Download or read book Superhuman Japan written by Marie Thorsten and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the imaginative narratives that shaped the attitudes of Americans (and others) toward Japan. Focusing on cultural aspects of economic nationalism and US-Japan relations during the trade war Marie Thorsten uses examples from public discourse, film, documentaries, novels, acts of racism and comparison of international education assessments to examine the way in which Japan has been constituted in a global political gaze as an economic hegemon. In times of heightened rivalry, we often try to find superior "others" so that we can motivate ourselves against an imagined future of decline. During the Cold War, Americans and other nations in the West took advantage of being the underdog against the perceived superiority of the Soviet Union, especially by turning the Sputnik launch of 1957 into a lodestone for an educational renaissance. As postwar Japanese power became increasingly threatening, American policymakers again tried to fashion Japan into another "Sputnik" to motivate American people. This book explores 1980s "Bubble" Japan as a "Superhuman Other" in the consciousness of Americans, especially as reflected in popular culture and policy discourses. Making Japan into a Superhuman often resorted into the same stereotyping that invented Japan as a Subhuman. It was difficult for many to see that America, Japan and other nations were actually sharing the same global economic circumstances affecting attitudes toward knowledge and nation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Japanese politics, International Relations and Japanese culture and society.
Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 2009-06 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Speculative Japan 2 written by Yasumi Kobayashi and published by . This book was released on 2011-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A selection of outstanding works of fantasy and science fiction from Japan, published here in English for the first time to reveal new and very different slices of the Japanese imagination. Following the success of the first Speculative Japan book, Volume 2 explores the visions of best-selling authors across a range of genres, from the heart-warming fantasy of Awa Naoko to the cold, lonely outer spaces of Tani Koshu. Explore the Japanese view of speculative fiction, and discover the similarities and differences that make cross-cultural literature so satisfying.
Download or read book Tokyo Cyberpunk written by Steven T. Brown and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging some of the most canonical and thought-provoking anime, manga, and science fiction films, Tokyo Cyberpunk offers insightful analysis of Japanese visual culture. Steven T. Brown draws new conclusions about the cultural flow of art, as well as important technological issues of the day.
Download or read book Japanese Science Fiction written by Robert Matthew and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Meiji Restoration of 1868 Japan modernized rapidly, transforming itself perhaps more quickly than any other country in history. However, the change was not without its conflicts, many of them still unresolved as the pleasures of modern society vie with a respect for the traditional Japanese lifestyle. As the literature of change and of the young, science fiction acts as a window to the modern mind and the uneasy alliance of the old and new. This book, filled with detailed reference to numerous stories, traces the origin and development of the genre from the mid-nineteenth century to today, thus exploring unique insights into Japanese attitudes to commercialism, spirituality, the media, war and international relations.
Download or read book The Metabolist Imagination written by William O. Gardner and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan’s postwar urban imagination through the Metabolism architecture movement and visionary science fiction authors The devastation of the Second World War gave rise to imaginations both utopian and apocalyptic. In Japan, a fascinating confluence of architects and science fiction writers took advantage of this space to begin remaking urban design. In The Metabolist Imagination, William O. Gardner explores the unique Metabolism movement, which allied with science fiction authors to foresee the global cities that would emerge in the postwar era. This first comparative study of postwar Japanese architecture and science fiction builds on the resurgence of interest in Metabolist architecture while establishing new directions for exploration. Gardner focuses on how these innovators created unique versions of shared concepts—including futurity, megastructures, capsules, and cybercities—making lasting contributions that resonate with contemporary conversations around cyberpunk, climate change, anime, and more. The Metabolist Imagination features original documentation of collaborations between giants of postwar Japanese art and architecture, such as the landmark 1970 Osaka Expo. It also provides the most sustained English-language discussion to date of the work of Komatsu Sakyō, considered one of the “big three” authors of postwar Japanese science fiction. These studies are underscored by Gardner’s insightful approach—treating architecture as a form of speculative fiction while positioning science fiction as an intervention into urban design—making it a necessary read for today’s visionaries.
Download or read book Introducing Japanese Popular Culture written by Alisa Freedman and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-04-18 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Specifically designed for use in a range of undergraduate and graduate courses, while reaching specialists and general readers, this second edition of Introducing Japanese Popular Culture is a comprehensive textbook offering an up-to-date overview of a wide variety of media forms. It uses particular case studies as a way into examining the broader themes in Japanese culture and provides a thorough analysis of the historical and contemporary trends that have shaped artistic production, as well as politics, society, and economics. As a result, more than being a time capsule of influential trends, this book teaches enduring lessons about how popular culture reflects the societies that produce and consume it. With contributions from an international team of scholars, representing a range of disciplines from history and anthropology to art history and media studies, the book covers: Characters Television Videogames Fan media and technology Music Popular cinema Anime Manga Spectacles and competitions Sites of popular culture Fashion Contemporary art. Written in an accessible style with ample description and analysis, this textbook is essential reading for students of Japanese culture and society, Asian media and popular culture, globalization, and Asian Studies in general. It is a go-to handbook for interested readers and a compendium for scholars.
Download or read book Visions of Precarity in Japanese Popular Culture and Literature written by Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the transition from postwar to post-disaster literature and examines the rise of precarity consciousness in Japanese socio-cultural discourse. Recent natural as well as man-made cataclysmic events have dramatically changed the status quo of contemporary Japanese society. This radically new worldview has significantly altered the socio-political as well as literary perception of one of the world's former superpowers and in this book the contributors closely examine how Japan's new paradigm of precarious existence is expressed through a variety of pop-cultural and literary media.
Download or read book Cosmos Latinos written by Andrea L. Bell and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2003-07-31 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first-ever collection of Latin American science fiction in English.
Download or read book Apocalypse in Contemporary Japanese Science Fiction written by M. Tanaka and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-01-29 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting with the history of apocalyptic tradition in the West and focusing on modern Japanese apocalyptic science fiction in manga, anime, and novels, Motoko Tanaka shows how science fiction reflected and coped with the devastation in Japanese national identity after 1945.
Download or read book Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America written by Edward King and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2017-07-03 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Latin America is experiencing a boom in graphic novels that are highly innovative in their conceptual play and their reworking of the medium. Inventive artwork and sophisticated scripts have combined to satisfy the demand of a growing readership, both at home and abroad. Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America, which is the first book-length study of the topic, argues that the graphic novel is emerging in Latin America as a uniquely powerful force to explore the nature of twenty-first century subjectivity. The authors place particular emphasis on the ways in which humans are bound to their non-human environment, and these ideas are productively drawn out in relation to posthuman thought and experience. The book draws together a range of recent graphic novels from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, many of which experiment with questions of transmediality, the representation of urban space, modes of perception and cognition, and a new form of ethics for a posthuman world. Praise for Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America '...well-referenced and… well considered - the analyses it brings are overall well-executed and insightful...' Image and Narrative, Jan 2018, vol 18, no 4
Download or read book Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke written by S. Napier and published by Springer. This book was released on 2001-05-03 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the popularity of Pokemon still far from waning, Japanese animation, known as anime to its fans, has a firm hold on American pop culture. However, anime is much more than children's cartoons. It runs the gamut from historical epics to sci-fi sexual thrillers. Often dismissed as fanciful entertainment, anime is actually quite adept at portraying important social and cultural issues like alienation, gender inequality, and teenage angst. This book investigates the ways that anime presents these issues in an in-depth and sophisticated manner, uncovering the identity conflicts, fears over rapid technological advancement, and other key themes present in much of Japanese animation.
Download or read book A Canticle for Leibowitz written by Walter M. Miller and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction written by Mark Bould and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-13 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction provides an overview of the study of science fiction across multiple academic fields. It offers a new conceptualisation of the field today, marking the significant changes that have taken place in sf studies over the past 15 years. Building on the pioneering research in the first edition, the collection reorganises historical coverage of the genre to emphasise new geographical areas of cultural production and the growing importance of media beyond print. It also updates and expands the range of frameworks that are relevant to the study of science fiction. The periodisation has been reframed to include new chapters focusing on science fiction produced outside the Anglophone context, including South Asian, Latin American, Chinese and African diasporic science fiction. The contributors use both well- established critical and theoretical approaches and embrace a range of new ones, including biopolitics, climate crisis, critical ethnic studies, disability studies, energy humanities, game studies, medical humanities, new materialisms and sonic studies. This book is an invaluable resource for students and established scholars seeking to understand the vast range of engagements with science fiction in scholarship today.
Download or read book Robo Sapiens Japanicus written by Jennifer Robertson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan is arguably the first postindustrial society to embrace the prospect of human-robot coexistence. Over the past decade, Japanese humanoid robots designed for use in homes, hospitals, offices, and schools have become celebrated in mass and social media throughout the world. In Robo sapiens japanicus, Jennifer Robertson casts a critical eye on press releases and public relations videos that misrepresent robots as being as versatile and agile as their science fiction counterparts. An ethnography and sociocultural history of governmental and academic discourse of human-robot relations in Japan, this book explores how actual robots—humanoids, androids, and animaloids—are “imagineered” in ways that reinforce the conventional sex/gender system and political-economic status quo. In addition, Robertson interrogates the notion of human exceptionalism as she considers whether “civil rights” should be granted to robots. Similarly, she juxtaposes how robots and robotic exoskeletons reinforce a conception of the “normal” body with a deconstruction of the much-invoked Theory of the Uncanny Valley.
Download or read book The Posthuman written by Rosi Braidotti and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-07-11 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Posthuman offers both an introduction and major contribution to contemporary debates on the posthuman. Digital 'second life', genetically modified food, advanced prosthetics, robotics and reproductive technologies are familiar facets of our globally linked and technologically mediated societies. This has blurred the traditional distinction between the human and its others, exposing the non-naturalistic structure of the human. The Posthuman starts by exploring the extent to which a post-humanist move displaces the traditional humanistic unity of the subject. Rather than perceiving this situation as a loss of cognitive and moral self-mastery, Braidotti argues that the posthuman helps us make sense of our flexible and multiple identities. Braidotti then analyzes the escalating effects of post-anthropocentric thought, which encompass not only other species, but also the sustainability of our planet as a whole. Because contemporary market economies profit from the control and commodification of all that lives, they result in hybridization, erasing categorical distinctions between the human and other species, seeds, plants, animals and bacteria. These dislocations induced by globalized cultures and economies enable a critique of anthropocentrism, but how reliable are they as indicators of a sustainable future? The Posthuman concludes by considering the implications of these shifts for the institutional practice of the humanities. Braidotti outlines new forms of cosmopolitan neo-humanism that emerge from the spectrum of post-colonial and race studies, as well as gender analysis and environmentalism. The challenge of the posthuman condition consists in seizing the opportunities for new social bonding and community building, while pursuing sustainability and empowerment.
