Events

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Gerald Sim, Florida Atlantic University, USA, and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

World literature has been an object of critical debates among literary specialists in English-language scholarly communities. Although the reasons for the proliferation of these debates are complex and overdetermined, a central focus of controversy has been the idea of world itself. Interestingly, in Japan, the question of world literature has not garnered scholarly attention as widely as in the US and elsewhere. But this does not at all mean that the idea of world has little critical valence in contemporary Japan; we just need to look at other sites of cultural production and representation to understand the utmost significance of the world for Japanese socio-political imagination. That is, it is not in the academic discourse on world literature but in anime, manga, and popular literature that the idea of world ubiquitously exists as a cultural dominant. Why has Japanese popular culture been so obsessed with the world as a constitutive component of creative imagination at least since the mid-1990s? Is it possible to see it as a popular manifestation of cognitive mapping? What is exactly mapped by world-images? Is it capitalism, postmodern conditions, or neoliberalism? What is rendered visible or invisible by world-images and the concept of the world in Japanese anime, manga, video games, etc.? In this presentation, I will try to come up with some preliminary answers to these questions.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto is Professor of Media and Film Studies at Waseda University in Tokyo. He is the author of Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Duke University Press, 2000), Empire of Images and the End of Cinema (Tokyo: Ibunsha, 2007), and Spectacle of Conspiracy (Tokyo: Ibunsha, 2012). He co-authored with Masao Miyoshi Site of Resistance (Kyoto: Rakuhoku Shuppan, 2007), and also co-edited Television, Japan, and Globalization (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2010) with Eva Tsai and Jung-bong Choi. He has just finished co-editing with Christophe Thouny an anthology titled Planetary Atmospheres and Urban Society after Fukushima (Palgrave, forthcoming).

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