Looking into the “Anime Global Popular” and the “Manga Media”: Reflections on the Scholarship of a Transnational and Transmedia Industry
Abstract
:1. The Problematic Definition of “Anime” and “Anime Studies”
1.1. Anime and Academia
1.2. Anime Disciplinisation and Future Directions: Who Will Lead towards Anime Epistemology?
We can see examples of these different directions throughout this special issue, where the problem of discipline, object of study, and scholar identity splits into new uneasy questions. Thus, Comic Studies is replaced by Manga Studies shifting from Media Studies to a more specific and isolated, but perhaps more legitimate approach (Kacsuk 2018, p. 4). In this scenario, interdisciplinary dialogue—when the ideal transdisciplinary collaboration among scholars is not possible—seems to be the best choice.…have operated as a form of thought police maintaining this emphasis on language issues, guarding the field from the encroachments of theory and protecting it from disciplinary specialists who lack the linguistic tools deemed necessary to understand Japan.
2. “Manga Media” and Their Ecosystem
2.1. Its Etymology
2.2. Its Complexity and Diversity
2.3. Its Audiences
3. Manga Media (Including Anime) as a Manifestation of the Global Popular
4. Conclusions
Funding
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
References
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1 | Please notice that, while I recognize the relevance of the Japanese speaking authors and their priviliged access to sources that are key for the understanding of these media, I’m much more interested in the depiction of an international academic discourse. While manga and anime can be not one but two different discursive objects, the text by Jaqueline Berndt (2008), “Considering Manga Discourse Location, Ambiguity, Historicity” may be a useful starting point for those interested in the description of debates arising within Japanese-language forums. |
2 | See, for example, the series of essays by Maria Teresa Orsi titled “Il Fumetto in Giappone 1” (1978), an academic reference that locates manga as an outcome of Japan’s Meiji era. By linking manga to Japan’s adaptation of Western newspapers’ satirical traditions, this may be one of the first non-continuist approaches to its origin in Western academia. On the other hand, sociologist Marco Pellitteri (1999) offers in Mazinga Nostalgia a comprensive study of the international distribution, adaptation and reception of anime through the case of the Italian market. |
3 | It may be necessary to differentiate between the notion of aesthetics as an individual perspective and as a shared feature. In this special issue, Alba Torrents (2018) concisely argues how each medium can be assessed according to its aesthetic, by evaluating its ontological materialities. |
4 | In this context, I prefer not to differentiate between transnationalisation and globalisation, although in fact they have been defined as very different, even opposite terms. Transnational media flows have been defined as a result of the interaction between different national producers, and, unlike “globalization”, can present more than one centre (Iwabuchi 2002). |
5 | While there are valuable exceptions of projcts embracing Cultural Studies, in the form of articles but mostly, as collaborative books (Lozano-Méndez 2016), these are not necessarily critical and not specially focused on identity as a key articulation point. This surely indicates how wrong it is to define the Cultural Studies Project as a homogeneous theoretical body. Instead, multidisciplinar approaches connecting Literary Theory, Political Economy, Film Studies, among many others, are the usual starting point. It also reinforces my idea of being in a “paradigm” where some key concepts such as “cultural hegemony”, “consumption as a response or manifestation of identy”, and other legacies of this tradition are, perhaps wrongly, taken for granted. |
6 | In this sense, I have commented in this article, some examples where Media Studies terminology, such as the one derived “media ecology”, is used in purely descriptive terms. These approaches are valid and have some value, but they could have been transformed in more valuable contributions to the field of Anime Studies (and also Media Studies) if they had engaged with a deeper reflection of the terms employed. |
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Hernández-Pérez, M. Looking into the “Anime Global Popular” and the “Manga Media”: Reflections on the Scholarship of a Transnational and Transmedia Industry. Arts 2019, 8, 57. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts8020057
Hernández-Pérez M. Looking into the “Anime Global Popular” and the “Manga Media”: Reflections on the Scholarship of a Transnational and Transmedia Industry. Arts. 2019; 8(2):57. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts8020057
Chicago/Turabian StyleHernández-Pérez, Manuel. 2019. "Looking into the “Anime Global Popular” and the “Manga Media”: Reflections on the Scholarship of a Transnational and Transmedia Industry" Arts 8, no. 2: 57. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts8020057