(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
This paper questions whether the “minority model” in Hollywood representations of Asians – the
stereotypical or absent images of Asians – still holds true with the advent of internationalized
East Asian films. Countering the ideological hold of American media industry on Asian audience
in the twenty-first century, the thesis hypothesizes that at the East-West media divides the socalled
centripetal and centrifugal patterns of signifying dissemination destabilize the Western
assertion that East Asian media industries are defined by centripetal flows just as the thesis will
argue that East Asia’s constitutional structures are no longer centripetal, previously conceived
dialectically different from that of the centrifugal force of Western constitutional politics. The
thesis is predicated on the Latin etymology of “centre”, arguing that the word “centripetal” is an
inaccurate use in the description of Pan-Asian film productions because it gestures to a “centreseeking”
quality. They are more precisely defined as global filmmaking, suggesting both
centripetal and centrifugal forces as consequences of disjuncture and difference, prompting
critiques on the political economy of Western mediatization. This interpretation is aided by Tu
Wei-ming’s reading of cultural China and Arjun Appadurai’s global cultural flows in their
constructions of the social imaginary. Instead of just reading East Asian politics from
international relations per se, the thesis works with the cross-cultural issues inherent to William
Callahan’s “Logic of Governance” by affirming East Asia’s “colonization in reverse”, an
analogy attendant to internationally well-received East-West translated or collaborated films.
This paper works with the Ring series (1998-2005) and Death Note: L Change the World (2008)
by Hideo Nakata and Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006), an adaptation of Infernal Affairs
(2002), in order to verify the thesis; they are not only metaphors of the postmodern crises of
values but also instances of how aesthetics can be interpreted in two ways, denotatively and
connotatively. The first gives us the literal meaning bound to a referent, the filmic plot, which is
then raised to a different level of signification. A complex reading of the films’ symbolic is given
when the aesthetic meanings of the above-mentioned movies lead to the second order of
signification illustrating the underlying political messages in and through their apocalyptic
anticipation. Fredric Jameson’s and Slavoj Zizek’s readings of Western culture and politics are
also exploited here in order to read the ways in which culture and politics overlap in East Asia. I
shall argue that implicit to the East-West relations described is the lack of attention given to the
interpellative processes that East Asian filmmaking promotes, made evident by the recent
deployment of Japanese cinematography in the West, the collaboration with directors and actors
from the East and filmmaking appealing to audiences from the East. These processes disrupt the
homogenizing effect of Americanization, arguably an insidiously negative effect of
globalization. The discussion will also demonstrate how interpellation can be a positive response
to possible neo-colonial acculturation driven by internationalization. Yet the thesis will also
explore if the very same globalizing and internationalizing operations can be used to promote an
awareness of ethnic and cultural diversity making us question whether phrases such as
“multiculturalism”, “integration”, “rights and responsibilities”, “social cohesion” and “unity in
diversity” associated with Western liberal democracy have similar inferences in East Asian
contexts.
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