Beyond Anime

Catalog description

The visual, tactile, and literary arts play key roles in how modern nation-states make sense of themselves and how they make sense of other nations. Japan provides one key example through which to observe the use and function of art to create not only the image and identity of a nation and national culture, but also the image and identity of other national cultures. In recent years, Japanese popular culture has been reborn around the world. A global generation has grown up watching anime and reading manga in Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and English. Beyond Anime is designed to contextualize the recent appropriation and dissemination of Japanese popular culture through the cyclical history of such appropriations through the modern period. In this way, the course will explore the precursors, antecedents, and contexts to our present cultural moment. Through film, photography, posters, matchbook-labels, textiles, industrial design, novels, and myriad other popular media, this seminar-style study of Japanese popular visual culture will help students see Japanese visual arts in terms that are local to Japanese aesthetics and through those that transcend local cultures. Drawing on the long history of illustrated narrative from scrolls to chapbooks, through film and photo essay, this course confronts the exoticist notion that Japan's arts have always placed a disproportionately heavy emphasis on the visual. Through comparative readings of cultural and visual material from Japan, this course will raise questions of aesthetic, cultural, and national difference. Specific topics will vary with instructor, but may include: the rendering of three dimensional space through perspective, the use of pictures in the service of narrative versus the use of pictures as narrative, and how notions of negative space promise deep insight and risk crass stereotypes.