Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture Lecture Series Invites you to:

Manga Empire: Comics and Companion Species Thomas LAMARRE, University of Toronto

April 27th, 2015 (Monday)
6:30 pm-8pm
Room 508, Building 10
Sophia University Yotsuya Campus

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Lecture in English / No RSVP required

Abstract
In its promotion for upcoming issues in 1931, Shōnen kurabu gave equal billing to the Mukden Incident and new features on animals. Indeed, throughout the 1930s, this boys’ magazine explored various ways of combining warfare and human-animal relations, from stories extolling companion animals to advice on hunting and features on military dogs. Yet it was the manga of Shōnen kurabu and their adaptation into cartoon films that came to supply a more stable set of relations between warfare and animals, albeit in “comic” form with the emergence of popular culture for children.

This expanded manga field thus succeeded in bringing together new contradictory visions of society. There were, on the one hand, troubling legacies of differentiating peoples on the basis of species, such as the discourses of social Darwinism as well as expressive procedures organized around national heralds and emblems with their tendency toward totemism. On the other hand, there arose new ideas about integrating peoples on the basis of species, from the monogenism of new anthropological theories (Tsuboi Shōgorō) and non-Darwinist ‘ecological’ theories (Imanishi Kinji) to philosophical justifications of Pan-Asianism and Co-Prosperity (Tanabe Hajime) and Japan’s proposal for a racial equality clause at the Paris Peace Conference. What is it about the expanded manga field that allowed it to assemble these contradictory stances?

To answer this question, I propose to examine Shōnen kurabu as a sort of intermediary context for the field that emerged around manga such as Norakuro and Bōken Dankichi — an intermediary site between broader ideological currents and the emerging manga field. It afforded an initial contraction of the various discursive and media components that would later be condensed into the manga field. In this way, I also hope to shed light on the persistence and even the amplification of the “multispecies ideal” in subsequent popular culture.

Thomas LAMARRE teaches in East Asian Studies and Communications Studies at McGill University. He is author of books dealing with the history of media, thought, and material culture, with projects ranging from the communication networks of 9th century Japan (Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription, 2000), to silent cinema and the global imaginary (Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirô on Cinema and Oriental Aesthetics, 2005) and animation technologies (The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation, 2009). He has also edited volumes on cinema and animation, on the impact of modernity in East Asia, on pre-emptive war, and, as Associate Editor of Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts, a number of volumes on manga, anime, and fan cultures: Circuits of Desire (2007), The Limits of the Human (2008), War/Time (2009), Fanthropologies (2010), User Enhancement (2011), Lines of Sight (2012), and Tezuka’s Manga Life (2013). He has recently completed two translations, Kawamata Chiaki’s SF novel Death Sentences and Muriel Combes’s Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. He is a participant in a Canadian Foundation Innovation grant to construct at Moving Image Research Laboratory. See Website: web.me.com/lamarre_mediaken

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David H. Slater, Ph.D.
Director of the Institute of Comparative Culture Professor of Cultural Anthropology Faculty of Liberal Arts, Graduate Program in Japanese Studies Sophia University, Tokyo