Introduction

This book is intended as a sequel to my most recent book The Asian Cinema Experience: Styles, Spaces, Theory (2013: Routledge), continuing certain themes from the previous book in arguing for a refocus of cinema studies from an Asian perspective. The topic of the Western is proposed here as one that can fit into a refocus or rediscovery of cinematic genres, from an Asian perspective. This is not a book on the traditional form of the Western as it is produced in America (or Hollywood), it is a book on the genre seen from a very broad critical scope covering the spectrum of West and East or even North and South. It will deal with the Western as it is produced in Asian cinemas (principally South Korea, China, Japan, India, Thailand), and it will go on to examine the Western, produced in America and other global settings (the Italian Western, the Australian Western). I will reexamine American Westerns through a comparative analytical framework in order to suggest a sense of rediscovering the classical Western from an AsianOther subaltern perspective, evoking and employing Asian philosophical ideas and values as well as ancient Asian myths-or simply just to consider the Western from an alternative critical sensibility which will be perceptibly different from Euro-American perspectives. The aim of tackling a genre study of the Western such as this one is to offer a counter-discourse, a substitute vision of a genre generally thought to be native to the United States of America and apparently indigenous to its culture.