1. Spaghetti Westerns and Asian Cinema: Perspectives on Global Cultural Flows
- Author
-
Ivo Ritzer
- Abstract
This chapter aims to undertake a consideration of Italian Westerns from the perspective of theories of cultural globalization, emphasising the fact that Italian Westerns never were exclusively an Italian product. It takes the Italian Western's iterative negotiation with Asian identities as a case study to chart multidimensional routes of cultural transfer. Deploying scholarly approaches around the ‘transnational’, it frames the Italian Western as a junction in a global network of cultural exchange, both borrowing from and influencing Asian cinematic discourses. Using The Warrior's Way (Sngmoo Lee, 2010) as a key example, the chapter considers the Italian Western's most significant legacy as its decoupling of the Western from its ideological and historical reference points, freeing the format up for myriad, heterogeneous cultural contexts.
- Published
- 2016