Wednesday 17 March 2010

No Film Studies in Japan?

Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto's "The University Disciplines, National Identity: Why Is There No Film Studies in Japan?" South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 99, No. 4, Fall 2000, pp. 697-713.

"Literature departments in Japan," Yoshimoto claims, "never embraced film or study of film as part of their intellectual endeavours." What is particularly puzzling and strange is "the absence of any institutionally sustained engagement with film in American studies in Japan." (p. 699-700) "English," in the Japanese historical and political contexts Yoshimoto suggests, "is an accomplice ofkokubungaku [national literature] in the construction of national subjects." The discipline of English, he argued, "divides the world into self-enclosed nation-states, and communicative model of translation that underlies the discipline constructs the relationship of equivalency and compatibility between Japan and the West." (p. 702)

Despite all these, I can't help asking: no Japanese film studies or simply English/American film studies?

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