Cross Cultural Circuits

Wrapping Around, Wrapping Up

[Home]

[Lectures]

Wrapping Around, Wrapping Up

• Course Overview
• Tokyo Disneyland: Who's Zooming Who?
• Japan in Asia: Contested Borders
• Re-Viewing
  • Politics of Culture
  • Consumption and Production

  Course Goals

• Introduction to manga and anime as prime examples of postwar Japanese popular visual culture
• Introduction of analytical approaches and themes for the same, hopefully to be adapted and applied on your own to a much broader range of objects drawn from your own world

  Course Topics

• Definitional Work
  • What is Popular Culture?
  • Industry: Birth of Modern Mass Culture & Postwar Pop
  • The Fans: Reading and Writing
  • Subcultures: Mainstream or Underground?
• Constructing Ids
  • Childish Disciplines
  • Becoming: Male
  • Becoming: Female
  • Blurring Boundaries
  • Nature and Technology
  • Cultural Imperialism

  Mary Y. Brannen, "Bwana Mickey"

  • Methods of reading/interpreting artifacts and texts that cross (national) borders
    • Context-free v. Context-dependent v. Re-contextualization
  • TDL : Western cultural imperialism and/or Japanese cultural imperialism?
    • Samurai Land v. Exact Replica of DL
    • Exact Replica? Similarities and Differences
    • Power, Production, Consumption
  • Constructions of National Self/Other

  Leo Ching: "Empires of the Sun"

  • Rethinking the meaning of national boundaries in light of global capitalism
    • Economic mode of analysis in describing Japan-Taiwan relationship
    • US not forgotten in account of Japan-Asia relations
    • National borders no longer have meaning?
  • Rethinking the cultural imperialism victim/victimizer relationship in light of
    • Multiple parties profiting from financial relations between Japan and Asia
    • Significance of consumption of pop culture not solely determined by producers

  Complicating Cultural Imperialism

• Brannen: "How is the concept of hegemony to be modified to account for the struggle between two dominant powers?"
• Ching: "Economic prowess does not necessarily entail cultural dominance."
• Ching: "What are the cultural implications of Japanese multinational capitalism? More importantly, what are the meanings people attach to the practice of consuming Japanese cultural commodities?"

  Re-Viewing Course Themes

• Brannen Article
  • Cuteness (Kawairashisa): Naughty or Nice?
  • Escapism
• Ching Article
  • Industry and the Economics of Pop Culture
• Both Articles
  • Politics of Culture
    • Power
    • Conflict/Negotiation
    • Commodity Circuits
  • Consumption as Productive
    • Complicates (but should not undermine) our understanding of exercise of power

  Back to the Beginning

• Ching: "The enunciative position and environment of cultural imperialism must be scrutinized: who speaks, who is speaking for whom, from what particular historical specificity, and on what asymmetrical power relation is one speaking from?"