Mechademia

Latest release: November 15, 2014
Series
3
Books

About this ebook series

The themes of war and time are intertwined in unique ways in Japanese culture, freighted as that nation is with the multiple legacies of World War II: the country’s militarization, its victories and defeats, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the uneasy pacifism imposed by the victors. Delving into topics ranging from the production of wartime propaganda to the multimedia adaptations of romance narrative, contributors to the fourth volume in the Mechademia series address the political, cultural, and technological continuum between war and the everyday time of orderly social productivity that is reflected, confronted, and changed in manga, anime, and other forms of Japanese popular culture.

Grouped thematically, the essays in this volume explore the relationship between national sovereignty and war (from the militarization of children as critically exposed in Grave of the Fireflies to reworkings of Japanese patriotism in The Place Promised in Our Early Days), the intersection of war and the technologies of social control (as observed in the films of Oshii Mamoru and the apocalyptic vision of Neon Genesis Evangelion), history and memory (as in manga artists working through the trauma of Japan’s defeat in World War II and the new modalities of storytelling represented by Final Fantasy X), and the renewal and hybridization of militaristic genres as a means of subverting conventions (in Yamada Futaro’s ninja fiction and Miuchi Suzue’s girl knight manga).

Contributors: Brent Allison; Mark Anderson; Christopher Bolton, Williams College; Martha Cornog; Marc Driscoll, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Angela Drummond-Mathews, Paul Quinn College; Michael Fisch; Michael Dylan Foster, Indiana U; Wendy Goldberg; Marc Hairston, U of Texas, Dallas; Charles Shiro Inouye, Tufts University; Rei Okamoto Inouye, Northeastern U; Paul Jackson; Seth Jacobowitz, San Francisco State U; Thomas Lamarre, McGill U; Tom Looser, New York U; Sheng-mei Ma, Michigan State U; Christine Marran, U of Minnesota; Zilia Papp, Hosei U, Tokyo; Marco Pellitteri; Timothy Perper; Yoji Sakate; Chinami Sango; Deborah Scally; Deborah Shamoon, U of Notre Dame; Manami Shima; Rebecca Suter, U of Sydney; Takayuki Tatsumi, Keio U, Tokyo; Christophe Thouny; Gavin Walker; Dennis Washburn, Dartmouth College; Teresa M. Winge, Indiana U.

Mechademia 4: War/Time
Book 4 · Nov 2013 ·
0.0
The themes of war and time are intertwined in unique ways in Japanese culture, freighted as that nation is with the multiple legacies of World War II: the country’s militarization, its victories and defeats, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the uneasy pacifism imposed by the victors. Delving into topics ranging from the production of wartime propaganda to the multimedia adaptations of romance narrative, contributors to the fourth volume in the Mechademia series address the political, cultural, and technological continuum between war and the everyday time of orderly social productivity that is reflected, confronted, and changed in manga, anime, and other forms of Japanese popular culture.

Grouped thematically, the essays in this volume explore the relationship between national sovereignty and war (from the militarization of children as critically exposed in Grave of the Fireflies to reworkings of Japanese patriotism in The Place Promised in Our Early Days), the intersection of war and the technologies of social control (as observed in the films of Oshii Mamoru and the apocalyptic vision of Neon Genesis Evangelion), history and memory (as in manga artists working through the trauma of Japan’s defeat in World War II and the new modalities of storytelling represented by Final Fantasy X), and the renewal and hybridization of militaristic genres as a means of subverting conventions (in Yamada Futaro’s ninja fiction and Miuchi Suzue’s girl knight manga).

Contributors: Brent Allison; Mark Anderson; Christopher Bolton, Williams College; Martha Cornog; Marc Driscoll, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Angela Drummond-Mathews, Paul Quinn College; Michael Fisch; Michael Dylan Foster, Indiana U; Wendy Goldberg; Marc Hairston, U of Texas, Dallas; Charles Shiro Inouye, Tufts University; Rei Okamoto Inouye, Northeastern U; Paul Jackson; Seth Jacobowitz, San Francisco State U; Thomas Lamarre, McGill U; Tom Looser, New York U; Sheng-mei Ma, Michigan State U; Christine Marran, U of Minnesota; Zilia Papp, Hosei U, Tokyo; Marco Pellitteri; Timothy Perper; Yoji Sakate; Chinami Sango; Deborah Scally; Deborah Shamoon, U of Notre Dame; Manami Shima; Rebecca Suter, U of Sydney; Takayuki Tatsumi, Keio U, Tokyo; Christophe Thouny; Gavin Walker; Dennis Washburn, Dartmouth College; Teresa M. Winge, Indiana U.

Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies
Book 5 · Nov 2013 ·
4.7
Passionate fans of anime and manga, known in Japan as otaku and active around the world, play a significant role in the creation and interpretation of this pervasive popular culture. Routinely appropriating and remixing favorite characters, narratives, imagery, and settings, otaku take control of the anime characters they consume.

Fanthropologies—the fifth volume in the Mechademia series, an annual forum devoted to Japanese anime and manga—focuses on fans, fan activities, and the otaku phenomenon. The zones of activity discussed in these essays range from fan-subs (fan-subtitled versions of anime and manga) and copyright issues to gender and nationality in fandom, dolls, and other forms of consumption that fandom offers. Individual pieces include a remarkable photo essay on the emerging art of cosplay photography; an original manga about an obsessive doll-fan; and a tour of Akihabara, Tokyo's discount electronics shopping district, by a scholar disguised as a fuzzy animal.

Contributors: Madeline Ashby; Jodie Beck, McGill U; Christopher Bolton, Williams College; Naitō Chizuko, Otsuma U; Ian Condry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Martha Cornog; Kathryn Dunlap, U of Central Florida; Ōtsuka Eiji, Kobe Design U; Gerald Figal, Vanderbilt U; Patrick W. Galbraith, U of Tokyo; Marc Hairston, U of Texas at Dallas; Marilyn Ivy, Columbia U; Koichi Iwabuchi, Waseda U; Paul Jackson; Amamiya Karin; Fan-Yi Lam; Thomas Lamarre, McGill U; Paul M. Malone, U of Waterloo; Anne McKnight, U of Southern California; Livia Monnet, U of Montreal; Susan Napier, Tufts U; Kerin Ogg; Timothy Perper; Eron Rauch; Brian Ruh, Indiana U; Nathan Shockey, Columbia U; Marc Steinberg, Concordia U; Jin C. Tomshine, U of California, San Francisco; Carissa Wolf, North Dakota State U.

Mechademia 9: Origins
Book 9 · Nov 2014 ·
0.0
If the source of manga and anime is physically located in Japan, the temptation for many critics and scholars is to ask what aspects of Japanese culture and history gave rise to these media. This ninth volume of Mechademia—an annual collection of critical work on anime and manga—challenges the tendency to answer the question of origins by reductively generalizing and essentializing “Japaneseness.”

The essays brought together in Mechademia 9 lead us to understand the extent to which “Japan” might be seen as an idea generated by anime, manga, and other texts rather than the other way around. What is it that manga and anime produce that no other medium can precisely duplicate? Is anime its own medium or a genre of animation—or something in between? And how must we adapt existing critical modes in order to read these new kinds of texts? While the authors begin with similar questions about the roots of Japanese popular culture and media, they invoke a wide range of theoretical work in the search for answers, including feminist criticism, disability studies, poststructuralist textual criticism, postcolonialism, art history, film theory, phenomenology, and more. Richly provocative and insightful, Mechademia 9 both enacts and resists the pursuit of fixed starting points, inspiring further creative investigation of this global artistic phenomenon.

Contributors: Stephen R. Anderson; Dale K. Andrews, Tohoku Gakuin U; Andrew Ballús; Jodie Beck; Christopher Bolton, Williams College; Kukhee Choo, Tulane U; Ranya Denison, U of East Anglia; Lucy Fraser; Fujimoto Yukari, Meiji U, Japan; Forrest Greenwood; Imamura Taihei; Seth Jacobowitz, Yale U; Kim Joon Yang; Thomas Lamarre, McGill U; Margherita Long, U of California, Riverside; Matsumoto Nobuyuki, Tokyo National Museum; Laura Miller, U of Missouri–St. Louis; Alexandra Roedder; Paul Roquet, Stanford U; Brian Ruh; Shun’ya Yoshimi, U of Tokyo; Alba G. Torrents.