ABSTRACT
As one peruses the Anglophone literature and course syllabi on “world” and “transnational” cinema, one is struck by an overriding Eurocentrism in both structure and approach. Books and articles in these areas rarely give genuine voice to the non-West, even when claiming or expressing desire to do so. A preponderance of these texts presume a North American and West/Central European readership, whereupon their focus becomes how to teach and conduct scholarship about, and how to make, films in the face of “other” cinemas that are outside the “West”—in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the South Pacific Rim. One result of this presumption is a preoccupation with Western responses to non-Western films and the peoples, societies, histories, and ideologies they depict, while non-Western responses and non-Western concerns—toward the “East” as much as the “West”—are elided from the discourse as if by default. By this tack, which simulates cultural openness, the historical positioning of the non-West as “Other” is retained within a less overtly racist context that, among other things, limits engagement with cultural difference to cursory pathos (admiration or pity) while discouraging its deep-structural understanding and sustained critique on the patronizing excuse that these may perpetuate attitudes of cultural imperialism (eminent domain and social arrogance), which play into the hands of the oppressors. Consequently, the non-West is defused of the fullness with which it is experienced and understood by non-Westerners throughout their own non-Western regions.
