramid,

Qutub Minar, Chinese Wall, Somnath Temple etc in Asia. Asiatic civilizations. Marx

says, they came into being as a result of “simple co-operation” but not simplistic at all.

As Marx writes, “The Colossal effects of simple co-operations are to be seen in the

gigantic structures of the ancient Asiatic, Egyptian, Etruscans and etc.”44 Marx quotes R.

Jones, “[…] these Oriental states, after supplying the expenses of their civil and military

establishments, have found themselves in possession of surplus which they could apply to

works of magnificence or utility and in the construction of these their commend over the

hands and arms of almost the entire non-agricultural population has produced stupendous

monuments which still indicate their power. […] The non-agricultural labourers of Pan-

Asiatic monarchy have little but their number is their strength, and the power of directing

masses gave rise to the palaces and temples, the pyramids and the armies of gigantic

- 23 -
statues of which remains astonish and perplex us.” Marx continues, “This power of

Asiatic and Egyptian kings, Etruscan theocrats, and etc, has in modern society been

transferred to the Capitalist, whether he be an isolated, or as in joint-stock companies, a

collective capitalists.”45 Marx’ explanation, here, is not truly influenced by Eurocentric

gaze that appreciates temples, palaces and sculptures as the highest ‘aesthetic order’. Or

Marx denounces to accept those items as Oriental charms along with snakes, black magic

and elephants and kings. Marx’ unique method of explanation, rather, demystifies the

glory of the so-called Oriental art objects by unraveling the political economy of their

creation.

It’s not important here whatever Marx could perfectly explain the political economy of

the colossal creations of art objects. But the critical paradigm which he introduced

matters. His line of argument could rescue art and culture of Asiatic societies from the

aestheticism and the positivist historicism. (These two isms had invested glory to the

ancient civilizations as the enlightened cultural past of the underdeveloped present.) Marx

thrives to rescue ‘Asia’ from culturalist, tourist, and positivist mysticism.

Marx elucidates the formal difference of Artisanal modes of production existed in Asiatic

societies and European societies which were unlike the industrial mode of production. He

writes that the capitalist mode of production with industrially manufactured commodity is

only possible when the industrial Capital is continuously and ceaselessly progressing

along its orbit and produce results like M-C-M…M’-C’-M’…M”-C”-M”... But in case of

artisanal mode of production, “instead of proceeding continuously, production would take

- 24 -
place in jerks and would apply for instance to a Chinese artisan who works only for

private customers and whose process of production ceases until he receives a new

order.”46 One may note that Marx does not put the instance of Chinese artisanal mode of

production as a unique global model of non-capitalist mode of production. He explained

various pre-modern forms both in Europe and non-European societies. Guild was one

such pre-modern mode of production existed in the West Europe. Guilds were consisted

with artisans; but the artisans were not wage-labourers under the capital investors. Guild-

master was the leader who either takes the assignment from the merchant and supplies the

articles to him or is free to produce and to sell his articles to the buyer directly. There was

neither mass production on the industrial basis nor the capitalists who were able to

control the whole cycle of purchase (of raw material), production (of articles) and selling

goods. The absence of world market and wage-labour system makes the guild-based

production markedly different from the industrial-capitalist mode of production of

commodity. West-European guild-based distribution economy was more like Chinese

artisanal mode of operation, though guilds were artisans’ independent collective whereas

Chinese artisans were basically independent individual producers.47

However, at least in three aspects, Marx, by using his unique method of comparative

analysis of political economy has initiated discourses beyond Orientalism and ahead of

Eurocentrism which have been proved really useful even in contemporary time. I would

like to mention Marx’s insightful views because, first, in order to understand the advent

of modernity in Asia he emphasized on the transformation of social labour, both in form

and content. Actually the transformation of social labour generates new occupations and

- 25 -
technical skills, new habitations and entertainment, new equation between tradition and

modernity; secondly, Marx has clearly hinted to the strong influence of mercantile

capital in east-Asian region as a stabilizing force in economy. The later discourse,

exercised and extrapolated by historians like Andre Gunder Frank, Giovanni Arighi and

Takeshi Hamashita in order to ‘discover’ the little known system of growth and

sustenance of Sinocentric mercantile system in East- Asian mari-time trade, is found

relevant even in the 19th and 20th century.

Marx’ writings on West’s conquer of Asia and of other non-European countries provide

only a general overview of the coming of modernity in the non-West. But, though he has

observed only the dawn of colonialism in Asia, his method of understanding should not

be considered as simplistic. He has pointed toward the possibility of the parallel existence

of both modes of production in a colonial nation – the traditional AMP and the emerging

IMP (industrial mode of production). This possibility indicates the formation of

bourgeoisie of different traits in different parts of the non-West. As a result of which, the

emerging nationalism in different non-Western countries may take different historical

shapes. Further, Marx identifies modern capitalism not as a homogeneous entity. He has

clearly distinguished, in his commentary, between the mercantile capital and the

industrial capital; and he has also mapped the historical tussle between these two in the

wake of colonialism. He has observed that though in Europe, the autonomy of the

mercantile capital was being superseded by the massive growth of the industrial capital,

Sino-centric marine trade helped out the survival of mercantile capital in the East-Asian

region. In the 19th century East Asia, the labour-intensive (Chinese model of) AMP, the

- 26 -
modernizing IMP and the age-old network of mercantile capital interacted in their own

way and formed an interlocking system. To Marx, this is not a question of ‘mysterious’

survival of the AMP in greater China, nor he marks the features of the mercantile capital

in East-Asia as ‘archaic’. Later, in many non-Western societies, the residual AMP and the

modern IMP have been subsisting in a symbiotic relationship. This symbiosis definitely

has produced which Willemen, borrowing from Moretti, explains as ‘local form’.

Marx has understood the effect of the coming of colonial modernity as ‘revolutionary’, as

it has immense power to transform the Indian villages; but he has never claimed that the

coming of the colonial modernity in the non-West only initiated the clash between the

tradition and the modernity. There are instances of compromise too. But there is another

part in Marx’ observations about colonialism in the non-western world; he understands

colonialism as foreign aggression on a native society. In his writings on China and India,

he has foregrounded the issue of brutal interference of the British force into Asian

people’s right to self-determination and justice. Aijaj Ahmed explains Marx’ dual register

of understanding the impact of colonialism (one is related to ‘progress’ and another is

related to ‘brutal coersion’), as “double mission”.48 Pranav Jani comments, “[in his

writings on the Revolt of 1857 in India] Marx tries to outline the dialectic of structure

and agency operating in colonial India and its relation to the British and, envisions

‘Indian progress’ as a product of struggle against colonialism.” 49(my emphasis).

Hence the strength of the Moretti-Willemen model (i.e. the compromise between the

foreign form and the local content gives rise to the local form/narrative/modernity) is that

- 27 -
it can address the structural transformation of culture/modernity in the colonial Asia; but

the model is not satisfactory in mapping up the rise and development of historical

agencies of power and struggle in the non-Western world. Moretti-Willemen model

presents the colonialism and ‘foreign form’ as an ‘unconscious tool’ of history, because

this model approaches them as ‘structure’ and fails to address them as ‘agency’. Marx

himself dialectically approached the transformation of social function of labour and the

transformation of human condition. Though he accepts the victories of capitalism over

the AMP as historical ‘progress’, he never undermines that the victory of capitalism i.e.

the transformation of social function of labour, was possible “without dragging

individuals and peoples through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation.”50 Both

the aspects – the newly emerged social function of labour and a revolt against the

colonial rule have contributed to the emergence of historical, political, social and cultural

agencies in the non-West. The debate over ‘historical agency’ later was centered in the

issue of nationalism in the non-West.

Marxism after Marx reviewed the question of nationalism and colonial dominance all

over the non-Western world in the first half of the 20th century. Luxemburg, Lenin and

Kautsky engaged themselves in a debate that took place in the 1910s.51 An important part

of the debate addressed the question of nationality, nationalism and imperialism in the

non-West. Luxemburg defined self-determination of the nations, colonized or un-

colonized, as a politico-legal right which must first be achieved universally. This implies

that the issue of class should come after a nation has achieved its sovereignty. Lenin was

more interested in drawing the discourse into the domain of political economy. He saw

nationalism in the light of a capitalism-dominated global system, and argued that the

- 28 -
“final victory of capitalism over feudalism” has been linked up with nationalism. Lenin

adds that self-determination of nations means the political separation of nations from the

alien bodies.52 It is clear that both Luxemburg and Lenin, though they differed to a large

extent, emphasize the ideological concerns of nationalism and nation formation in the

context of development of capitalism and class consciousness.

Luxemburg underlines the sovereignty of the nation as a universal-democratic right while

Lenin is more critical on the issue as he points to the politics of the formation of the

national ‘self’. The construction of the national ‘self’, as Lenin indicates, is based on the

process of othering the alien nations. We must also note his understanding of nationalist

and anti-colonial struggle in the non-West, particularly in Asia. He observed the case of

Japan as a free nation which not only developed a national capital but also established

itself as the strongest ever imperialist force in East Asia.53 And Japan interestingly did

not give up the artisanal mode of production entirely; it managed to sustain the artisanal

mode of production and traditional customs within the newly developed industrial mode

of production and modern life. Capitalism, as a modernizing force in Japan, was not

hindered by this phenomenon of the inclusion of the traditional into the modern but

helped Japan to establish itself as a modern capitalist nation. Tradition adapted/

reinvented selectively in the modern no longer was acting as an archaicizing force, but

appeared as a tool that helps constructing ‘Japaneseness’ on the basis of othering the

neighborhood nations in East Asia. The films of Yasujiro Ozu, for example, the pet

location where the Western critics found the ‘alternative’ modernism and melancholy, are

being reviewed and criticized by the Korean film critics like Kim Soyoung as an aesthetic

venture to conceal the ‘imperialist’ Japan.54 Though intense textual criticism of his films

- 29 -
shows that Ozu has not left Japanese nationalism and war unproblematic. But what is

important to me is the fresh discourse initiated by Soyoung which addresses the political

and cultural dynamics in trans-Asian or inter-Asian frames.

4. East-Asian approaches to nationalism and modernity

The imagination of ‘Asia’ in 19th and early 20th century Japan, specifically in the context

of Japanese nationalism, is important to us as it came from Asia within. And therefore

this history is important in the context of culture they have manifested. In the context of

Japanese intellectual history, the question of Asia is often associated with the following

‘accepted observations’: after Meiji Ishin (Restoration), there are two lines of thinking

among intellectuals in Japan regarding the question of Asia; one is presented by

Fukuzawa Yukichi’s idea of dissociating from ‘Asia’ and integrating with ‘Europe’

(Datsu-Aron); and the other is articulated by Okakura Tenshin’s intellectual effort of

advocating that ‘Asia is one’.55 The former upholds that Japan must forsake the

‘unmanageable allies’ in Asia so far and should give effort to join the ranks of European

and American powers as quickly as possible. But the later emphasized on the

commonality of Asian civilizations in the embodiment of the European civilization. And

these two apparently opposite views later merged as two integrated part of a single

discourse in the concept of the Greater East Asia.

Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834-1901), known as the ‘father of Japanese enlightenment’ and the

ideologue of modernization of Japan in order to achieve the Western type ‘social

advantages’, ‘reason’ and ‘nation-state’, published a manifesto Datsu-Aron or ‘On

Departing from Asia’ in 1885. He raised a discourse – Japan must dissociate from Asia

- 30 -
and should take the path that will lead to the formation of modern society and modern

state in Japan. He wrote: “[C]ulturally Japan has already departed from Asia altogether in

favour of the new phases of civilization shown to us by the West. […] The Chinese and

Koreans are extremely similar to each other and both are the very different from the

Japanese. Neither the Chinese nor the Koreans have shown any capacity for development

[as shown by the Japanese …] Exposure to Western civilization has not shaken them

from their tenacious clinging to ancient traditions. They are still given to barbaric

violence. […] We cannot afford to wait for our neighbours to catch up to the West. […] It

is better for Japan to dissociate itself entirely from Asia and to join the nations of

civilized West.”56

Though Fukuzawa seems much more concerned about ‘Japan’s present’ of late 19th

century, his writings hint on ‘Asian past’. As if once there was an ‘Asia’ in the pre-

modern (past) and now, as ‘Japan’s present’ breaks apart from the (pre-modern) history

(of Asia) and the rest of the neighbours are lagging behind Japan. Japan cannot wait for

them and should leave them. Therefore he has a concept of underdeveloped ‘Asia’ (minus

Japan) which continues to remain ‘Asia’ as pre-modern identity. Fukuzawa indicates to

an ‘Asia’ which is retarded, under-civilized and lagged behind Western civilization.

Fukuzawa’s ‘shed Asia and join Europe’ (tuo ya, ru ou) slogan is premised on the notion

of Asia includes two levels. First, Asia referred with a high degree of cultural

homogenization, i.e. Confucian Asia. Second, the political meaning of ‘shedding

Confucianism’ was aimed to dissociate from China-centered imperial relations and to

construct a European style nation-state oriented towards ‘freedom’, ‘human rights’,

- 31 -
‘national sovereignty’, ‘civilization’ and ‘independent spirit’. Fukuzawa’s thought

corresponds to a negative definition of Asia. His criticism of ‘Asian backwardness’ and

‘European progressiveness’ is actually coming from his world view. Fukuzawa Yukichi

came from a samurai family. He was trained into Sino-centric culture and then exposed

to Dutch and English language, European science and philosophy. He traveled North

America and Europe. In 1875 he wrote ‘An Outline of a Theory of Civilization’

(Bummeiron ho gairyaku) – an introduction to Western philosophical ideas in Japanese.

He believed in the evolutionary view of ‘progress’. He believes that the progress have

reached to the highest stage of civilization with the evolution of modernity in Europe and

all the other modes of civilizations as predatory states of affairs in this journey. The

‘supremacy’ of Western modernity, which provides the domain of ‘free thinking’ and the

‘glory’ of Asian pre-modern ‘civilizations’ and aesthetic excellence are, therefore two

stages of single journey towards modernity. The idea of civilization launched by

Fukuzawa inevitably comes from the European conception of the ‘world history’ derived

from the evolutionary ideas.57

Modernization in Japan had taken off in the late Tokugawa period before Meiji

Restoration in 1868. It is evident that Japanese intellectuals started debating on

Westernization since late Tokugawa period. A good example would be the call of Yokoi

Shonan (1809-1869). He said, “We should follow the way of Yao, Shun and Confucius

and learn what we can from the machine technology of the West. Why should we stop to

enriching our country and strengthening our army? It is our supreme duty to spread

righteousness throughout the world.”58 It is true that the issues of modernization

- 32 -
(technology from the west), nation-state (national army) were already addressed here, but

unlike Fukuzawa, Shonan put his faith on Empire system (e.g. Yao, Shun etc) and on the

Confucian World order. Shonan defined modern Japan, therefore as a part of East-Asian

‘Confucian Empire’, not truly as a political system but as a national culture

The idea of drastic Westernization coupled with expansionism took up the centre stage in

Meiji Restoration. Fukuzawa’s thought, which rightly represented Meiji Japan’s

Westernization, wrote off (East) Asia and its Confucian ideals of empire system and

urged to ‘join Europe’. However another important thinker of Meiji Japan was journalist

Tokutomi Soho (or Iichiro, 1863-1957). In 1890s, Soho wrote a number of essays

supporting Japan’s expansionism and celebrated Japan’s victory over China and Russia.

He opines that Chinese War marked new epoch in Japan’s history as it was a leap from

‘national life’ to ‘world life’. He says that earlier Japan had strived to achieve a national

consciousness and now with the victory over China they entered into the world scale and

Japan finally came to be aware about its own imperialist power. In his opinion, “[Japan’s]

spirit of Eastern vitality allowed it to make the most of its knowledge of European

civilization.”59 The combination of ‘primitive vitality’ (of Asiatic life) and ‘modern

knowledge’ (of West) as he explains, helped Japan to become the leader of east-Asia.

Though Soho was the great ideologue of Japanese modernization and expansionism, but

contrary to Fukuzawa, he never entirely gave up the idea of Asia. In mid 1880s, ten years

before the Sino-Japanese war, a group of journalists urged for the ‘national essence’ in

accordance with the ‘Asiatic values’. Shiga Shigetaka (1863-1927), Miyake Setsurei

(1860-1945) in the magazine of Nihonjin, an organ of Political and Education Society and

- 33 -
Kuga Katsunan, editor of Nihon newspaper promoted that the thought of ‘Westernization’

must not be criticized and it must be welcomed as it is inevitable. But Japan should not

blindly admire the ‘Western Institutions and cultures’; ‘national essence’ built on the

Confucian values must be restored and kept untouched from the European cultures.60

However since the success of Japan in Sino-Japanese and Japan-Russian war,

Fukuzawa’s thought became the most prominent one. Maruyama Masai, a war time

Japanese historian explains his predecessor Fukuzawa’s vision as Meiji period

Westernization, post-Meiji constitutions, nation-state model and state rationality which

claimed a ‘true’ national culture established first in Japan and later to be propagated to

the other parts of Asia following Japanese model. ‘Asia’, therefore according to

Fukuzawa, was a historical essence rather than a part of modernity. Maruyama explains,

that ‘Asian nations’ would be built on this sort of Eurocentric culturalism following Meiji

Japan’s principle of ‘leaving Asia behind’. Maruyama gives opinion that though

Fukuzawa shed from Confucian Asia, Confucian notion of expelling ‘barbarism’ and

championing ‘civilization’ ultimately helps Japan to assert expansionism. And Japan’s

imperialist attacks on neighbouring nations were rested on the culturalist logic; that is,

‘civilized’ Japan must occupy the ‘barbaric’ neighbours in order to ‘civilize’ them.

‘Shedding Asia’ to join Europe alloyed with Japanese imperialism to occupy

neighbouring countries is the sign of ‘incomplete westernization’ as explained by

Maruyama. As Maruyama says that West’s teaching of international brotherhood and the

‘sovereignty of all nations’, on which the idea of modern nation-state is based on,

contradicts the Japanese expansionist foreign policy. In one hand, Fukuzawa’s West has

- 34 -
been defined according to the Enlightenment – liberal bourgeoisie views – freedom,

reason, science, nationality; on the other hand the power of Japanese nation-state,

according to his vision, identifies with the Capitalist-Colonialist West. Maruyama says,

“[In] the Western state System […] ‘State rationality’ developed under the twin pillars of

the principle of equality among sovereign states and the balance of power.”61 He

comments that the tragedy of Japanese nationalism in the late 19th century and early 20th

century is marked by the fact that Japan was caught between the two principles of

modern nation-state.

However Maruyama Masai to an extent appreciates Fukuzawa Yukichi’s ‘negative way’

of defining Asia. Because following Hegelian dialectics, Maruyama believes that without

the experience of negativity people cannot define their nation. He says, “[T]he moment of

negativity could be discerned in Japanese thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries, whereas the Chinese never succeeded in giving rise to their own negativity.”62

Naoki Sakai, a contemporary historian says, “Implicit in Maruyama’s wartime

historiography, which justified Japan’s political superiority over China, was the old thesis

of ‘flight from Asia, entry into Europe’, which meant that Japan should be capable of

modernizing itself while the rest of Asia must wait for the West’s initiative and that,

accordingly, Japan ought not to belong to Asia in that respect.”63

In an article ‘What is Modernity?’ (1948), Maruyama’s contemporary Tekeuchi Yoshimi

says that to understand Toyo (East Asia) we must appreciate that what constitute Asia are

European factors existing in Europe. Asia is Asia, as he understands, by dint of its

- 35 -
European context. Tekeuchi disagrees in many major points with Maruyama but he

appreciates the idea of ‘negativity’ Maruyama brings in this issue. Tekeuchi says that

Asia could not be conscious of itself before it was invaded by the west. According to him,

‘negativity’ which is “reflectively necessary for self-consciousness of a nation, [was]

never originated in Asia.” He argues, “Only through the acknowledgment of its lost

autonomy, of its dependence on the west, or only in the mirror of the west, so to say,

could Asia reflectively acquire its civilizational, cultural, ethnic, or national self-

consciousness.”64 Tekeuchi’s historicism is diametrically opposite to Maruyama’s in this

sense, though both have started from Hegelian notion of history. For Tekeuchi, the Asia

experienced negativity the moment it historically encountered the West, unlike

Maruyama who tried to find out negativity as ‘the essence of Japanese past.’

Tekeuchi had a conviction that “Asian modernity could be accomplished only by

appropriating the essence of Western modernity. […But] modern values must first

require the people’s radical negation of the external forces and of their internal heritage

of the feudal past. […] Asia was to modernize itself by negating both the West outside

and its own past inside.”65 Following this argument, Tekeuchi indicates the lack of

historically derived nationalism in Japan since Japan never resisted the West; and

consequently Japan’s modern history only shows the absence of a genuine negativity. He

was very optimistic and appeasing about China’s modernity and its origin as nation-state.

Because China was resisting the West as external force and fights to eradicate the

remnants of its internal feudalism. He was really opposing the ideas of ‘East Asian

collective’ and transnational subjectivity as to achieve; nation to him was a journey of

history towards modernity. He also criticized very strongly Japan’s expansionist

- 36 -
aggression in China and Korea that aimed to form Great East Asia under the leadership of

Japan. He admires the way the Chinese people resisted Japanese aggression as external

attack and the way the socialists and nationalists were fighting the remnants of feudalism

internal to their system. His Sino-centric vision epitomizes Chinese nationalist thought in

1930 and 1940 as genuine example of nation building approach.

It is really difficult to measure the role of categories like nationalism, tradition, capitalism

in non-Western nations within a modular formula. We have another very interesting

example of the Chinese theatre. The Chinese peasantry largely belonged to the feudal

mode of production in the third and fourth decades of the 20th century. But they came up

as the largest anti-imperialist and nationalist force with a view of radical reform in the

mode of production in order to modernize social relations. The idea of nationalism in

China is not a product of the historical process of the triumph of capitalism over the

feudal system as presumed by the European Marxists. Maoists in China in their

organizing phase and after the success of the socialist-nationalist struggle sustained the

political battle against feudalism and the traditional in order to modernize and de-

imperialize the society. But interestingly, in the cultural front they wanted not only to

preserve and restore some traditional art forms but to revive and popularize the folk art as

the modern culture of the people.66 One must note here that traditional culture had been

de-contextualized from its basic mode of production, i.e. feudalism, and was re-

contextualized in order to construe the cultural identity of the people of China as a

peasant identity.

- 37 -
The history of the development of Chinese traditional theatre in the 20th century is of

interest in this connection. Though Chinese traditional theatre achieved its foreign

reputation for its prestigious jingju, the actual traditional form was xiqu (theatre of

songs). But xiqu is not a single form; it was being practiced in various different forms in

different districts of China. Later Beijing Opera, as an improvised form, developed in the

19th century and was widely acclaimed among the urban population while the revived

xiqu was very popular among the peasantry even in the 20th century.67

The history of the development of xiqu in 20th century and its reception by the modernists

is fascinating. The New Cultural Movement, the first organized modernist movement in

China, started in 1917. This movement, also known as May Fourth movement, declared

xiqu as anti-progressive and rustic.68 They introduced Western theatre in China with a

view to replace the traditional forms. But since the 1920s Communist Party in China

placed value in xiqu as a theatrical form practiced by the common peasantry as a culture

that opposes the aesthetics of elite Chinese royal opera. As Mao Ze-dong took a personal

interest in traditional folk literature and theatre, since the 1930s the collection,

preservation and circulation of xiqu got a new impetus. In the 1940s, as recorded in

historical documents, xiqu was being censored and partly banned in the temporary capital

of Kuomintang-dominated Chongqing while it was warmly welcomed and widely

practiced in Yan’an district, the base of the central committee of the Chinese Communist

Party.69

In the 1940s and 1950s, the old mythic contents of the traditional Chinese theatre were

replaced with the oral history of the peasant movements that took place in Chinese hinter-

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lands, though the traditional form i.e. three-sides-open stage, jian chang (visible stage

assistants) and erdao mu (inner curtain), etc., were restored. On the other hand, Beijing

Opera, under the influence of modernist intellectuals, replaced the traditional forms to a

great extent with the Western proscenium craft, while the mythic contents were restored.

The Maoist ideologues of culture were not interested in Westernizing the xiqu. They

found (Western) realism a bourgeois mode of expression and held traditional form,

coupled with the historical-revolutionary content, as more ‘progressive’. Even the

influences of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold were disliked.70 A captain of Maoist army who

was very close to the leader writes: “I found that he liked all Chinese folk literature and

arts, [but] he was not interested in foreign literature and arts very much.”71

But this cannot be the single timeless clue with which one can read the development of

Chinese traditional theatre in the 20 th century. In the period of the Cultural Revolution

(1964-1976) the attitude of the Chinese Communist Party towards traditional art-forms

changed. In order to uproot all traces of feudal remnants from the Chinese society, Mao

declared a crusade against the practice of traditional arts, particularly against the mythic

narratives and costume drama performed in the Beijing Opera. Chinese theatre was

drastically censored and the artists and intellectuals who argued in favour of the

traditional art-forms were purged.72

The iron curtain lifted in the 1980s with the coming of Deng Xiaoping into power. The

open market economy brought fresh air also in the Chinese art and cultural practices. And

a new Chinese bourgeoisie emerged as a result of the open-market economy, ironically

whose (modernist) predecessors once had written off the traditional practices as anti-

- 39 -
modern, sought to bring back the practice of Chinese traditional art and theatre.73 Since

the 1980s the revivals of Daoism and Confucianism have also been witnessed. The

performances of traditional theatre in Beijing Opera now became an attraction for the

foreign tourists, and became viable cultural goods for export. Clearly, the regeneration of

the traditional in the field of art, culture, performance or philosophy in contemporary

China is motivated by the globalizing forces in the era of economic liberalization. The

proposed comparative cultural analyses constituted with the categories ‘foreign

form’/‘local content’ seems very inadequate in apprehending the contemporary cultural

dynamics of the PRC.

In the Chinese cinema of the1980s, we find two strong currents. One, the practice of

realism, which emerged as a critique of the melodramatic fourth generation films made in

the era of the Cultural Revolution, and the practice of avant-gardism inspired by French

New Wave of 1960s. And two, the historical narratives of pre-Maoist China told in the

form of spectacular costume drama and action films.74 Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou

have made a number of such films which have been released in foreign film festivals and

sold well in the film-markets of Europe and USA. It is quite clear that the Fifth

Generation Chinese filmmakers’ take on tradition is ambiguous, and, according to some

critics, motivated by the market. As Zhang Yimou says in an interview with Michael

Berry, the reason why he is so keen to make films related to the narratives dealing with

the traditional past is not clear to him – it might have some connection to his “time spent

growing in north-western China and Chinese folk-lore”75 ; or it might have been triggered

by the bitter memory of the Cultural Revolution which ignited his desire for traditional

- 40 -
art-forms, since the ‘traditional’ after Cultural Revolution is antithetical, at least in face

value, to the Maoist dictate.

For example, in his film The House of Flying Daggers (2004), Yimou found himself “in

the midst of a bamboo forest in Sichuan” and that suddenly changed [his] mind. It was

early morning and there was a thick mist lingering among the trees and rays of thin

sunlight were just beginning to shine down through the tree tops”. He realized, “why all

those martial arts novels feature deals in a bamboo forest – it is the perfect world for the

xia, those roaming martial arts heroes”.76 Zhang Yimou says, regarding the reception of

the films as martial arts action genre, that most Western audiences are more drawn to the

films he made in this mould. They are attracted to the beauty of the "Images in these

East-Asian action genre films. He says that he aspires to make an Asian-style science-

fiction film - “People can imagine what a real Chinese science-fiction film would be

like”.77

It is understandable that nothing is related to unmediated tradition in his desire to cater

the ‘real Chinese’ to the global audience. Yimou’s childhood memory or his political

desire to represent the ‘traditional’ or his attempt to re-create the pre-modern China to

have a good business in the global festival circuit – none functions outside the realm of

modernity; neither this desire for the nostalgic is an archaicizing vector. A much stronger

globalizing force is operative in the 1990s in the form of the capitalist globalization

whose take on tradition/local has already created a new dynamics, which is ideologically

and functionally very different from the nationalistic framework. In order to understand

the films, for example The House of Flying Daggers, linear history of China and the

- 41 -
knowledge on Daoism and Confucianism can provide us with the explanation that might

only satisfy the cine-philes. Not history in general but the study in historiography can

enable us to map the changing landscape of culture and the changing lines of forces in

representational politics.

The question is how to find out the location of ‘tradition’? Is it located territorially or is it

located civilizationally? One answer, though not at all satisfactory, is usually agreed

upon: tradition is located nationally as the latter’s heritage. This helps us but to lead the

discourse to a more confusing alley. For instance, words ‘Chinese tradition’ must differ

politically in the PRC and the RoC. The Nationalist Party’s long fifty-year-dominance in

RoC and its defeat in the hands of the communists in PRC defined the notion of

‘tradition’ in different ways in two different Chinas. PRC claims its part as mainland

China while Chiang Kai-shek’s government proclaimed RoC as ‘real China’. Both claim,

though in two different ways, that their part of the land is the custodian of the ‘real

Chinese tradition’.

In both countries cinema could not develop freely between 1949 and the early 1980s. But

the take on tradition has been quite different in the two nations,. The PRC fourth

generation filmmakers often tried to establish tradition as a continuity of the peasant

struggle against the feudal rule, Kuomintang and imperialism, while official projects

were assigned to the Taiwanese fourth generation filmmakers to make films which show

the timeless flow of the tradition of nobility, ethnicity and iconic landscapes.78 In the

RoC, the ancient Chinese scripts are officially used, and the rural people who speak in

old dialects have been ghettoized as ‘real’ Chinese ethnic-linguistic community. But the

- 42 -
PRC has reformed the old Chinese script radically to give it a new form and has sought a

revolutionary national identity for itself. Two Chinese nationalisms generate two

different official and popular discourses of the histories of the traditional pasts as modern

project.79 The two films, Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984, PRC) and Hou Hsiao Hsien’s

City of Sadness (1987, Taiwan), which heralded freedom from the iron curtains in the

PRC and the RoC respectively, exemplify this by addressing two different political pasts.

But since late 1980s under the influence of the homogenizing forces of globalization we

find the emergence of films of the martial arts genre both in the PRC and RoC, which

apparently look very similar and often studied under the common rubric of ‘Chinese

martial art cinema’. They show some common features as they use some common generic

traits and stylistic codes, yet the mythological contents of narratives produced by the

filmmakers of two nations indicate allegories of two different kinds.

Fredric Jameson notes the ‘epic ambitions’ of the PRC’s fifth generation filmmaking

which is markedly different from its contemporary Taiwanese New Wave counterpart.80

He observes distinct mannerism and style in their depiction of “landscapes below the

mountain peaks and endless procession of moving figures like a cinematographic scroll”

exposed in mid-shots, which reminds us the “traditional painterly story-telling, and at the

same time that it defamiliarizes the conventional relationship of human bodies and their

landscape contexts”. Jameson says, “politically it claims to constitute some new way of

appropriating tradition which is neither iconoclastic nor given over to Western

individualism – with what truth one cannot say (save to register the claim as arrival form

in competition with ‘nostalgia film’ as the current dominant Western or postmodern form

- 43 -
of telling history)”.81 The tradition used by the Chinese fifth generation filmmakers,

Jameson explains, must be understood in terms of contemporary politics and political

history. It is the drive of the political and the ideological that makes the condition

possible to (re)articulate tradition in a unique and distinguishable cinematic form. “This

epic mid-shot is thus is a symbolic act”, Jameson infers, “which promises some new

utopian combination of what used to be the subject-object”.82

Here Jameson’s position is distinctly different from that of the positions taken by either

Willemen or Nick Browne. According to Jameson, ‘nostalgia’ is a certain trend in the

postmodern western cinema which recreates a text or culture of earlier decades

obliterating the markers of the time and the historical contexts. According to him the

‘nostalgia industry’ is part of the culture industry in the West which is fixated on

postmodern pastiche that has nothing to do with the active politics the nation-state. In

‘Remapping Taipei’, Jameson theoretically locates subjectivity as opposed to identity, as

Willlemen does in ‘Detouring Korean Cinema’. But Jameson’s idea of subjectivity seems

not very different from the Western notion of the individual subject. In Willemen’s

formulation it is not a question of single subject but it operates with more than one

regime of subjectivation simultaneously. Willemen suggests, this is a composite of pre-

modern (archaizing) and modern (modernizing) which are orchestrated by the narrative

voice.

Jameson too shows how different subjective looks orchestrate to give rise to the narrative,

but he restricts it to the analyses of film-form negotiated through political and ideological

positions. Everything to him falls under different modernizing forces and vary with

- 44 -
different modes of operation of the capital and its encounter with the nation-states. By

traditional forces Jameson means not the pre-modern but the ethnic-national construction

of the nation-state and the politics related to the formation of identity. Jameson is more

interested in the study of the emerging narrative forms in the East-Asian cinemas in the

era of late capitalism.

Actually, the identification of the location of tradition is a well-known problem in Film

Studies since the emergence of the concept of ‘national cinemas’. There are three broad

categories of knowledge related to national cinemas in Film Studies. First, national

cinemas in the non-West are studied from the perspective of the World Cinema. The

consequence of this is the appropriation of the knowledge of national cinemas by a

Eurocentric world-view. This scholarship, following the official cultural manifestation of

a national culture that Hobsbawm describes as ‘symbolic nationalism’83, or following the

humanist tradition of acquiring knowledge about the other, identifies the nation-state as

the unproblematic location of culture. The second category is a refined and politically

more correct version derived from the first, but filtered through structuralism and post-

structuralism. This second category mainly uses ‘difference’ as the theoretical tool to

approach non-Western cinemas. They understand national cinemas as structurally

different modes of representation from Hollywood or the dominant form. Finally, they

introduce the ‘cultural difference’ and ‘difference in identity’ as the theoretical tool to

analyze cinema. The scholars of these categories find the location of tradition in

national/ethnic identity. They understand film cultures in the non-West as a direct

correlate of identity politics.

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The inevitable question is: who speaks about Korean or Indian or Japanese past? How is

a cultural force defined as modernizing and archaicizing? It is primarily a question of

historical agency and secondarily a concern of cultural studies. Let us refer to Dipesh

Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe once again. In the second chapter of this book,

‘The Two Histories of Capital’, he addresses the ‘aesthetic paradox’ of the modern Indian

life “living in several centuries at once”.84 According to Chakrabarty, the pre-modern

should not be identified as traditional or archaicizing force. A particular social custom or

behaviour, if to be marked as ‘tradition’ or ‘modernity,’ is a question of historiographic

approach not subject to ‘historicality’ in general.

The final part of this article attempts to address the question: who speaks about Asian

culture in what terms? And, how far is it possible to reach trans-Asian or inter-Asian

frames negotiating the difficulties of ‘cross-cultural analyses’ of new Asian cinemas?

5. from cross-cultural analysis to trans-Asian or inter-Asian frames

Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto’s article ‘The Difficulty of Being Radical: the Discipline of Film

Studies and the Postcolonial World Order’85 revisits the major theoretical positions and

their critiques related to the third world as the possible object of the production of cross-

cultural knowledge. He explains in his article the limitations of Western critiques in

theorizing non-Western cinemas. He appreciates the fact that Bordwell, Burch, Desser,

Willemen and E. Anne Kaplan have been successful in shifting the production of

knowledge of Japanese cinema from area studies to poststructuralist analyses. And they

have engaged themselves in long debates regarding Japanese cinema, “often accusing

- 46 -
each other of being ‘Western’ in their approaches”,86 Yoshimoto says, quoting Peter

Lehman.

The debate, related to the modernity in Ozu’s films where Bordwell and Willemen

participated, was an intense one. Bordwell, based on the definition that modernism,

having been emerged in the womb of the modern, is a critical attitude toward modernity,

claims that the narrative mode and formal strategy in Ozu’s films ‘systematically’ defies

the rules established by Hollywood cinema; Ozu should be read, therefore, as a

modernist. Willemen questions the very definition of modernism used by David

Bordwell. He argues that the definition framed with the West-European experiences in art

and culture by the 19th and 20th century English and French scholars is inappropriate as

far as the understanding of non-Western modernity is concerned. Willemen thinks, “to

call Ozu modernist is not so much different from European modernists’ questionable

appropriation of African tribal sculpture in the early 20th century.” Bordwell responded

by saying Willemen’s critique does not hold, since African sculptors never saw modernist

art.87

Yoshimoto observes, “the hermeneutics of the Other sought out in non-Western national

cinemas’ scholarship is neither a simple identification with the Other nor an easy

assimilation of the Other into the self. Instead it is a new position of knowledge through a

careful negotiation between the Other and the Self.”88 Yoshimoto carefully observes the

different positions taken by the Western critics on Japanese and Chinese cinemas in order

to map the (flawed) methodology of cross cultural analyses.

- 47 -
Ann Kaplan in her article on the representation of women in recent Chinese cinema

addresses the problem of cross-cultural analyses. She remarks that there are two types of

scholars working in this area: scholars like Chris Berry and Donald Richie who lived for

decades in China and Japan respectively, knew the Chinese and Japanese languages,

observed the cultures closely and produced ‘expert’s knowledge’. But scholars like

Fredric Jameson, David Bordwell and Paul Willemen who do not know the languages but

studied their culture and cinema produce ‘tentative knowledge’.89

Both the kinds have their problems. For the first kind of knowledge which Kaplan

identifies as ‘formal’, the Western critic reaches a little-known culture with a

preconceived idea of the World Cinema and finally comes to interpret a non-Western

national cinema based partly from her/ his first-hand experience and partly from her/ his

preconceived ideas. In most of the cases it either is affected by the colonial method of

acquiring the ethnographic information or is mediated by the canonized framework of the

World Cinema that presumes Hollywood and European cinemas as standard forms.

Kaplan rightly remarks, therefore “Cross-cultural analysis…is difficult – fraught with

danger” since we “are forced to read works produced by the Other through the constraints

of our frameworks/theories/ and ideologies”.90

The second kind of knowledge is which has been marked as ‘tentative’. Kaplan says,

“This tentativeness of informal knowledge can become formal knowledge if one goes to

and lives in China [for example] and becomes an expert in things Chinese.”91 Yoshimoto

criticizes her proposed model of understanding the other as a historicist attempt to

explore the non-West. He says that the model of cross-cultural exchange presented here,

- 48 -
is a classic example of what Gayatri Spivak calls the “arrogance of the radical European

Humanist conscience, which will consolidate itself by imagining the other…through the

collection of information.92

In comparison with the modernist critics, postmodern scholars are more critical on the

issue of the production of knowledge of the non-Western cultures. Yoshimoto takes Scott

Nygren’s article on Japanese modernism and Japanese cinema as a leading example of

postmodern approach towards a cross-cultural analysis. Nygren proposes a

“discontinuous and reversible history” to conceptualize the West-Japan cultural

relationship. Instead of believing in the linear historical model that Japan, like any other

non-Western country, has ‘rich’ tradition and West provides it with modernity, Nygren

argues that traditional Japanese culture radically inspired Western modernism (e.g.

Eisenstein’s montage theory in late 1920s, still-life paintings of the late impressionist

painters) as much as Western bourgeois humanism and scholarship had a “deconstructive

impact on feudal Japanese society.93 One can also address the Sino-West cultural

relationship in the light of Nygren’s argument. The influence of Chinese theatrical form

on Brechtian modernist theatre is a well-acknowledged fact.

So far Nygren’s argument holds good. But there remain two or three unaddressed areas.

First, if it did not concern big and influential nations like Japan, China or India, and it

was a non-Western culture that has very ‘insignificant’ contribution in Western

modernism how can a critic identify the chiasmic cultural correspondence? And second,

as Yoshimoto puts it, how Japanese culture (or any non-Western culture) can be treated

on equal footings with the Western culture when “the relation between the two has

- 49 -
always taken the form of political, economic and cultural domination of the non-West by

the West”?

Nygren’s answer might take recourse to comparing the historiographies developed in two

cultures (nations) to find a more politically correct solution. Cross-cultural analysis

without the intervention of comparative historiography might lead to a failure. But as we

carefully scan the constellation of cross-cultural analyses, the presumption of the Western

critics is that the West is the locus of theory and the non-West is the location of practice.

As a result in most of the academic studies of the non-West the Western critic volunteers

her service in the role of the ‘theoretician’ who is supposed to be the agency of setting the

paradigm and who will propose the theory based on the information collected on the non-

Western practice. The non-Western intelligentsia functions here as a mediator or

interlocutor who helps Western critic to prepare the theory for explaining the non-

Western culture. That is, a native expert of Korean or Malaysian cinema only provides

historical documents, hard facts, the ‘authentic’ meaning of cultural nuances and the

critic, preferably Western, builds the theory upon it. In this process, Homi Bhaba

observes, “the Other loses its power to signify, to negate, to initiate its desire, to split its

‘sign’ of identity, to establish its own institutional and oppositional discourses.” 94

The development of Film Studies as a discipline and its negotiation with non-Western

cinemas can be scrutinized keeping in mind the discourses regarding the political and

cultural relationship between the West and the non-West. Film Studies as a discipline

emerged in the 1970s equipped with the Lacanian and Althusserian poststructuralim and

Metzian semiotics of cinema. The British journal Screen was instrumental in hosting the

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new discourses regarding cinema that contributed to the establishment of the new

discipline. Despite its conscious attempt to demystify the ‘conventional’ West as the

‘locus of meaning and value’, Screen theory showed its limitation regarding the study of

non-Western cinemas; even though in many ways it has inspired the spread of Film

Studies in the non-West. Yoshimoto says, “[I]t is enough to say that the success and

demise of Screen theory came from its inability to critique the cultural assumptions that

underpinned a certain fetishization of cinematic specificity”.95 In the UK, USA and

Canada Screen theory has played pivotal role in the development of Film Studies as a

discipline. In search of cinematic specificity and of the relative autonomy of the text, film

theory and. Film Studies lost sight of the political and historical dimensions of film

culture to a great extent, which is reflected in Western Film Studies’ huge failure in

theorizing Latin American, African and Asian cinemas. In the case of Latin American

cinemas, for example, a large number of Western film scholars contributed valuable

insights, but their work has nothing really to do with Film Studies proper.

Asian cinemas were not really placed in the disciplinary canon of Film Studies, though

critics often studied Asian autuers sporadically. Only Japanese cinema has been studied

rigorously as an ‘alternative mode of representation’. But as Yoshimoto comments, “This

search for alternative modes of address and concomitant subject-formations miserably

failed because the terms of comparison remained the ones dictated by Hollywood films.

Hollywood cinema’s mode of narration silently continued to function as the classical and

institutional mode of narration and representation”.96 He underlines the lack of presence

of the ‘terms of comparison’ of non-Western national cinemas in Film Studies. The

meteoric rise of Asian cinemas in last two decades indicates the end of the domination of

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Hollywood both in economy and representation. This opens up new theoretical

possibilities in Film Studies in the form of trans/inter-Asian frames rather than socalled

comparative studies. But, why trans/inter-Asian frames of film studies have been chosen

over the Comparative Film Studies must be explained. The problematic is set as the

following. First, will the proposed Comparative Film Studies be able to encounter the

power relations between the West and the non-West, Hollywood and Asian cinemas,

global and the local/national? And second, how will Comparative Film Studies envisage

its canon with regard to Asian cinema?

Three broad possibilities regarding which two are to be compared may arise. First,

comparison of two Western cinemas, say French cinema and Hollywood Second, the

comparison of one Western cinema and one non-Western cinema. And third, it is a

comparison of two Asian cinemas. The first one is not critical because already there

exists formed canons as tool to be applied in the practice of comparison. The second one

is dangerous as it involves a pre-existing power relation and a hegemonic hierarchy

related to the two cultures subject to comparison. The third would be the most radical one

as there is no existing canon at all. But unless the second problem is resolved successfully

one cannot enter into the third since the agency of the comparatist may carry the same

danger from which the cross-cultural analysis suffered.

Then how can a Comparative Film Studies which is free from the inhibitions of World

Cinema, be framed? “Comparative studies”, Yoshimoto says, “does not necessarily mean

that two or more national cinemas or types of cinema are compared to each

other…comparative studies can introduce in film scholarship a historically definable

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understanding of national cinema in its unique cultural specificity, that is to say, not as

the ‘other’ of some other national cinema which, for its commercially dominant and

aesthetically influential position on a global scale, is equated to ‘the cinema’.”9766 He

suggests that Trans-Asian cinema studies can help highlight the necessity of introducing a

genuine comparative perspective into Film Studies in Asia. As long as Film Studies as a

discipline is dominated by the study of national cinemas with the ‘comprehensive’

knowledge of World Cinema which overlaps with the same theoretical paradigms used by

either area studies or the transnational studies and cross-cultural analysis of acquisition of

linguistic, historical and cultural expertise, genuine comparison is impossible.98

The emergence of the trans-Asian frame in Asian cinema opens up some new radical

possibilities. “And it is that”, Yoshimoto says “a notion of trans-Asian cinemas of Asia –

a comparative approach to the cinemas of Asia in relation to each other as constitutive

players in the global cinemas – can, at last, begin to oppose, to the benefit of the study of

any cinema, including that produced in Hollywood”.99

New Asian cinemas as both textual and extra-textual affairs help us surmise some points:

one, it produces the post-Hollywood age of cinema, two; it initiates a large panorama of

varied reception; and three, there emerges a trans-Asian frame that opposes the idea of

the World Cinema as a comprehensive paradigm. The basic premise on which Willemen

constructs his approach is cultures’ encounter with capitalism. Capitalism is based on

market, and market mobilizes people. As DVD culture appears as the dominant force of

mobilization, it brings a milieu of new exhibition-reception relationship. It may be that

pirated DVD circulation and copy (mechanical reproduction) culture disorient capitalist

- 53 -
mode of marketing or may be it is indulged by capitalism as a new strategy of operating

culture industry. Whatever it is, desired or undesired in legal terms; DVD culture

mobilizes the audience and consequently deterritorializes exhibition and circulation of

films. But if film scholars over-emphasize their potential in the global dissemination of

Asian cinema, following fashionable cultural studies discourses which invests much in

reading a film text as autonomous entity without referring to the discourses related to

historical development of cultural specificities, research on national cinemas in Asia and

the small budget independent filmmakers’ works, which often find themselves existing

against the logic of global capitalism and global marketing, will suffer.

The research based on a trans-Asian frame, on the other hand, is able to address the

international as well as the local/national discourses regarding Asian cinema. ‘Trans-

Asian cinema’ is put forward as anti-thetical to both the categories ‘Asian cinema’ and

‘transnational Asian cinema’. ‘Asian cinema’ is a much older category which tries to find

‘Asianness’ in the films read under the rubric of Asian cinema. Transnationalism in Asian

cinema criticism focuses principally on the deployment of transnational capital in cinema,

transnational circulation of DVDs and trans-border migration of people and culture.

Transnationalism places transnational Asian cinema as the imaginary alternative to

national cinema and in this way reaffirms the agenda of transnational capital. Chris Berry

describes transnationalism’s inability to address the discourses regarding nation-state as

“the frustration of the slippery quality of the ‘transnational’”. On the other side trans-

Asian criticism is a transformative, reflexive practice, in which the production of films

and critical discourses are firmly intertwined.”100

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The trans-Asian culture is not a historically alien phenomenon in East-Asian region. In

the resent decades, the historical legacy of trans-Asian flow of capital and culture has

been traced by the historians. Marxist historians like Andre Gunder Frank and Giovanni

Arrighi explored the history of Sono-centric mari-time trade in the East-Asian region.

They have employed Marxist concepts about mercantile capital, socio-economic function

of labour and their role in the historical construction of modernity in East-Asia. Japanese

postcolonial historian Takeshi Hamashita has also contributed significantly in this field.

He has investigated the role of the Sino-centric tribute-trade system and the role of

Chinese diaspora in the history of East-Asian trade. Their researches reveal the existence

of an age-old powerful network of the flow of human being and commodity in the East-

Asian region. The recent works of Frank, Arrighi and Hamashita helps us to understand a

trans-Asian frame of the economic and social history of East-Asia.101 A very powerful

mari-time trade network which started centuries before the coming of the Western

modernity and of the concept of Western statehood, has continued, though in a much

subdued form, even in the era of the Cold War and now in the time of neo-liberal

globalization it has been revived in a new form. Since this kind of transaction had been

there since long before the coming of the idea of the Western statehood, it should not be

called a simple ‘transnational’ phenomenon; rather it can be understand as trans-Asian

relationship.

In order to re-interpret the modernization of East-Asia, both Frank and Hamashita agree

that the expanding European World Economy (based on the nation-nation relationship)

could never ‘incorporate’ the Sino-centric tribute-trade system in East-Asia. They argue

- 55 -
that though these East-Asian nations were never formed unity like NATO or EU, the

regions, countries and cities located along the perimeter of each sea-zone “are close

enough to influence one another”.102 Arrighi comments, “When the Sino-centric tribute

began to wither away under the combined impact of endogenous nationalism and

exogenous incorporation in the Eurocentric interstate system, these interstitial business

communities did not vanish into thin air. On the contrary they continue to constitute an

“invisible” but powerful connector of the East-Asian regional economy.”103

The comparative East-West experience tells us, “In the eighteenth century, trade and

markets were more developed in East-Asia in general, and in China in particular, than

they were in Europe.”104 Arrighi refers to Kaoru Sugihara; Sugihara explicates that from

sixteenth through eighteenth century an unprecedented and unparallel ‘industrious’, as

opposed to capital-intensive industrial, revolution took place, which was based on

labour-intensive technology, local as well as huge regional market and trade mobility.105

It is argued that the quqsi-state and city-state status of East-Asian nations have facilitate

the existence of trade network, though in the informal plane, even in the era of nation-

state. Among the East-Asian nations South Korea lives in constant hope or fear of being

re-united with its northern counterpart; Taiwan lives in constant hope or fear of being

master or servant of the PRC; Japan is juridically sovereign but militarily and politically

dependent on the USA – these facts contribute to the quasi-state nature of the East-Asian

nations. And finally the city-states like Hong Kong and Singapore strongly contribute to

this quasi-state nature of East-Asian countries.106

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In the 1980s, apart from foreign direct investment in Japan, the domestic and regional

multilayered subcontracting network became powerful. Giovanni Arrighi says, “The

overseas Chinese are the oil – the lubricant that makes the deal possible – and the

Japanese are the vinegar – the technology, capital, and management that really packs a

punch..”107 In the same decade, as the PRC has again opened their economy up to the

world market, the Chinese diaspora again become powerful in the region. The historical

continuity of a regional system of the flow of capital in East-Asia, in the form of tribute

trade, subcontracting and diasporic network, has been facilitating the flow of people,

technology, culture and modernity all over the region. The growth of the neo-liberal

global capital in East-Asia is dependent on the historical foundation of distribution

network, which creates unique formal as well as informal mobility of commodity and

people. Sugihara explains, “If the European miracle was a miracle of production…. the

East-Asian miracle has been a miracle of distribution.”108

We can conjecture a hypothetic relationship between the age-old East-Asian distribution

network and the dissemination of pirated dvd all over the East and South-East Asian

region. Lawrence Liang refers to Kelly Hu and comments, “This technological emulation

of East-Asia by other parts of Asia evident in case of the vcd however has a deeper

history; and it is perhaps here that we may start considering the question of [east] Asia in

relation to piracy, technology and cultural flows […] the East-Asian miracle and

Electronic boom […] was also a very distinct modernity, which did not necessarily place

the West as it’s point of reference.”109 And this modernity is closely associated with copy

culture and rapid distribution and cross-border flow of pirated dvd/ vcd. This distribution

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network is spatially trans-Asian, legally informal and operates beyond the institutional

frameworks of distribution permitted by transnational culture industry and by the State.

This phenomenon very clearly lies beyond the brand name, trade mark, patent and copy-

right which have epitomized the capital-intensive industrial production-distribution of

(cultural) commodity. Rather this phenomenon strikes a chord of the legacy of industrial,

labour intensive, quasi-artisanal production system and the trans-Asian flow of capital,

commodity and culture as well as lively local markets. I would like to quote Lawrence

Liang once again, “The circulation of dvd traverses diverse worlds, from that of monetary

exchange to barter to gift to ubiquitous reproduction, and acts of circulation always

exceed the monetary idea of exchange value.”110 Perhaps copy culture and the culture of

dissemination of dvd/ vcd, have been in the one hand, reinforced with the legacy of age-

old East Asian type of cross-border distribution network and on the other hand, have been

endorsed by the peoples’ desire to communicate and to exchange cultural commodities

beyond the prohibition imposed by authoritarian states of East-Asia in the era of Cold

War. The dialectical relationship between the historical legacy of alternative distribution

network and prohibition on cultural communication imposed by authoritarian states may

be explored in order to understand the phenomenon of dvd copy culture in East and

South-East Asia. From this point a trans-Asian frame of investigating East-Asian film

culture, which allows the critic to understand the contemporary culture in the dialectics of

cross-border and national might emerge.

Trans-Asian framework never places recently emerged transnational affairs in Asian

cinema beyond nation-state but puts them in the multiplicity of other discourses,

including the discourse related to reformulation of nation-state. I would like to furnish

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two examples. The dynamics of Taiwan cinema, for example, cannot be gauged without

measuring the complexity of distribution-exhibition of Taiwan cinema within its territory

and outside. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh in her article ‘Taiwan: Popular Cinema’s Disappearing

Act’, observes that domestic market has been dominated by Hollywood blockbusters and

the distributors are extremely reluctant to release Taiwan-made films as Hollywood

blockbusters have never flopped in the local market. Widely acclaimed directors from

Taiwan therefore must depend on their film festival release and trans-territorial

dissemination of DVD copies.111 A great impetus of making so-called art cinema in

Taiwan, as indicated by Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, is by and large coming from a particular

market equation that forecloses the release of Taiwan filmmakers’ films in the domestic

market. The way she explains the phenomenon of trans-territorial production and

dissemination of Taiwan art-cinema follows the trans-Asian frame of criticism. She does

not agree to contemporary transnationalist monolithic logic that trans-territorialism is an

inevitable trend of the globalization. She derives her logic from the multiplicity of

discourses in which cinema industry in Taiwan, censorship, national policy, global capital

all contribute to the account.

Trans-Asian frame of criticism, as it believes in Asian cinemas and not in Asian cinema,

addresses minor-modes in cinematic practices including trans-cinemas like amateur

videos, personal videos shot in webcam and circulated in Youtube. Korean cinema, for

instance, also has been undergoing a change over the last 20 years, which cannot be

gauged without studying the massively growing cine-mania there. Kim Soyoung in her

article ‘From Cine-mania to Blockbusters and Trans-cinema: Reflections on Recent

South Korean Cinema’ argues that the phenomenal rise of cine-mania in South Korea,

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which unifies different groups with different positions under the rubric of the desire for

cinema, creates a dynamics in which “the new political agency may be found in the

topography of cultural studies”.112 And the rise of the new cinema of South Korea thus is

profoundly related to the emergence of cine-mania. The proliferation of digital films

made by the independent filmmakers which Soyoung studied under the rubric of ‘trans-

cinema’ is a decisive issue in the development of new Korean cinema. Soyoung says:

“Trans-cinema proposes that digital and net cinema, LCD screens (installed in subways,

taxis and buses) and gigantic electrified display boards should be seen as spaces into

which cinema theories and criticism should intervene”.113

I would suggest the meaning of new cinema is not generated only in the body of the film

texts. The film scholarship with which one can read any film including Asian cinema as a

part of ‘the cinema’ is rapidly losing its ground with more and more emphasis on Asian

national cinemas, trans-Asian cinema and the trans-cinema in Asia. Janet Staiger

observes that in cinema studies canons are formulated with the intentions of film

criticism, politics of selection of representative film texts and intervention of Film

Studies as an academic discipline.114 Critical emphasis on trans-Asian cinema and trans-

cinema in Asia, resist strict canonization of Asian cinema. This will facilitate the

emergence of new methods of reading contemporary Asian cinemas.

1
Nick Browne, introduction to New Chinese Cinema: Forms Identities Politics, ed. Nick Browne, Paul G
Picowicz, Vivian Sobchak and Esther Yau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) p.5.

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2
ibid, p.5

3
ibid, p.2

4
Paul Willemen , “The National Revisited”, in Theorising National Cinema, ed. Valentina Vitali and Paul
Willemen ( London: BFI, 2006) p.33.

5
see Depesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Oxford
New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

6
Dipesh Chakrabarty, op cit. (2001), p.3-23.

7
see Donald Richie, Ozu (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).

8
see Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space”, in Question of Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1981).

9
see Fredric Jameson, “Remapping Taipei”, in Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World
System (London: BFI, 1992) pp. 114 - 157.

10
see Paul Willemen, “Detouring Through Korean Cinema”, Inter Asia Cultural Studies 3:2 (2002): 167-
185.

11
see M Madhava Prasad on Paul Willemen’s ‘Detouring Through Korean Cinema’ (unpublished paper,
2003).

12
see Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature”, New Left Review II:1 (2002): 54-68.

13
see Willemen, op cit. (2002).

14
see ibid.

15
Rey Chow, “A Phantom Discipline”, Modern Language Association, PMLA, 116:5 (Oct., 2001):1386-
1395, pp. 1392-1393.
16
see Samir Amin, Spectres of Capitalism: A Critique of Current Intellectual Fashions, trans. Shane Henry
Mage (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998).

17
see Wimal Dissanayake, “Issues in World Cinema.”, in The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, ed. John Hill
and Pamela Church Gibson (Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

18
see M Madhava Prasad, “Melodramatic Polities?” Inter Asia Cultural Studies 2 :3 (2001): 459-466.

19
ibid, p.460.

20
ibid.

21
Peter Rist, “Camera Movement in Japanese Silent Films”, Asian Cinema 14:2 (2003):197-205, p.200.

22
ibid, pp. 200-201.

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23
see David Desser, “The Filmmaker of all Seasons” in Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide, ed. Dimitris
Eleftheriotis and Gary Needham ( Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) pp. 17-27.
24
see Willemen, op cit. (2002).
25
see Janki Nair, , “Tipu Sultan, History, Painting and the Battle for ‘Perspective’’, Studies in History 22 :1
(2006): 97-143.

26
see M. Madhava Prasad, “Towards Real Subsumption?”, in Ideology of The Hindi Film, A Historical
Construction ( New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).

27
see Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington
(London: Penguin Books, 2001) pp. 166 – 199.
28
see Partha Chatterjee, “Nationalist Thought and Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?” , The Partha
Chetterjee Omnibus (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).
29
see Harry Harootunian “Remembering the Historical Present”, Critical Inquiry 33 (Spring 2007): 471-
494.
30
Tom Bottomore ed. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Indian Reprint: Maya Blackwell Worldview, 2002)
p. 96.
31
see Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progressive Publishers,
1989).
32
Karl Marx, “The British Rule in India” www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm (accessed
on 26-11-2007, 1.30 pm of IST).
33
see see Lectures on the History of Philosophy by G W F Hegel, 1805-6, trans. E S Haldane, 1892-6,
www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpconten.htm (accessed on 26-11-2007, 1.30 pm of
IST).
34
Karl Marx, “The British Rule in India”, op cit.
35
ibid.
36
ibid
37
Karl Marx, Capital: a Critique of Political Economy, vol1 (Moscow: Progressive Publishers, 1954) p.337.
38
ibid, p.140.
39
ibid. 337.
40
ibid. 338.
41
ibid. 338.
.
42
ibid. 339.
43
ibid.
44
ibid. 315.

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45
ibid. 316.
46
Karl Marx, op. cit. (1954) p.105.
47
see Karl Marx, op. cit. (1989).
48
see Pranav Jani, “Karl Marx, Eurocentrism, and the 1857 Revolt in British India” in Marxism, Modernity,
and Postcolonial Studies, ed. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), p.84.
49
ibid, p.86.
50
Ian Cummings, Marx, Engels and National Movements (London: Taylor & Francis, 1980) p.75.
51
Marxist thinkers wrote a number of articles on the national question, for example, Rosa Luxemburg “The
National Question and Autonomy” (1908-9), Kautsky “Nationality and Internationality” (1907-8) Lenin
“The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1914), and “Imperialism: The
Highest Stage of Capital”(1916), see www.marxists.org/archive.

52
see V. I. Lenin, “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination”,
www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/ch01.htm (accessed on 26-11-2007, 1.30 pm of IST)

53
see V. I Lenin, “What is meant by the self-determination of Nations”, op cit.

54
Kim Soyoung’ s remarks in response to Moinak Biswas’ discussion on the panel titled “The Artistic
Adventure of Asian Cinema: Alternatives and Institutions” (at the International Seminar on ‘New Asian
Cinema: Trans-Asian Frames’, organised by Dept of Film Studies, Jadavpur University in 13-15
September,2007).
55
see Sun Ge, “How does Asia mean? (Part I)”, trans. Hui Shiu-Lun and Lau Kinchi, Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies 1:1 (2000): 13-47.
56
Ibid.
57
Wang Hui and Matthew A. Hale, “The politics of imagining Asia: a genealogical analysis”, Inter-Asia
Cultural Studies 8:1 (2007): 1-33, p. 3.
58
see Sun Ge, op cit. (2000).
59
Matsumoto Sannosuke, “National Mission”, The Emergence of Imperial Japan: Self-Defense or
Calculated Aggression?, ed. Marlene Mayo (Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1970) p.60.
60
see ibid.
61
Wang Hui and Matthew A. Hale, op cit (2007) p.10.
62
Naoki Sakai, “ “You Asians”: On the Historical Role of the West and Asia Binary”, The South Atlantic
Quarterly 99:4 (Fall 2000): 789-817, p.792.
63
ibid.
64
ibid.

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65
ibid. 793.

66
see Colin Chambers ed. The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre (London New York:
Continuum, 2002) pp.154 – 156.

67
see Mei Sun, “Xiqu’s Problems in Contemporary China”, Journal of Contemporary China 3:6 (1994)
pp.74-83.
68
see ibid.
69
see ibid.
70
see ibid.
71
see ibid, p181.
72
see ibid.
73
see ibid.
74
see Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (New York and London: Routledge, 2004).
75
see “Flying Colours”, Zhang Yimou interviewed by Michael Berry in Speaking in Images: Interviews
with the Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, ed. Michael Berry ( New York: Columbia University Press,
New York, 2005) pp. 109-140.
76
see ibid, p. 118.
77
see ibid, p. 125.
78
see Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation ( New York: Columbia
University Press, 2006).
79
see ibid
80
see Fredric Jameson, op cit. (1992).
81
ibid, p 118.
82
ibid.
83
see Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass Producing Traditions: Europe 1870 – 1914” in The Invention of Tradition, ed.
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
84
see Dipesh Chakraborty, op cit (2001).
85
see Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “The Difficulty of Being Radical: the Discipline of Film Studies and the
Postcolonial World Order”, Boundary 18:3 (1991):242 – 257.
86
see ibid. p 243.
.
87
see ibid. p 244.
88
see ibid. p 243.

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89
see E Ann Kaplan, “Probelematizing cross-cultural Analysis: the Case of Woman in the recent Chinese
Cinema” in Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide, ed. Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Gary Needham
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) pp. 156-167.
90
ibid, p 157.
91
ibid.
92
see M. Yoshimoto, op cit (1991) p. 245.
93
ibid, pp. 247- 248.
94
ibid, pp. 250.
95
ibid, pp. 256.
96
see ibid.
97
see ibid.
98
see ibid.
99
see ibid.
100
see Chris Berry and Laikwan Pang, “Introduction, or, What’s is in ‘s’’’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2:1
(2008): 2-8.
101
see Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, eds.,Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
102
Giovanni Arrighi, “The Rise of East Asia and the Withering away of the interstate system”, Marxism,
Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies, ed. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002) p22.
103
ibid. p.24.
104
Giovanni Arrighi, “States, Market, and Capitalism, East and West”, Positions 15:2 (Fall 2007): 251-284,
p.254.
105
ibid. p.258.
106
Giovanni Arrighi, op.cit. (2002), pp.33-34.
107
ibid, 28.
108
Giovanni Arrighi, op. cit. (2007), p.278.

109
Lawrence Liang, “Meet John Doe’s Order: Piracy, Temporality and the Question of Asia”, Journal of the
Moving Image, Number 7 (December, 2008): 67-84, p.78.

110
ibid. p.75.

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111
see Anna Tereska Ciecko ed., Contemporary Asian Cinema: Popular Culture in Global Frame (Oxford
and New York: BERG, 2006) pp. 156 – 168

112
see Kim Soyoung, “From Cine-mania to Blockbusters and Trans-cinema: Reflections on Recent South
Korean Cinema” in Theorizing National Cinema, Willemen and Vitali ed. op cit., (2006).
113
see ibid.
114
see Janet Staiger, “Politics of Film Canons”,Cinema Journal 24:3 (1985): 4-23, 1985.

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