Mechademia 7

Lines of Sight

2012

Frenchy Lunning, Editor

Tracing the impact of anime and manga’s radical break with Cartesian perspective

Lines of Sight, the seventh volume in the Mechademia series, explores the various ways in which anime, manga, digital media, fan culture, and Japanese art challenge, undermine, or disregard the concept of Cartesian perspective. 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.

Heady and challenging, the essays in Lines of Sight provide penetrating insight into the often-baffling world of anime.

Shepherd Express

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.

Heady and challenging, the essays in Lines of Sight provide penetrating insight into the often-baffling world of anime.

Shepherd Express

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 Rachel 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