On March 6 and April 4, The Ohio State University’s East Asian Studies Center will present Manga at a Crossroads, a two-day symposium on manga as a major form of Japanese popular culture, with influence and impact world-wide. The symposium’s first session will focus on the origins, history and development of manga; the second will examine its global reach. Both sessions will feature talks by leading scholars of Japanese popular culture from around the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain, and are designed to run in connection with the exhibit World of Shojo Manga!: Mirrors of Girls’ Desires, which will be hosted by OSU’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum from March 28 to July 15.
Manga at a Crossroads:
Classic Manga!
March 6, 2015
12 p.m. – 4 p.m.
Thomson Library, Room 165
The Ohio State University (Columbus, OH)
- Maureen Donovan (Japanese Studies Librarian and Professor,
The Ohio State University Libraries)
“Comics from the Time of ‘Erotic Grotesque Nonsense’: Yomiuri Sunday Manga of 1930-1931”
- Thomas Lamarre (Professor, East Asian Studies, McGill University)
“Manga Empire: Companion Species and Shōnen Kurabu”
Prof. Lamarre is the author of The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), as well as several major journal articles on Japanese animation, such as From animation to anime: Drawing movements and moving drawings (Japan Forum, 14:2), Platonic sex: Perversion and shojo anime (in two parts, in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 1:1 and 2:1), and the 3-part essay on depictions of humans as literal animals in early Japanese animation and comics (in Mechademia volumes 3, 5 and 6).
- Gennifer Weisenfeld (Professor, Visual History and Art Studies, Duke University)
“Laughing in the Face of Calamity: Visual Satire after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923”
- Natsu Onoda Power (Assistant Professor, Theater, Georgetown University)
“Questioning the Racial Question: Representations of Human Faces in Classic Manga”
Prof. Power is the author of God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-Word War II Manga (University Press of Mississippi, 2009)
Manga at a Crossroads:
Development and Globalization of Manga!
April 4, 2015
1 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Sullivant Hall, Room Room 220
The Ohio State University (Columbus, OH)
- Masami Toku (Professor, Art and Art History, California State University, Chico)
“World of Shōjo Manga!: Mirrors of Girls’ Desires”
The focus of Prof. Toku’s research is on the effect of popular visual culture, including manga, on children’s art artistic development, and the potential for the use of manga in art education. In 2005, she organized the touring exhibition series Shojo Manga! Girls’ Power! which was presented at various locations around the U.S. and Canada, including the University of New Mexico, Columbia College Chicago, Pratt Institute, the Japanese Canadian National Museum (Burnaby, British Columbia, and the Japan Exhibition and Culture Center at the Embassy of Japan (Washington, DC). She is also the also the organizer of the World of Shojo Manga: Mirrors of Girls’ Desires exhibit, which is currently running at the Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College (New York).
- Jennifer Prough (Associate Professor, Humanities and East Asian Studies, Valparaiso University)
“Local Texts, Global Audiences: A View from Within the Shōjo Manga Industry”
- Kerim Yasar (Assistant Professor, Japanese, The Ohio State University)
“Marketing Manga in the U.S.: Translational Strategies, Transnational Flows”
- Casey Brienza (Lecturer, Publishing and Digital Media, City University London)
“Global Manga: ‘Japanese’ Comics Without Japan?”
Casey Brienza is easily one of the rising stars of the field of manga studies. She has published extensively on manga production and the manga industry, and on the spread of the manga style and format outside Japan. She is the editor of the forthcoming essay collection Global Manga: “Japanese” Comics ‘Without’ Japan? (which I discussed in a previous post) and her own monograph, Manga in America: Transnational Book Publishing and the Domestication of Japanese Comics is also scheduled for publication later this year.
Manga at a Crossroads is sponsored by The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center, Institute for Japanese Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Department of History of Art, Department of Arts Administration, Education & Policy, Division of Arts and Humanities, The Ohio State University Libraries, The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, The Association for Asian Studies, and the Japan Foundation New York