AX 2011: the Anime & Manga Studies Symposium
by V.E. on October 19th, 2011
filed under anime/manga, recap/review
[Note: this post is part of a multiple-post recap and review about Anime Expo 2011.]
I talked about the other panels I attended in a previous post, but the Anime & Manga Studies Symposium was set up a little differently and, honestly, ended up being more interesting to me.
Open Session 1 Friday, July 1 @ 8 PM
left to right: Mikhail Koulikov, Andrea Gilroy, and Casey Brienza
Andrea Gilroy (center, in the image above) provided a close reading of a single title, Domu: A Child’s Dream, in her presentation called “This Place is a Nightmare”. Domu was in itself, she says, a critique of globalization, noting that horror tends to lend itself to allegory. Though many anime fans’ first taste of anime was through Akira (see my note below), she wanted to know why Domu, a work by the same author, wasn’t more famous. “The question is not, ‘Why Akira?’” she said, “It is, instead, ‘Why not Domu?’”
I suspect, actually, that Gilroy’s claim that most fans are first exposed to anime through Akira was more true ten years ago than it is today. When she asked what the audience what was the first anime they ever saw—and then answered herself with, “For most people, it’s Akira“—I didn’t notice too much agreement. Most of the audience had surely heard of Akira and had probably even watched it, but I doubt that it was their first foray into the world of anime and manga. It wasn’t mine, for example.
Places that are supposed to be home become dangerous and “unhome” with overpopulation, industrialization, etc. Gilroy mentioned “Born of Trauma” (PDF) by Thomas Lamarre and Contemporary Urban Japan by John Clammer as two resources for further reading. Maybe part of the reason Domu isn’t as popular as Akira is that we must face the fact that, at the end of the story, we agree with Itsuko (the child), and she is becoming the monster. And we don’t want to admit that there may be a little (a lot?) monster in us, too.
Casey Brienza (right, in the above image) talked about TokyoPop‘s recent demise in her presentation, “Manga Revolution or Logical Evolution?” She disagreed with Matt Thorn’s ideas about TokyoPop’s “cutting corners” and paying less than other publishers for the same work. The true “TokyoPop Effect”, she says, is the translation that TokyoPop forced from “a comic book” to “a book”—TokyoPop discovered book publishers’ way of working and turned it toward comics and manga. Getting manga into mainstream bookstores (Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc.) was a big deal, as opposed to the traditional comic book store route. In fact, manga as a category grew 250% in sales between 2002 and 2007, and there are more full-time workers in the (U.S.) manga industry now than before TokyoPop (Mixx) came onto the scene in 1997.
Open Session 2 Saturday, July 2 @ Noon
I attended Open Session 2 so I could see Deborah Scally’s talk “Cognito, ergo anime: Some Thoughts on Using Anime and Manga in the Classroom” but she didn’t speak during the session (even though she was scheduled), so I sat through three other talks instead, including one that was scheduled for another time. (Maybe the two presenters switched? I don’t know.)
left to right: Sherrie Bakelar, Sandra Aragona, and Samantha Close;
not shown: Annie Manion
Samantha Close, who was actually scheduled for Open Session 4 (which I did not attend), gave her presentation called “Real Ninjas Make AMVs”, the contents of which is an academic paper in progress. She talked about “transformative works” which are pieces of writing or art that add something new to the already established work. (By her definition: fanfiction, fanart, and AMVs are examples of transformative works.) AMVs, Close argues, are productive spectatorship: fans of a series can sync caps and short scenes from that series to a song to create an emotional theme or highlight a hard fought battle or even just recap the series itself. Unlike professionally made music videos (which use the visuals of the video to help explain the audio), however, AMVs use the audio to help explain the video. Likewise, professional editing and AMV editing are “completely different beasts”, she said. AMVs cut to the next image or scene much more, and they rely on cutting to the beat of the music more than professional editing. She noted the importance of community among AMV editors (and viewers) and cited AMV Chef at Anime Expo, AMV contests, and animemusicvideos.org as examples of such community. She closed by saying,
Being a fan of something that is not produced in your cultural context allows for a type of remix that brings the context more in line with your own [culture].
Sandra Alagona and Sherrie Bakelar spoke about the warrior mother in anime in their presentation called “Between Yasashii and Bushido”. The presentation focused on Rangiku (from BLEACH) and Balsa (from Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit), who both act as surrogate mothers to other characters in their respective stories. Warrior women in anime must enact dual gender roles and face the choices of all women: “settling down to raise a family or stay in a profession”. For example, Balsa rejects the idea that she can be both a warrior and mother, Alagona and Bakelar say. Rangiku, in contrast, seems to act more like an older sister, in my opinion—she loves her friends and protects them when it’s in her power, but she’s not afraid to whack them herself (nor is she very shy about it) when they step out of line. They noted three primary types of female characters, which I named thusly: femme fatale, mother bear, and tomboy. Balsa tends toward the mother bear stereotype; Rangiku looks like a femme fatale but acts more like a tomboy. I wasn’t sure I agreed with some of what the two researchers said, but I haven’t done the research as they have (and I doubt I ever will, since it only vaguely interests me). It made me wonder if these types of characteristics can be found in male anime characters, especially in yaoi (where there are almost no female characters at all). Also, I’ve noticed that historical anime given more leeway to characters’ gender role adherence, while sci-fi/futuristic anime tend to restrict their characters to stereotypical gender roles, often at the expense of the plot.
Annie Manion gave a presentation called “Modernity and Pre-War Japanese Animation” which focused on animation between 1917 (the year the earliest still-existing Japanese animation was domestically produced) and 1945 (the end of World War II). Manion noted for reference that in the United States, the “golden age of cartoons” is considered 1920s-1940s. She also placed the context in history: in 1923, there was a great earthquake in Japan; the 1930s called in the Great Depression (which was more than an American phenomenon), and World War II raged 1931-1945. Toei, the oldest Japanese animation company still in existence, for example, was founded in 1946. (The link says 1948, but [1] either way, that date is still after WWII, which was her point, and [2] I’d believe Manion over Wikipedia. But, you know, that’s just me.) Though the oldest surviving Japanese-produced animation dates back to 1917, manga had been already well established by that time (as short strips and political cartoons). Manion noted three early filmmakers:
Shinokawa Oten (1892-1973)
Kitayama Seitaro (1888-1945) and
Jun’ichi Koichi (1886-1970)
and noted that Hollywood (the animation industry in the United States) was extremely hegemonic during the golden age. Japanese censorship was prevalent, and domestic animators felt no compunction reusing American characters such as Felix the Cat, Betty Boop, Popeye, and—yes—Mickey Mouse. Manion was prepared to speak a lot more about it, but she ran out of time (unfortunately!) and she skipped ahead to modernization (teaching people that they are part of a nation and how to practice “good citizenship”) and briefly mentioned the artificial tension created between “traditional” and “modern” before wrapping up.
Roundtable 2 & Closing Remarks Sunday, July 3 @ 3:30 PM
left to right: Kim Rudolph, Northrop Davis, and Dru Pagliosotti;
not shown: Lawrence Eng, who gave the closing remarks
During the second roundtable discussion (I didn’t attend the first one), academics talked about their relationship to and with anime and manga (academically and personally) and made note of some resources for interested parties.
Northrop Davis, a former screenwriter who now teaches at the university level, talked about creating manga, briefly about manga’s history, and mentioned wemakemanga.com, which is a website for OEL manga. He also referenced Scott McCloud’s Making Comics as a good resource for visual artists who want to make manga themselves.
Dru Pagliassotti, who acted as one of the editors for and contributed to Boys’ Love Manga, talked about how anime and manga can (and do!) overlap with many other disciplines: gender studies, queer studies, race, post-colonialism, creative writing, fans/reception/audience, history, legal/copyright issues, art/iconography, discursive analysis—practically anything you can think of! She mentioned two calls for papers: one for a special issue of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics [Note: deadline has passed] and one for Transformative Works and Cultures.
Kim Rudolph spoke on the importance of including anime and manga in the classroom (and how to do that); anime, for example, can be very helpful in language classes for pronunciation and comprehension purposes and to study history and Japanese customs (ie: summer festival). She, as a fansubber herself, is also interested in fan-created content and using technology to build better communities. She referenced Paul Gravett’s Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics and Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture as good places to start for people who are interested in the history of anime and manga.
Lawrence Eng gave the closing remarks immediately following the second Roundtable discussion, wherein he gave a presentation called “Writing About Otaku: lessons from fandom, academia, and beyond” which I don’t think was really closing remarks more than it was another presentation among the many others, but it serendipitously managed to wrap things up very well nonetheless. He noted that in Japan the word otaku is used negatively, but here in the United States it just means “a fan of anime and/or manga”. (Otaku is both singular and plural, the same way the word fish is: one fish; three fish.) And often, American fans use/claim the word for themselves, especially since outsiders (non-otaku) don’t even know what the word means, much less its varied, often hotly-debated definition(s). He briefly outlined something he called the “otaku ethic”, the three parts of which are (1) [obtaining and having] information, (2) appropriation and/or resistance, and (3) [creating] networks.
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I want to give a sincere note of thanks to Mikhail Koulikov (shown in the first photo), who coordinated the Anime & Manga Studies Symposium because he, too, loves anime and manga and wants to see academic circles pay more serious attention to said media. Thank you for stepping up and helping to make it happen. I really enjoyed the Symposium, and I hope it happens again next year. If it does, I will definitely try to attend more of the sessions.
Thank you so much for taking the time and making the effort to write this up! I really appreciate your feedback. And I’ll be the first one to admit that trying to put this on as basically a one-man show was a little crazy. *Never again.*
For what that’s worth, yes, you’re right – there were a couple of last-minute speaker cancellations, including Prof. Scally, so I had to move some of the speaker slots around with very little notice. I do apologize for that.
And re/Larry Eng’s speech, essentially, I tagged it as a closing remarks kind of thing largely as a measure of the immense respect I have for him. He is almost single-handedly responsible for getting the area of anime/manga studies to be where it is now, and to transforming a bunch of college students from all around the country into an actual community of scholars – and friends. So, I wanted to give him an opportunity to participate in something that he played such a big role in creating and fostering.
In any case, I will probably start planning next year’s seminar fairly soon, and if you think you will be interested in participating as a speaker or panelist, or in helping me with organizing this thing, I’ll definitely look forward to hearing from you!
Again, thank you,