The poetry of the Heian court of Japan has typically been linked with the emergence of a distinct Japanese language and culture. This concept of a linguistically homogeneous and ethnically pure Japaneseness has been integral to the construction of a modern Japanese nation, especially during periods of western colonial expansion and cultural encroachment. But Thomas LaMarre argues in Uncovering Heian Japan that this need for a cultural unity a singular Japanese identity has resulted in an overemphasis of a relatively minor aspect of Heian poetry, obscuring not only its other significant...
The poetry of the Heian court of Japan has typically been linked with the emergence of a distinct Japanese language and culture. This concept of a lin...
In the war on Iraq, the Bush administration has advanced a strategy of preemption--striking in advance of any realized threat. This special issue of positions is a call for critical and international opposition to the logic of preemptive war.
In the war on Iraq, the Bush administration has advanced a strategy of preemption--striking in advance of any realized threat. This special issue of p...
Despite the longevity of animation and its significance within the history of cinema, film theorists have focused on live-action motion pictures and largely ignored hand-drawn and computer-generated movies. Thomas Lamarre contends that the history, techniques, and complex visual language of animation, particularly Japanese animation, demands serious and sustained engagement, and in The Anime Machine he lays the foundation for a new critical theory for reading Japanese animation, showing how anime fundamentally differs from other visual media.
The Anime Machine defines...
Despite the longevity of animation and its significance within the history of cinema, film theorists have focused on live-action motion pictures an...
Manga and anime inspire a wide range of creative activities for fans: blogging and contributing to databases, making elaborate cosplay costumes, producing dojinshi (amateur) manga and scanlations, and engaging in fansubbing and DIY animation. Indeed, fans can no longer be considered passive consumers of popular culture easily duped by corporations and their industrial-capitalist ideologies. They are now more accurately described as users, in whose hands cultural commodities can provide instant gratification but also need to be understood as creative spaces that can be inhabited,...
Manga and anime inspire a wide range of creative activities for fans: blogging and contributing to databases, making elaborate cosplay costumes, pr...
Japan, 1980s: A special police squad is tracking down one of the "afflicted" to recover the "stuff." Although the operation seems like a drug bust, the "stuff" is actually some kind of text. Death Sentences--a work of science fiction that shares its conceit with the major motion picture The Ring--tells the story of a mysterious surrealist poem, penned in the 1940s, which, through low-tech circulation across time, kills its readers, including Arshile Gorky and Antonin Artaud, before sparking a wave of suicides after its publication in 1980s Japan. Mixing elements of Japanese...
Japan, 1980s: A special police squad is tracking down one of the "afflicted" to recover the "stuff." Although the operation seems like a drug bust,...
Japan, 1980s: A special police squad is tracking down one of the "afflicted" to recover the "stuff." Although the operation seems like a drug bust, the "stuff" is actually some kind of text. Death Sentences--a work of science fiction that shares its conceit with the major motion picture The Ring--tells the story of a mysterious surrealist poem, penned in the 1940s, which, through low-tech circulation across time, kills its readers, including Arshile Gorky and Antonin Artaud, before sparking a wave of suicides after its publication in 1980s Japan. Mixing elements of Japanese...
Japan, 1980s: A special police squad is tracking down one of the "afflicted" to recover the "stuff." Although the operation seems like a drug bust,...
Lines of Sight--the seventh volume in the Mechademia series, an annual forum devoted to Japanese anime and manga--explores the various ways in which anime, manga, digital media, fan culture, and Japanese art--from scroll paintings to superflat--challenge, undermine, or disregard the concept of Cartesian (or one-point) perspective, the dominant mode of visual culture in the West since the seventeenth century. More than just a visual mode or geometric system, Cartesianism has shaped nearly every aspect of modern rational thought, from mathematics and science to philosophy and...
Lines of Sight--the seventh volume in the Mechademia series, an annual forum devoted to Japanese anime and manga--explores the variou...
