Perhaps you’ve heard of the World Cinema Project, which is making foreign language films, largely unknown outside their native countries, available on Blu-ray discs and DVDs. Established in 2007 by director Martin Scorsese, the project has thus far restored and distributed 50 obscure, overlooked and neglected films from 28 countries in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Central America, South America and the Middle East.
This extraordinary preservation project has not been without critics. One critique, for example, focuses on the paucity of works by female directors, the prevalence of narratives that emphasize female suffering and the number of hackneyed love triangle plots, which grows out of the project’s concern with formal aspects of filmmaking rather than plot or themes.
Yet despite these criticisms, there can be no doubt that the project exemplifies a growing concern with internationalizing our conception of the humanities, a concern also manifest within the academy in the rapid growth of world history and world literature.
If the humanities are to be truly inclusive, it’s not enough to study previously marginalized and exploited groups within Western societies. It’s imperative to ensure that the humanities’ subject matter become more explicitly international and cross-cultural.
The future of the humanities is global and comparative. Propelled by demography and economic and technological interconnectedness, the humanities need to forsake Eurocentrism and national insularity and adopt a more international, cross-cultural perspective that focuses on differences and similarities within and across cultures and regions.
So argues Wiebke Denecke, the German, Chinese, Danish, Hungarian, Japanese and U.S.-trained professor of literature at MIT, in a recently published essay that deserves far greater attention than it has received.
Having received an education of extraordinary breadth, in Japanology, Korean studies, philosophy, medicine and Sinology, Denecke, one of the editors of The Norton Anthology of World Literature, proposes to re-energize the humanities by internationalizing its subject matter and championing methods that involve systematic comparisons and contrasts.
At a time when fundamentalist nationalism is on the rise in many parts of the world, Denecke argues persuasively that the humanities have a special role to play in combating narrowness and provinciality. “To create more equal societies in the present,” she maintains, “we need to create more equality for other pasts—and learn from all they offer.”