Critical methodologies evolve, a more recent group of assumptions replacing an older. At present Western approaches to Eastern cinema are newly crowded with postcolonial stances, the problems of perceiving the "other," the perils of Orientalism, the clutter of genre studies, and much more. One way out is to machete your way through. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, a U.S.-resident Japanese film scholar, has honed a two-way critical tool that divides foreign critics of Asian cinema into two groups.
The first is the area-study specialist who knows the culture and the language, who favors conventional linear narrative and historical chronology, and is, in effect, empirical. The second is the theorist who practices detachment from the object of study, and whose importance is the result of his or her unfamiliarity with the native discourse. By thus radically de-contextualizing Asian "national" cinema, they displace it from its marginal status to the forefront of contemporary film scholarship.
The real division in Western scholarship on Asian film is thus, as perceived by Yoshimoto, not created by any West/East dichotomy but by the opposition between history and theory. A problem, however, is that the two approaches get along with each other quite well. Yoshimoto finds this suspicious.
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