Hideaki Fukiji's Making Audiences: A Social History of Japanese Cinema and Media marks a critical new moment in the field of film audience studies. In this brilliant study, Fujiki forges an intersection between the film audience and the protocols of citizenship, specifically in the case of Japan, national citizenship. This gesture transforms the faceless spectator-auditor into a highly surveilled figure that forces one to rethink the very stakes of audience studies. Making Audiences offers an intervention far beyond the contours of its subject: by drawing a line from audience to citizen, Fujiki reveals the very capacity of cinema to establish the conditions of citizenship and even of race.
Hideaki Fujiki is Professor of Screen Studies at the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University, Japan. His other publications include Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan (2013) and The Japanese Cinema Book, co-edited with Alastair Phillips (2020).