Oregon, anyone?
Roland Kelts on Multipolar Japan, 3/10 4pm
Pop Culture from a Multipolar Japan
Roland Kelts, Author and Journalist
Knight Library Browsing Room
March 10, 4:00 pm
Is there something more to the U.S.’s fascination with Japanese anime and manga? How are anime films and manga comics cultural channeling zones, opened by the horrors of war and disaster and animated by the desire to assemble a world of new looks, feelings and identities? Roland Kelts addresses the movement of Japanese culture into the West as sign and symptom of broader reanimations. With uncertainty now the norm, style, he argues, is trumping identity, explaining, in part, the success of Japanese pop and fashion, design and cuisine in the West. As Western mindsets encounter a rapid decline in longstanding binaries – good/evil, woman/man, black/white – Japan’s cultural narratives evolve in borderless, unstable worlds where characters transform, morality is multifaceted, and endings inconclusive. Animation allows an aesthetic freedom wherein these transformations and gender ambiguity may be given fuller play than in live action films. Nothing appears fixed. No surprise, perhaps, argues Kelts, coming from the only people to have suffered the immediate transformations of two atomic bombs and the instant denigration of their supreme polar father: the Japanese Emperor.
Roland Kelts is a half-Japanese American writer, editor and lecturer who divides his time between New York and Tokyo. He is the author of Japanamerica : How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the US and the forthcoming novel, Access. He has presented on contemporary Japanese culture worldwide and has taught courses in Japanese popular culture at numerous universities. His fiction and nonfiction appear in such publications as Zoetrope: All Story, Psychology Today, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue Japan, The Millions, The Japan Times, Animation Magazine, Bookforum, and The Village Voice. He is the Editor in Chief of the Anime Masterpieces screening and discussion program, the commentator for National Public Radio’s series, “Pacific Rim Diary,” and the author of a weekly column for the Daily Yomiuri newspaper. His blog is: http://japanamerica.blogspot.com/
This event is presented by the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies and cosponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. For more info, please call 541-346-1521
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