Handbook of Japanese Media and Popular Culture in Transition
9789463728898
296 pages
Amsterdam University Press
Overview
The Handbook of Japanese Media and Popular Culture in Transition brings together new research and perspectives on popular media phenomena, as well as shining a spotlight on texts that are less well known or studied. Organized into five thematic sections, the chapters span a diverse range of cultural genres, including contemporary film and television, postwar cinema, advertising, popular fiction, men’s magazines, manga and anime, karaoke and digital media. They address issues critical to contemporary Japanese society: the politicization of history, authenticity and representation, constructions of identity, trauma and social disaffection, intersectionality and trans/nationalism. Drawing on methods and approaches from a range of disciplines, the chapters make explicit the interconnections between these areas of research and map out possible trajectories for future inquiry. As such, the handbook will be of value to both novice scholars and seasoned researchers, working within and/or beyond the Japanese media studies remit.
Author Bio
Forum Mithani is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Cardiff University, where she has previously held the position of Lecturer in Japanese Studies. She received her PhD from SOAS University of London for her thesis on the representation of single motherhood in Japanese television drama. She is the author of “Maternal Fantasies in an Era of Crisis—Single Mothers, Self-Sacrifice and Sexuality in Japanese Television Drama,” in F. Portier-Le Cocq ed. Motherhood in Contemporary International Perspective: Continuity and Change (Routledge, 2020) and “(De)Constructing Nostalgic Myths of the Mother in Japanese drama Woman” in Series—International Journal of TV Serial Narratives 5 (2019). Her research interests include Japanese media and popular culture, gender, motherhood, feminism and social minorities.Griseldis Kirsch is Reader in Contemporary Japanese Culture at SOAS University of London. She is the author of Contemporary Sino-Japanese Relations on Screen. A History: 1989-2005 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and co-editor of the volume Assembling Japan: Technology, Modernity and Global Culture (Peter Lang, 2015). Her research interests include nationalism, identity and memory in Japanese screen media and she has published widely on these topics.
