Tag: Akiko Sugawa-Shimada

SGMS/Mechademia Tokyo Conference on Asian Popular Cultures Program

MechademiaThe organizers of the 桜SGMS: Mechademia Conference on Asian Popular Cultures, which will run at Aoyama Gakuin University (Tokyo, Japan) over this weekend (March 18-20) have now announced the full program for this event. The theme for this international conference “Conflicts of Interest in Anime, Manga, and Gaming”, and the program will consist of a total of twelve themed panel sessions, with over 40 individual presentations. It will also feature plenary addresses by Takayuki Tatsumi, who teaches at the Department of English, Keio University, and has been described as “one of Japan’s leading cultural critics”, author and science fiction critic Mari Kotani, and Vince Shortino, Executive Vice President of Japan Channels at Crunchyroll, Inc., the leading global platform for internet streaming of anime and other Asian video content, a “Cosplay: In Costume and Performance” workshop, and a “micro-museum” curated by the photographer, writer, and installation artist Eron Rauch.

Mechademia’s keynote address will be presented by Prof. Hiroshi Deguchi (Department of Computational Intelligence and Systems Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology), one of the founders of Comiket and a co-editor of the forthcoming essay collection The Rise of Japanese Visual Narratives: Cultural, Institutional, and Industrial Aspects of Reproducible Contents (Springer). Other speakers who will be participating in Mechademia include both a number of established who have written and lectured on anime/manga extensively, among them Deborah Shamoon, Marco Pellitteri, Akiko Sugawa-Shimada, Renato Rivera Rusca, Stevie Suan, Wendy Goldberg, Heike Hoffer and Andrea Horbinski, and scholars who are just entering the field. Just some of the specific talks on the program include:

  • Mobile Suit Gundam War Narratives
  • Romantic Love and the ‘Housewife Trap’: A Gendered Reading of The Cat Returns
  • The Heretical Lineage: Images of Rural Blasphemy in Lovecraft and Lovecraftian Manga
  • The Postmodern Magical Girl: The Evolution and Contemporary Representation of the Mahô Shôjo Genre
  • Musical World-Making in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
  • Performing Differently: Convention, Medium, and Globality from Manga (Studies) to Anime (Studies)

桜SGMS: Mechademia Conference on Asian Popular Cultures – full program

Friday, March 18:

Session I: 12:45 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.

Opening Introductions
Edmund W. Hoff, Frenchy Lunning

Panel 1 – Impact of the Global Expansion of Cosplay
Convener: Edmund W. Hoff

In the post war period, anime and manga of Japan has seen popular expansion around the world. Initially enjoyed through bookstores and on television, they have come to be consumed in various forms. This panel will explore the extent to which cosplay has had an impact in coordination with this global spread. Edmund Hoff will look at the soft power and hard power relations of two nations with long histories of costuming, the United States and Japan. In a world where cosplay has come to be enjoyed in many countries, Lillian Ruan will examine the global popularity of cosplay in relation to the relatively robust marketing machines of other contents from Japan. Tiffany Lim will discuss the implications of online social media on cosplay communities and with the Filipino cosplay community as a focal point she will consider presentation, esteem, and image of the self. With locations in India as a case study for the popular expansion of Japanese pop culture, Sharmishtha Rawat will explore the forms in which this culture has taken root and the various forms of interaction with greater society. Discussion will span a wide geographic range and share a common association in cosplay and its varied implications.

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Annual Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies – 2015 Ed.

Over the more than 10 years now that I have been tracking the development of anime/manga studies as an academic area in general, and new academic publications on anime/manga more specifically, I have presented my work in several different formats. A single fixed list or table was adequate when there were only a few dozen books, book chapters, and journal articles to highlight. But it would not be able an adequate way to present several hundred records. For a while, I was able to add new items to a database presented online using the DabbleDB platform. Since it was discontinued four years ago, I have compiled annual lists of new publications on anime/manga, and announced them at the end of each year. These lists for the years from 2010 to 2014 are now archived in the Bibliographies section of this site, and I plan to continue this work and present similar lists for the years prior to 2010 as well – in fact, the one for 2009 will be up in the next few days. At the same time, this blog now also makes it possible for me to maintain a running list of new publications on anime/manga – so, rather than assembling the list continuously but only releasing it in December or even next year, I can instead make the list of academic publications on anime/manga published this year available to the public right now, and update it continuously as new materials are published.

Annual Bibliography of Anime/Manga Studies, 2015 Ed.

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Annual Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies – 2011 Ed.

2011 was a very strong year for new English-language academic/scholarly publications on anime and manga. These included four new monographs, a Collector’s Edition of Frederik Schodt’s seminal Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (originally published in 1996), a new edited collection of essays on Japanese animation and comics, to add to Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime (M. E. Sharpe, 2008), 16 individual book chapters in other essay collections, and over 50 articles in various scholarly journals. In addition, 3 journals published special issues focused on anime/manga.

Once again, these books and journals spanned a wide range of fields and disciplines. While some were in the expected areas of animation and comics studies, film, literature, and East Asian/Japanese studies, some of the other areas that welcomed publications on anime/manga and related topics included urban studies, folklore, modern European history, and health communication. (more…)

Manga and the Manga-esque: New Perspectives to a Global Culture

Manga and the Manga-EsqueThe Japanese Studies Program at Ateneo de Manila University (Manila, Philippines) has unveiled the full schedule for Manga and the Manga-esque: New Perspectives to a Global Culture, the program’s 15th Annual International Conference on Japanese Studies. The conference will be held at Ateneo de Manila University on January 22 and 23, 2015, and this year, it will receive support from the Women’s MANGA Research Project (Chikushi Jogakuen University) and also serve as the project’s 6th Women’s Manga Conference. Accordingly, the conference will significantly emphasize manga in general and manga’s female readers in particular both in Japan and in other Southeast Asian countries, including Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand.

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Anime and Manga Studies Symposium – Previous Years

My work in promoting, facilitating and supporting anime and manga studies involves several different kinds of activities. I am one of the founders of the Anime and Manga Research Circle, an informal community of academics, students, industry professionals and fans interested in studying Japanese animation and comics, and a moderator of the AMRC mailing list. I have reviewed books on anime for the Anime News Network – and articles submitted for publication in the scholarly journal Transformative Works and Cultures. I have presented talks on anime and manga studies at conventions around the U.S. – Otakon, Anime Central, A-Kon, Anime Boston, Katsucon and others. But at least for now, what I think of as my main contribution to this area is as the organizer/producer of the annual Anime and Manga Studies Symposium, the track of academic presentations and panels that are a part of the programming at Anime Expo, the largest anime convention in the U.S.

The Call for Papers for this year’s Symposium is open through the end of the month – I have already seen several excellent submissions, and look forward to seeing more. And, since one of the goals I had in mind for this blog is to have it serve as a hub or central point for activities in the field of anime and manga studies, I am also happy to present the full schedules for the previous years:

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Anime and Manga Symposium Archives – 2013

By its third year, the Anime and Manga Studies Symposium was firmly established as a part of Anime Expo’s programming. A highlight of the 2013 schedule were the guest lectures on the history of anime and manga studies in Japan presented by Dr. Akiko Sugawa-Shimada (Kansai Gaidai University, Osaka, Japan), and on the challenges of using Japanese animation and comics to introduce American college students to Japanese culture (Masako Hamada, Villanova University). In addition to these full-length lectures, the Symposium again featured a set of shorter presentations and talks on much more focused topics, such as the use of foreign languages in manga, depictions of girls and women across several decades of Japanese animation, and the sometimes uneasy relationship between anime fans’ practices and commercial activities.

AX 2013 Anime and Manga Studies Symposium – Schedule

Thursday, July 4

Keynote Address: Christopher Kuipers (Professor, English, Indiana University of Pennsylvania)

  • Translating Anime and Manga: Let Us Count the Ways

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