The institutionalization of ‘Chinese’ cinema as an academic discipline

Abstract

There is a recent academic trend in the studies of Chinese cinema of reiterating the problematic definition of Chinese cinema itself. Much recent scholarship challenges the very notion of ‘Chinese’ as a cultural and (trans)national identity, and they resist taking the term ‘Chinese’ for granted, but the definition and the problematization of such only persist. There are three main approaches to the problem detected in recent scholarship: the assertion and the problematization of the specific model of ‘Chinese national cinema’; Chinese cinema as a category composed of different regional cinemas; and the global and transnational dimensions of Chinese cinema. Through a survey of these scholarly trends, this article demonstrates the strong academic drive to institutionalize Chinese cinema as a coherent and legitimate academic discipline, but this institutionalization is achieved through the negation of the very name of ‘Chinese cinema’ itself.