Anime's Identity

Anime's Identity

Author: Stevie Suan

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2021-11-09

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 1452966060

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A formal approach to anime rethinks globalization and transnationality under neoliberalism Anime has become synonymous with Japanese culture, but its global reach raises a perplexing question—what happens when anime is produced outside of Japan? Who actually makes anime, and how can this help us rethink notions of cultural production? In Anime’s Identity, Stevie Suan examines how anime’s recognizable media-form—no matter where it is produced—reflects the problematics of globalization. The result is an incisive look at not only anime but also the tensions of transnationality. Far from valorizing the individualistic “originality” so often touted in national creative industries, anime reveals an alternate type of creativity based in repetition and variation. In exploring this alternative creativity and its accompanying aesthetics, Suan examines anime from fresh angles, including considerations of how anime operates like a brand of media, the intricacies of anime production occurring across national borders, inquiries into the selfhood involved in anime’s character acting, and analyses of various anime works that present differing modes of transnationality. Anime’s Identity deftly merges theories from media studies and performance studies, introducing innovative formal concepts that connect anime to questions of dislocation on a global scale, creating a transformative new lens for analyzing popular media.


Japanese Media Cultures in Japan and Abroad: Transnational Consumption of Manga, Anime, and Media-Mixes

Japanese Media Cultures in Japan and Abroad: Transnational Consumption of Manga, Anime, and Media-Mixes

Author: Manuel Hernández-Pérez

Publisher: MDPI

Published: 2019-06-24

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 3039210084

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In the last few decades, Japanese popular culture productions have been consolidated as one of the most influential and profitable global industries. As a creative industry, Japanese Media-Mixes generate multimillion-dollar revenues, being a product of international synergies and the natural appeal of the characters and stories. The transnationalization of investment capital, diversification of themes and (sub)genres, underlying threat in the proliferation of illegal audiences, development of internet streaming technologies, and other new transformations in media-mix-based production models make the study of these products even more relevant today. In this way, manga (Japanese comics), anime (Japanese animation), and video games are not necessarily products designed for the national market. More than ever, it is necessary to reconcile national and transnational positions for the study of this cultural production. The present volume includes contributions aligned to the analysis of Japanese popular culture flow from many perspectives (cultural studies, film, comic studies, sociology, etc.), although we have emphasized the relationships between manga, anime, and international audiences. The selected works include the following topics: • Studies on audiences—national and transnational case studies; • Fandom production and Otaku culture; • Cross-media and transmedia perspectives; • Theoretical perspectives on manga, anime, and media-mixes.


Anime Wong

Anime Wong

Author: Karen Tei Yamashita

Publisher: Coffee House Press

Published: 2014-03-25

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 1566893402

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Giant foam rubber sushi and cyborg kungfu fighters populate performances that reflect questions of gender, identity, orientalism, and racial politics.


Language and Identity in the Arab World

Language and Identity in the Arab World

Author: Fathiya Al Rashdi

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-09-05

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1000613054

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Language and Identity in the Arab World explores the inextricable link between language and identity, referring particularly to the Arab world. Spanning Indonesia to the United States, the Arab world is here imagined as a continually changing one, with the Arab diaspora asserting its linguistic identity across the world. Crucial questions on transforming linguistic landscapes, the role and implications of migration, and the impact of technology on language use are explored by established and emerging scholars in the field of applied and socio-linguistics. The book asks such crucial questions as how language contact affects or transforms identity, how language reflects changing identities among migrant communities, and how language choices contribute to identity construction in social media. As well as appreciating the breadth and scope of the Arab world, this anthology focuses on the transformative role of language within indigenous and migrant communities as they negotiate between their heritage languages and those spoken by the wider society. Investigating the ways in which identity continues to be imagined and re-constructed in and among Arab communities, this book is indispensable to students, teachers, and anyone who is interested in language contact, linguistic landscapes, and minority language retention as well as the intersections of language and technology.


Identities and Intimacies on Social Media

Identities and Intimacies on Social Media

Author: Tonny Krijnen

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-11-21

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 100079959X

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This edited collection illuminates the scope with which identities and intimacies interact on a wide range of social media platforms. A varied range of international scholars examine the contexts of very different social media spaces, with topics ranging from whitewashing and memes, parental discourses in online activities, Spotify as an intimate social media platform, neoliberalisation of feminist discourses, digital sex work, social media wars in trans debates and ‘BimboTok’. The focus is on their acceleration and impact due to the specificities of social media in relation to identities, intimacies within the broad ‘political’ sphere. The geographic range of case study material reflects the global impact of social media, and includes data from Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the USA. This enlightening and rigorous collection will be of key interest to scholars in media studies and gender studies, and to scholars and professionals of social media. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.


Anime's Knowledge Cultures

Anime's Knowledge Cultures

Author: Jinying Li

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2024-03-12

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1452970580

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Unlocking the technosocial implications of global geek cultures Why has anime, a “low-tech” medium from last century, suddenly become the cultural “new cool” in the information age? Through the lens of anime and its transnational fandom, Jinying Li explores the meanings and logics of “geekdom” as one of the most significant sociocultural groups of our time. In Anime’s Knowledge Cultures, Li shifts the center of global geography in knowledge culture from the computer boys in Silicon Valley to the anime fandom in East Asia. Drawing from film studies, animation studies, media theories, fan studies, and area studies, she provides broad cultural and theoretical explanations of anime’s appeal to a new body of tech-savvy knowledge workers and consumers commonly known as geeks, otaku, or zhai. Examining the forms, techniques, and aesthetics of anime, as well as the organization, practices, and sensibilities of its fandom, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures is at once a theorization of anime as a media environment as well as a historical and cultural study of transnational geekdom as a knowledge culture. Li analyzes anime culture beyond the national and subcultural frameworks of Japan or Japanese otaku, instead theorizing anime’s transnational, transmedial network as the epitome of the postindustrial knowledge culture of global geekdom. By interrogating the connection between the anime boom and global geekdom, Li reshapes how we understand the meanings and significance of anime culture in relation to changing social and technological environments.


Anime, Philosophy and Religion

Anime, Philosophy and Religion

Author: Kaz Hayashi

Publisher: Vernon Press

Published: 2023-10-17

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 1648898009

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Anime is exploding on the worldwide stage! Anime has been a staple in Japan for decades, strongly connected to manga. So why has anime become a worldwide sensation? A cursory explanation is the explosion of online streaming services specializing in anime, like Funimation and Crunchyroll. Even more general streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have gotten in on the game. Anime is exotic to Western eyes and culture. That is one of the reasons anime has gained worldwide popularity. This strange aesthetic draws the audience in only to find it is deeper and more sophisticated than its surface appearance. Japan is an honor and shame culture. Anime provides a platform to discuss “universal” problems facing human beings. It does so in an amazing variety of ways and subgenres, and often with a sense of humor. The themes, characters, stories, plotlines, and development are often complex. This makes anime a deep well of philosophical, metaphysical, and religious ideas for analysis. International scholars are represented in this book. There is a diversity of perspectives on a diversity of anime, themes, content, and analysis. It hopes to delve deeper into the complex world of anime and demonstrate why it deserves the respect of scholars and the public alike.


Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital

Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital

Author: Ani Maitra

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0810141817

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In Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital, Ani Maitra urgently calls for a reevaluation of identity politics as an aesthetic maneuver regulated by capitalism. A dominant critical trend in the humanities, Maitra argues, is to dismiss or embrace identity through the formal properties of a privileged aesthetic medium such as literature, cinema, or even the performative body. In contrast, he demonstrates that identity politics becomes unavoidably real and material only because the minoritized subject is split between multiple sites of mediation—visual, linguistic, and sonic—while remaining firmly tethered to capitalism’s hierarchical logic of value production. Only in the interstices of media can we track the aesthetic conversion of identitarian difference into value, marked by the inequities of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Maitra’s archive is transnational and multimodal. Moving from anticolonial polemics to psychoanalysis to diasporic experimental literature to postcolonial feminist and queer media, he lays bare the cunning by which capitalism produces and fragments identity through an intermedial “aesthetic dissonance” with the commodity form. Maitra’s novel contribution to theories of identity and to the concept of mediation will interest a wide range of scholars in media studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, and critical aesthetics.


Cinema Anime

Cinema Anime

Author: Steven T. Brown

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2006-04-01

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1403983089

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This collection charts the terrain of contemporary Japanese animation, one of the most explosive forms of visual culture to emerge at the crossroads of transnational cultural production in the last twenty-five years. The essays offer bold and insightful engagement with animé's concerns with gender identity, anxieties about body mutation and technological monstrosity, and apocalyptic fantasies of the end of history. The contributors dismantle the distinction between 'high' and 'low' culture and offer compelling arguments for the value and importance of the study of animé and popular culture as a key link in the translation from the local to the global.


Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke

Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke

Author: S. Napier

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2001-05-03

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0312299400

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With the popularity of Pokemon still far from waning, Japanese animation, known as anime to its fans, has a firm hold on American pop culture. However, anime is much more than children's cartoons. It runs the gamut from historical epics to sci-fi sexual thrillers. Often dismissed as fanciful entertainment, anime is actually quite adept at portraying important social and cultural issues like alienation, gender inequality, and teenage angst. This book investigates the ways that anime presents these issues in an in-depth and sophisticated manner, uncovering the identity conflicts, fears over rapid technological advancement, and other key themes present in much of Japanese animation.