Theorizing East Asian Minor Cinema

Abstract

Theorizing East Asian Minor Cinema Woosung Kang (bio) Why East Asia? Ever since Karl Marx referred to the Asiatic mode of production, the whole continent has often been characterized as the origin of modern capitalist social formation. As is well known, Marx once distinguished Asiatic landforms from all other precapitalist social formations. He specifically had in mind "oriental despotism and the propertylessness" in ancient Asia, "this clan or communal property system" that was "created mostly by a combination of manufactures and agriculture within the small commune" (Marx 1973, 473). Regardless of the historical evidence of such a primitive form of production, the main purpose of Marx's Asian reference appears to have been to emphasize the transitory nature of modern bourgeois society, thereby showcasing that capitalist modernity is not a natural phenomenon but a historically specific form that has to "give place to the next higher (and final) stage in the systematic historical process of the economic formation of society" (Lubasz 1984, 457). For Marx, the Asiatic mode of production constitutes, if anything, both the norm and the exception to his systematic theory of human history. It demonstrates the embryonic stage from which nineteenth-century European bourgeois society derived, but it is also to be understood as the deviant form of social formation that is not fully developed into capitalist economy. Asia has simultaneously been conceived of as prehistorical and premodern. Although Marx's polemical argument emphasizes the former intent, it becomes inevitable that the latter has been appropriated by the later theorists of Orientalism to justify the European intervention of modernity into premodern Asian territories. Since the seventeenth century, modernity in Asia has predominantly been compared with European modernity, and as a result, Asian communities have had to suffer various forms of colonialism. Indeed, Asian colonial modernity is frequently defined as the obverse of European modernity, lagging behind—or lacking entirely, for that matter—the universal narrative of civilizational development. In particular, East Asian communities, or what is often called "Sinophone culture" or "trans-Chinese tributary system," are usually described to be [End Page 205] the epitome of premodern feudalism tightly yoked to the familial system of economy (Hamashita 2008, 12). The violent disintegration of the Qing empire in the nineteenth century by European national imperialism was the case in point. Since then, modernity in East Asia means the Westernization by colonialism according to European standards, thereby modernizing the premodern system of Asiatic feudalism. The exception in this process was Japan, which, because it was situated at the fringe of trans-Chinese tribute system and quick to open to European modernity, voluntarily turned its society into a European one earlier than other East Asian societies (Hamashita 2001, 84). The upshot of the colonization of Chinese empire by European national imperialism and later by modernized Japan was the conundrum in which every community in East Asia constantly strives to catch up with European modernity and, at the same time, fiercely resist the very process of colonial modernization. As a result, East Asian countries find themselves faced with the often contradictory task of at once rapidly modernizing their premodern societies and seeking national independence against Western national imperialisms, including the regional superpower of Japan. Just at the moment when European nationalism in the form of colonial imperialism was clearly in decline, colonized East Asian countries strengthened their nationalism for the purpose of rapid modernization. Ironically, this rise of "belated" nationalisms has defined East Asian communities at least since the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. Indeed, colonial modernity in East Asia has less to do with the direct occupation of Western imperialism than with the intraregional intervention of Japanese empire. That's why the dominant form of East Asian nationalism and colonial modernity is more anti-Japanese than anti-Western. In fact, the idea of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere or Pan-Asianism by Japanese regional empire was the double-edged sword that partly helped sponsor the nationalism of colonized societies in East Asia and partly compelled the subjugation of national interests to the geopolitical identity of East Asia against Western imperialism. The desire behind the slogan of Co-Prosperity Sphere is clear: Japan, as a new regional empire...