Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 18:58:55 -0500 From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu> Subject: Re: M-TH: Mass-Culture & Violence Dennis, When you have enough courage to strip yourself of grad-school theory-speak and used items from pop culture thrift shops, your words and thoughts, I guarantee, will become more revelatory. One note of caution (this is the second time). Never turn a selective + sexist import of cultural commodities into a synecdoche for the entire mass culture of a given nation. Don't think that your local video store or comic book market can give you a clue as to how others do culture, much less how others live. (Re-read Edward Said in your spare time for good measure.) I have an impression that you speak neither Japanese nor Chinese. If so, learning either language might be a step in the right direction. (However, given the pervasive nature of reactionary scholarship in the "area studies" and foreign language instruction in the U.S., it might put you into a right-wing direction.) Regarding your comment on the "violent corporeality of Japanese mass-culture," I think that it reveals more about American teenage hetero male consumer tastes than the state of mass culture in Japan. The same goes, I am pretty certain, for Chinese mass culture. The question to be asked, IMHO, by American scholars who do not have enough knowledge about the language, culture, + social relations of Japan and other Asian nations, is what makes American hetero male teenagers desire the cultural waste products from Japan, HK, etc.? What do they get from them? What does their desire say about the society they live in, that is, the United States? >Actually, this raises an interesting question: how >different is the sadism in the manga and anime from the American >run-and-gun films? Or is it just that the former is more of a televisual, >video form, a kind of indigenous Japanese version of the latter? Suppose one can compare Samuel Fuller, Sergio Leone, Sam Pekinpah, John Woo, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, etc. (for 'feral homoeroticism'). [Or read _Billy Budd_ with Eve Sedgewick eyes.] Or compare _Akira_ with _Blade Runner_, _Brazil_, the _Alien_ series, etc. (for post-industrial dystopias). Or _Tetsuo_ with anything by David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Alex Cox, etc. (for 'violent corporeality'). We can write many papers on such subjects, and it may be that we have no way around the *conspicuous production* treadmill of cultural junk studies given the state of the academic job market, but we had better remember that they will be "very clever, radical, and completely pointless," to borrow Fergal's words. Yoshie --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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