Mechademia 7

Lines of Sight—the seventh volume in the Mechademia series, an annual forum devoted to Japanese anime and manga—explores the various ways in which anime, manga, digital media, fan culture, and Japanese art—from scroll paintings to superflat—challenge, undermine, or disregard the concept of Cartesian (or one-point) perspective, the dominant mode of visual culture in the West since the seventeenth century. More than just a visual mode or geometric system, Cartesianism has shaped nearly every aspect of modern rational thought, from mathematics and science to philosophy and history.

Framed by Thomas Lamarre’s introduction, “Radical Perspectivalism,” the essays here approach Japanese popular culture as a visual mode that employs non-Cartesian formations, which by extension make possible new configurations of perception and knowledge. Whether by shattering the illusion of visual or narrative seamlessness through the use of multiple layers or irregular layouts, blurring the divide between viewer and creator, providing diverse perspectives within a single work of art, or rejecting dualism, causality, and other hallmarks of Cartesianism, anime and manga offer in their radicalization of perspective the potential for aesthetic and even political transformation.

Contributors: David Beynon, Deakin U; Fujimoto Yukari, Meiji U; Yuriko Furuhata, McGill U; Craig Jackson, Ohio Wesleyan U; Reginald Jackson, U of Chicago; Thomas Lamarre, McGill U; Jinying Li; Waiyee Loh; Livia Monnet, U of Montreal; Sharalyn Orbaugh, U of British Columbia; Stefan Riekeles; Atsuko Sakaki, U of Toronto; Miryam Sas, U of California, Berkeley; Timon Screech, U of London; Emily Somers; Marc Steinberg, Concordia U.

Frenchy Lunning is professor of liberal arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Contents

Introduction: Radical Perspectivalism

Thomas Lamarre

Intervals

Inventing Intervals: The Digital Image in Metropolis and Gankutsuō

Marc Steinberg

Takahashi Macoto: The Origin of Shōjo Manga Style

Fujimoto Yukari

Translated by Matt Thorn

The Face in the Shadow of the Camera: Corporeality of the Photographer in Kanai Mieko’s Narratives

Atsuko Sakaki

Kamishibai and the Art of the Interval

Sharalyn Orbaugh

Worlds in Perspective

Hokusai’s Lines of Sight

Timon Screech

Superflat and the Postmodern Gothic: Images of Western Modernity in Kuroshitsuji

Waiyee Loh

From Techno-cute to Superflat: Robots and Asian Architectural Futures

David Beynon

Dying in Two Dimensions: Genji emaki and the Wages of Depth Perception

Reginald Jackson

Image Essay: Mobile Worldviews

Stefan Riekeles and Thomas Lamarre

Nonlocalizable Selves

Topologies of Identity in Serial Experiments Lain

Craig Jackson

From Superflat Windows to Facebook Walls: Mobility and Multiplicity of an Animated Shopping Gaze

Jinying Li

New Halves, Old Selves: Reincarnation and Transgender Identification in Ōshima Yumiko’s Tsurubara-tsurubara

Emily Somers

Energetic Matter

Audiovisual Redundancy and Remediation in Ninja bugeichō

Yuriko Furuhata

Moving the Horizon: Violence and Cinematic Revolution in Ōshima Nagisa’s Ninja Bugeichō (1967)

Miryam Sas

Anatomy of Permutational Desire, Part 3: The Artificial Woman and the Perverse Structure of Modernity

Livia Monnet

Contributors

Call for Papers