Pitfalls of Cross-Cultural Analysis: Chinese Wenyi Film and Melodrama

In East Asia political decolonization of European and American rule was largely completed in the mid-1960s, yet intellectual and epistemological decolonization remains shaky. This circumstance has to do with the region’s continuing economic dependence on the U.S.; “soft power” transmission of Euro-American values over the globe, sometimes considered synonymous with globalization itself; and for students, scholarships from American graduate programs still entice, further entrenching Western knowledge paradigms, and making decolonization at practical and unconscious levels yet more problematic. Western domination, whether in thought patterns, languages, technology, lifestyle, values, or sexuality, is ubiquitous. So in discussing the options and means of intellectual/ epistemological decolonization, we need to venture beyond the formal properties of colonialism. We need to look into the state of our intellectual investment and examine the presumptions of Western theory in our academic life and intellectual pursuits.