If the source of manga and anime is physically located in Japan,
the temptation for many critics and scholars is to ask what
aspects of Japanese culture and history gave rise to these media.
This ninth volume of Mechademia—an annual collection of critical
work on anime and manga—challenges the tendency to answer the
question of origins by reductively generalizing and
essentializing “Japaneseness.”
The essays brought together in Mechademia 9 lead us to understand
the extent to which “Japan” might be seen as an idea generated by
anime, manga, and other texts rather than the other way around.
What is it that manga and anime produce that no other medium can
precisely duplicate? Is anime its own medium or a genre of
animation—or something in between? And how must we adapt existing
critical modes in order to read these new kinds of texts? While
the authors begin with similar questions about the roots of
Japanese popular culture and media, they invoke a wide range of
theoretical work in the search for answers, including feminist
criticism, disability studies, poststructuralist textual
criticism, postcolonialism, art history, film theory,
phenomenology, and more. Richly provocative and insightful,
Mechademia 9 both enacts and resists the pursuit of fixed
starting points, inspiring further creative investigation of this
global artistic phenomenon.
Contributors: Stephen R. Anderson; Dale K. Andrews, Tohoku Gakuin
U; Andrew Ballús; Jodie Beck; Christopher Bolton, Williams
College; Kukhee Choo, Tulane U; Ranya Denison, U of East Anglia;
Lucy Fraser; Fujimoto Yukari, Meiji U, Japan; Forrest Greenwood;
Imamura Taihei; Seth Jacobowitz, Yale U; Kim Joon Yang; Thomas
Lamarre, McGill U; Margherita Long, U of California, Riverside;
Matsumoto Nobuyuki, Tokyo National Museum; Laura Miller, U of
Missouri–St. Louis; Alexandra Roedder; Paul Roquet, Stanford U;
Brian Ruh; Shun’ya Yoshimi, U of Tokyo; Alba G. Torrents.
