Download or read book Scripted Affects Branded Selves written by Gabriella Lukács and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-05 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Scripted Affects, Branded Selves, Gabriella Lukács analyzes the development of a new primetime serial called “trendy drama” as the Japanese television industry’s ingenious response to market fragmentation. Much like the HBO hit Sex and the City, trendy dramas feature well-heeled young sophisticates enjoying consumer-oriented lifestyles while managing their unruly love lives. Integrating a political-economic analysis of television production with reception research, Lukács suggests that the trendy drama marked a shift in the Japanese television industry from offering story-driven entertainment to producing lifestyle-oriented programming. She interprets the new televisual preoccupation with consumer trends not as a sign of the medium’s downfall, but as a savvy strategy to appeal to viewers who increasingly demand entertainment that feels more personal than mass-produced fare. After all, what the producers of trendy dramas realized in the late 1980s was that taste and lifestyle were sources of identification that could be manipulated to satisfy mass and niche demands more easily than could conventional marketing criteria such as generation or gender. Lukács argues that by capitalizing on the semantic fluidity of the notion of lifestyle, commercial television networks were capable of uniting viewers into new affective alliances that, in turn, helped them bury anxieties over changing class relations in the wake of the prolonged economic recession.
Download or read book Visions of Precarity in Japanese Popular Culture and Literature written by Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-27 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent natural as well as man-made cataclysmic events have dramatically changed the status quo of contemporary Japanese society, and following the Asia-Pacific war’s never-ending ‘postwar’ period, Japan has been dramatically forced into a zeitgeist of saigo or ‘post-disaster.’ This radically new worldview has significantly altered the socio-political as well as literary perception of one of the world’s potential 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 as well as literary media. Addressing the transition from post-war to post-disaster literature, this book examines the rise of precarity consciousness in Japanese socio-cultural discourse. The chapters investigate the extent to which we can talk about the emergence of a new literary paradigm of precarity in the world of Japanese popular culture. Through careful examination of a variety of contemporary texts ranging from literature, manga, anime, television drama and film this study offers an interpretation of the many dissonant voices in Japanese society. The contributors also outline the related social issues in Japanese society and culture, providing a comprehensive overview of the global trends that link Japan with the rest of the world. Visions of Precarity in Japanese Popular Culture and Literature will be of great interest to students and scholars of contemporary Japan, Japanese culture and society, popular culture and social and cultural history.
Download or read book Administering Affect written by Daniel White and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do the worlds that state administrators manage become the feelings publics embody? In Administering Affect, Daniel White addresses this question by documenting the rise of a new national figure he calls "Pop-Culture Japan." Emerging in the wake of Japan's dramatic economic decline in the early 1990s, Pop-Culture Japan reflected the hopes of Japanese state bureaucrats and political elites seeking to recover their country's standing on the global stage. White argues that due to growing regional competitiveness and geopolitical tension in East Asia in recent decades, Japan's state bureaucrats increasingly targeted political anxiety as a national problem and built a new national image based on pop-culture branding as a remedy. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork among rarely accessible government bureaucrats, Administering Affect examines the fascinating connection between state administration and public sentiment. White analyzes various creative policy figures of Pop-Culture Japan, such as anime diplomats, "Cool Japan" branding campaigns, and the so-called "Ambassadors of Cute," in order to illustrate a powerful link between practices of managing national culture and the circulation of anxiety among Japanese publics. Invoking the term "administering affect" to illustrate how anxiety becomes a bureaucratic target, technique, and unintended consequence of promoting Japan's national popular culture, the book presents an ethnographic portrait of the at-times surprisingly emotional lives of Japan's state bureaucrats. In examining how anxious feelings come to drive policymaking, White delivers an intimate anthropological analysis of the affective forces interconnecting state governance, popular culture, and national identity.
Download or read book Making Audiences written by Hideaki Fujiki and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book explores the hundred-year history of the relationships between Japanese media and social subjects through an analysis of the connections between cinema audiences and five significant discursive terms in the Japanese language: minshåu (the people), kokumin (the national populace), tåoa minzoku (the East Asian race), taishåu (the masses), and shimin (citizens). Roughly speaking, as far as their relations with cinema are concerned, the term "the people" circulated from the 1910s through the 1920s, "the national populace" from the 1930s through the 2010s and even to the present day, "the East Asian race" from the late 1930s up to the mid-1940s, "the masses" from the late 1920s to the present, and "citizens" from the 1960s through the present. The overlap between the terms indicates that the history of Japanese social subjects has unfolded not in a linear, but in a multilayered manner. Each period has also been bound up with various political and economic issues which have impacted on that very history. These include the presence of capitalism, total war, imperialism, democracy, social movements, post-Fordism, neoliberalism, the network society, and the risk society. In each context, such terms as "the people," "the national populace," "the East Asian race," "the masses," and "the citizens" have not necessarily been deployed in terms of a set of lexically defined, fixed, and stable meanings; rather, they all have entailed certain discrepancies and contradictions among a diverse range of standpoints, while at the same time changing their different interpretative valence according to historical context. In addition, these concepts have sometimes been used to define the self and at other times to define a given other. Moreover, the terms have not only been enunciated through discourses; they have also been enacted by physical bodies. The overall purpose of this book, therefore, is to empirically and analytically elucidate a dynamic, multi-layered history of cinema audiences in Japan as part of a larger relationship between media and social subjects and examines cinema audiences as simultaneously shaped by and shaping social history. In so doing, it brings a new perspective to the history of Japanese society and culture in its global context from the early twentieth century up to the early twenty-first century"--
Download or read book The Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in East Asia written by Jie Yang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When thinking about the culture and economy of East Asia, many attribute to the region a range of dispositions, including a preference for consensus and social harmony, loyalty and respect towards superiors and government, family values, collectivism, and communitarianism. Affect is central to these concepts, and yet the role of affect and its animated or imagined potentialities in the political economy of East Asia has not been systematically studied. The book examines the affective dimensions of power and economy in East Asia. It illuminates the dynamics of contemporary governance, and ways of overcoming common Western assumptions about East Asian societies. Here, affect is defined as felt quality that gives meaning and imagination to social, political, and economic processes, and as this book demonstrates, it can provide an analytical tool for a nuanced and enriched analysis of social, political, and economic transformations in East Asia. Through ethnographic and media analyses, this book provides a framework for analyzing emerging phenomena in East Asia, such as happiness promotion, therapeutic governance, the psychologization of social issues, the rise of self-help genres, transnational labor migration, new ideologies of gender and the family, and mass-mediated affective communities. Through the lens of affect theory, the contributors explore changing political configurations, economic engagements, modes of belonging, and forms of subjectivity in East Asia, and use ethnographic research and discourse analysis to illustrate the affective dimensions of state and economic power and the way affect informs and inspires action. This interdisciplinary book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Asian studies, anthropology, sociology, media studies, history, cultural studies, and gender and women’s studies.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics written by James Laidlaw and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-30 with total page 1165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 'ethical turn' in anthropology has been one of the most vibrant fields in the discipline in the past quarter-century. It has fostered new dialogue between anthropology and philosophy, psychology, and theology and seen a wealth of theoretical innovation and influential ethnographic studies. This book brings together a global team of established and emerging leaders in the field and makes the results of this fast-growing body of diverse research available in one volume. Topics covered include: the philosophical and other intellectual sources of the ethical turn; inter-disciplinary dialogues; emerging conceptualizations of core aspects of ethical agency such as freedom, responsibility, and affect; and the diverse ways in which ethical thought and practice are institutionalized in social life, both intimate and institutional. Authoritative and cutting-edge, it is essential reading for researchers and students in anthropology, philosophy, psychology and theology, and will set the agenda for future research in the field.
Download or read book Powers of the Real written by Diane Wei Lewis and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Powers of the Real analyzes the cultural politics of cinema’s persuasive sensory realism in interwar Japan. Examining cultural criticism, art, news media, literature, and film, Diane Wei Lewis shows how representations of women and signifiers of femininity were used to characterize new forms of pleasure and fantasy enabled by consumer culture and technological media. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, she analyzes the role that images of women played in articulating the new expressions of identity, behavior, and affiliation produced by cinema and consumer capitalism. In the process, Lewis traces new discourses on the technological mediation of emotion to the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and postquake mass media boom. The earthquake transformed the Japanese film industry and lent urgency to debates surrounding cinema’s ability to reach a mass audience and shape public sentiment, while the rise of consumer culture contributed to alarm over rampant materialism and “feminization.” Demonstrating how ideas about emotion and sexual difference played a crucial role in popular discourse on cinema’s reach and its sensory-affective powers, Powers of the Real offers new perspectives on media history, the commodification of intimacy and emotion, film realism, and gender politics in the “age of the mass society” in Japan.
Download or read book Pop City written by Youjeong Oh and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pop City examines the use of Korean television dramas and K-pop music to promote urban and rural places in South Korea. Building on the phenomenon of Korean pop culture, Youjeong Oh argues that pop culture–featured place selling mediates two separate domains: political decentralization and the globalization of Korean popular culture. By analyzing the process of culture-featured place marketing, Pop City shows that urban spaces are produced and sold just like TV dramas and pop idols by promoting spectacular images rather than substantial physical and cultural qualities. Oh demonstrates how the speculative, image-based, and consumer-exploitive nature of popular culture shapes the commodification of urban space and ultimately argues that pop culture–mediated place promotion entails the domination of urban space by capital in more sophisticated and fetishized ways.
Download or read book Japanese New York written by Olga Kanzaki Sooudi and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2014-10-31 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spend time in New York City and, soon enough, you will encounter some of the Japanese nationals who live and work there—young English students, office workers, painters, and hairstylists. New York City, one of the world’s most vibrant and creative cities, is also home to one of the largest overseas Japanese populations in the world. Among them are artists and designers who produce cutting-edge work in fields such as design, fashion, music, and art. Part of the so-called “creative class” and a growing segment of the neoliberal economy, they are usually middle-class and college-educated. They move to New York for anywhere from a few years to several decades in the hope of realizing dreams and aspirations unavailable to them in Japan. Yet the creative careers they desire are competitive, and many end up working illegally in precarious, low paying jobs. Though they often migrate without fixed plans for return, nearly all eventually do, and their migrant trajectories are punctuated by visits home. Japanese New York offers an intimate, ethnographic portrait of these Japanese creative migrants living and working in NYC. At its heart is a universal question—how do adults reinvent their lives? In the absence of any material or social need, what makes it worthwhile for people to abandon middle-class comfort and home for an unfamiliar and insecure life? Author Olga Sooudi explores these questions in four different venues patronized by New York’s Japanese: a grocery store and restaurant, where hopeful migrants work part-time as they pursue their ambitions; a fashion designer’s atelier and an art gallery, both sites of migrant aspirations. As Sooudi’s migrant artists toil and network, biding time until they “make it” in their chosen industries, their optimism is complicated by the material and social limitations of their lives. The story of Japanese migrants in NYC is both a story about Japan and a way of examining Japan from beyond its borders. The Japanese presence abroad, a dynamic process involving the moving, settling, and return to Japan of people and their cultural products, is still underexplored. Sooudi’s work will help fill this lacuna and will contribute to international migration studies, to the study of contemporary Japanese culture and society, and to the study of Japanese youth, while shedding light on what it means to be a creative migrant worker in the global city today.
Download or read book Global TV Horror written by Stacey Abbott and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2021-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an era fascinated by horror, this book examines some of the most significant global TV horror, from children’s television and classic series to contemporary shows taking advantage of streaming and on-demand to reach audiences around the world.
Download or read book Love s Uncertainty written by Teresa Kuan and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2015-02-27 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love’s Uncertainty explores the hopes and anxieties of urban, middle-class parents in contemporary China. Combining long-term ethnographic research with analyses of popular child-rearing manuals, television dramas, and government documents, Teresa Kuan bears witness to the dilemmas of ordinary Chinese parents, who struggle to reconcile new definitions of good parenting with the reality of limited resources. Situating these parents’ experiences in the historical context of state efforts to improve "population quality," Love’s Uncertainty reveals how global transformations are expressed in the most intimate of human experiences. Ultimately, the book offers a meditation on the nature of moral agency, examining how people discern, amid the myriad contingencies of life, the boundary between what can and cannot be controlled.
Download or read book Tokyo Listening written by Lorraine Plourde and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-17 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tokyo Listening examines how the sensory experience of the city informs how people listen to both music and everyday, ubiquitous sounds. Drawing on recent scholarship in the fields of sound studies, anthropology, and ethnomusicology and over fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan, Lorraine Plourde traces the linkages between sound and urban space. She examines listening cultures via four main ethnographic sites in Tokyo—an experimental music venue, classical music cafes, office workspaces, and department stores—looking specifically at how such auditory sensibilities are cultivated. The book brings together two different types of spaces into the same frame of reference: places people go to specifically for the music, and spaces where the music comes to them. Tokyo Listening examines the sensory experience of urban listening as a planned and multifaceted dimension of everyday city life, ultimately exploring the relationship between sound, comfort, happiness, and productivity.
Download or read book Doing Style written by Constantine V. Nakassis and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-04-25 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Doing Style, Constantine V. Nakassis explores the world of youth and mass media in South India, where what Tamil youth call “style” anchors their day-to-day lives and media worlds. Through intimate ethnographic descriptions of college life in Tamil Nadu, Nakassis explores the complex ways that acts and objects of style such as brand fashion, English slang, and film representations express the multiple desires and anxieties of this generation, who live in the shadow of the promise of global modernity. As Nakassis shows, while signs of the global, modern world are everywhere in post-liberalization India, for most of these young people this world is still very distant—a paradox that results in youth’s profound sense of being in between. This in-betweenness manifests itself in the ambivalent quality of style, the ways in which stylish objects are necessarily marked as counterfeit, mixed, or ironical. In order to show how this in-betweenness materializes in particular media, Nakassis explores the entanglements between youth peer groups and the sites where such stylish media objects are produced, arguing that these entanglements deeply condition the production and circulation of the media objects themselves. The result is an important and timely look at the tremendous forces of youth culture, globalization, and mass media as they interact in the vibrancy of a rapidly changing India.
Download or read book Schooling Selves written by Peter Cave and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Individuals, autonomy, and society in Japanese education -- Reshaping reform : discipline, autonomy, and group relations -- Classes, clubs, and control -- Mass games and dreams of youth -- Changing the classroom? : autonomy and expression in Japanese language and literature -- The challenges and trials of curricular change -- To graduation and beyond : high school entrance and juku
Download or read book The Time of Laughter written by David Humphrey and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2023-08-16 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From broadcast to social media, comedy plays a prominent role in Japan’s cultural landscape and political landscape. The Time of Laughter explores how comedy grew out of the early days of television to become a central force in shaping Japanese media over the past half-century. Comedy and its impact, David Humphrey argues, established a “time of laughter” in the media of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in Japan. Through masterful interrogation of Japanese televisual archives and media discourse, Humphrey demonstrates that the unique temporality of laughter has had a profound role in the cultural atmosphere of Japan’s recent past. Laughter both complemented and absorbed the profound tensions and contradictions that emerged in Japanese television. Joyous and cacophonous, reaffirming and subverting, laughter simultaneously alienated and unified viewers. Through its exploration of the influence of comedy and the culture of laughter, The Time of Laughter presents a vibrant new take on Japan’s recent media history.
Download or read book Shock Therapy written by Tomas Matza and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia witnessed a dramatic increase in psychotherapeutic options, which promoted social connection while advancing new forms of capitalist subjectivity amid often-wrenching social and economic transformations. In Shock Therapy Tomas Matza provides an ethnography of post-Soviet Saint Petersburg, following psychotherapists, psychologists, and their clients as they navigate the challenges of post-Soviet life. Juxtaposing personal growth and success seminars for elites with crisis counseling and remedial interventions for those on public assistance, Matza shows how profound inequalities are emerging in contemporary Russia in increasingly intimate ways as matters of selfhood. Extending anthropologies of neoliberalism and care in new directions, Matza offers a profound meditation on the interplay between ethics, therapy, and biopolitics, as well as a sensitive portrait of everyday caring practices in the face of the confounding promise of postsocialist democracy.
Download or read book Living on Your Own written by Jesook Song and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ethnography of young, single women struggling to live independently in South Korea. Living on Your Own is an ethnography of young, single women in South Korea who seek to live independently. Using extensive interviews, along with media analysis and archival research, Jesook Song traces the womens difficulties in achieving residential autonomy. Song exposes the clash between the womens burgeoning desire for independent lives and the ongoing incursion of traditional, conservative family ideology and marriage pressure into housing practices and financial institutions. She pays particular attention to the Korean rent system and the reliance on lump-sum cash even for basic subsistence, which promotes tight control of young adults lives by family and kinship networks. The young women whose voices feature prominently in this book are a prototype of global youth in crisis: caught between aspirations for the self-development and flexible lifestyle championed by globalizing media and communication technology and the reality of their position as flexible labor in a neoliberal economy.
