Dissatisfaction with certain aspects of global media studies spurred me to develop an advanced undergraduate seminar under the rubric “Race, Media, Empire,” which is designed to situate media at once geopolitically and personally. My dissatisfaction stemmed from the challenges inherent in teaching what are awkwardly called Japanese global media: manga, anime, video games, light novels, J-pop, vocaloids, and idol cultures. Each of these objects is a vast and unruly domain in itself, and each domain is often intwined in various ways with the others to form media worlds, either through licensing and marketing or through fan activities — none of which are confined to Japan. Despite their ubiquity, however, global Japanese media are not evenly spread across the world. They tend to flock and swarm, cluster and pool, unpredictably, inflected by a variety of factors spanning the gamut from marketing strategies and infrastructural dispositions to cultural affinities, language learning, and fashions, which express the complex relations between Japan and world. What I found especially dissatisfactory in certain global media studies is the simplistic geopolitical framework brought to bear on the historical and cultural complexity of these relations, which introduces an opposition between the Japan and world, erasing the deeper history of Japan in the world.
As someone who teaches and writes on Japanese media, I engage with two fields whose divergent geopolitical concerns tend to repeat the opposition between the national and the global that is reinforced in global media studies: Japan studies, a variety of “area studies,” is profoundly concerned with national language, culture, and history, which are not constituent concerns for media studies. Media studies does not hesitate to speak of the world and to the world, while Japan studies largely speaks of Japan and to Japan. Instead of trying to reconcile these fields, I have found it more useful to engage with problematics where both approaches are useful, even necessary, while perhaps not compatible. This is the case with race and empire.
Two problems are particularly important to address in the context of global Japanese media. First, diversity and specificity are placed on the side of the local, while unity and generality are on the side of global. This framework thus presumes and reinforces the idea of one world with multiple locations — the ideal of a global order. A locale is assumed not to have its own world, for the global order tacitly assumed in global media studies makes multiple worlds unthinkable. Second, global media studies continues to shore up an unwarranted yet unquestioned opposition between the national and the global, as if they were antithetical or contradictory formations. Deeper histories of the co-emergence of the national and the international, or of the co-figuration of the particular and the universal, are thus suppressed or ignored. These persistent problems make it difficult to engage with the genuine challenge of global media studies: while the national and the nation-state have not been overcome and thus may not be ignored, the local implies a geopolitical force different from the national in relation to globalization.
The course “Race, Media, Empire” is designed to situate Japanese global media between race and empire in a bid to take on the challenge of the local. Because my teaching has been primarily in Canada and U.S., I try to begin with more local anti-racist struggles that bring the relation between race and empire to the fore. Let me use a recent example.
The Atlanta shootings — the killing of eight people, six of them Asian women, in three massage parlors in Atlanta on March 16, 2021 — not only called attention to the recent surge in anti-Asian violence in the U.S. but also spurred reflection on the deeply entangled histories of the policing of sex work, immigration policy, and U.S. military imperialism in the Asia-Pacific region.[1] These events make all too clear, once again, that U.S. empire is not something over there, at a remove, beyond the territorial confines of the nation-state. Similar observations arose amid the social movements and political protests under the banner of Black Lives Matter and push to defund police forces: the state-sanctioned violence that police inflicted on protestors and bystanders mobilized practices and weaponry associated with military deployment. U.S. military empire base is happening locally, deploying techniques and technologies that enact and reenact deeper historical intersections of sexism and racism often associated with wars and military occupation happening elsewhere. At the same time, such events make clear that we are not heir to empire in the same way. We need to work through how we are situated, precisely because we are not situated in the same way.
The course consists of three units — race, media, empire — with somewhat different aims, for each unit casts the question of Japanese global media in a different light. The unit on race focuses on readings that deal with the relation between racism “internal” to the nation and racism “external” to it, such as Étienne Balibar[2], Leo Ching[3], Rey Chow[4], Denise Ferreira da Silva[5], Tessa Morris-Suzuki[6], Naoki Sakai[7], and Gayatri Spivak[8]. The aim is to get students thinking about what da Silva calls the global idea of race. Each unit also includes Japanese global media objects in which questions of race and racism are situated at once inside and outside Japan. The first unit includes the anime series Golden Kamuy, for example. Telling the tale of a Japanese imperial soldier who teams up with a young Ainu woman in Hokkaido in 1907 on a treasure quest, the series highlights the connections between the global idea of race, exterritoriality, settler colonialism, and military empire.
As a white male scholar of Japanese media, I am not in position to tell students what or how to think about race and racism. They have the intellectual and emotional resources to work through these readings and to situate themselves. The students attracted to this course are fairly diverse, and many are, broadly speaking, Asian American or Asian. To ensure that particular students do not feel that the burden of speaking about racism falls on them (or is lifted from them), when I have students sign up to teach specific readings and to lead discussion throughout the course, I ask them to focus not only the content of the readings and what is at stake for the writer, but also to talk a bit about how the reading affected their understanding of military base empire, racism, Japan, or the Asia-Pacific, for instance. How do we come to know what we know? How does knowledge circulate and reach us? Because many students are confronting these issues for the first time (or at least feel that they are), our collective aim is to develop questions that help us think about how each of us is situated personally, and about how our personal situation is related to non-personal forces associated with knowledge distribution and media circulation.
Across East Asia, the historical legacy of Japanese empire is commonly evoked in discussions of the regional ascendency of Japanese popular media. The second unit on empire introduces a range of historical and geopolitical perspectives on Japanese empire through readings by Duara[9], Hanazaki[10], Hein and Selden[11], Hirano et al.[12] and Matsumura[13], for instance. But the aim is not only to provide students with a better understanding of Japanese empire. Also, and more importantly, it aims to raise questions about “supranational” modes of governance, to provide another perspective on U.S. military base empire and global media.[14] Here, too, students continue to lead discussion on specific readings. But they are also asked to “choose their own base,” from among the hundreds of U.S. military bases, or one of the sites for extraterritorial occupation under Japanese empire. They consider what perspective the readings offer with respect to their particular site or vice versa, and contribute that perspective to class discussion. Essential to this unit is grappling with the difficulty posed by empire, of thinking at once globally and locally. I find an aphoristic phrase by Catherine Lutz especially useful for formulating and taking up this challenge: “Empire is in the details.”[15] Lutz’s emphasis on complex daily arrangements through which empire is lived invites us collectively to develop a reading practice for Japanese global media objects, based on considering what details of empire matter, and for whom.
Finally, the aim of the unit on media is shift attention toward infrastructures, in particular the infrastructures associated with U.S. military base empire, which build on those of Japanese empire in significant ways, especially in the Asia-Pacific “theater of operations.” The infrastructural turn in media studies is useful for calling attention to the brute material presence and environmental impact of infrastructures.[16] But it is sensibility that accompanies infrastructures that is of primary concern in this course. Especially useful is Ruth Oldenziel’s account of how infrastructures and technologies are used to minimize physical presence of the U.S. military while maximizing U.S. geopolitical and economic interests, for it opens into questions of sensibility.[17] Likewise, Deborah Cowen’s account of the thickening of borders shows that the impact of infrastructures is never only a matter of physically occupying space, but of subjectivity or sensibility as well.[18] How are polarized experiences of thinness and thickness lived and gauged? These questions add an additional layer to our reading of Japanese global media, for the sense of thinness or thickness of media objects is relative not only to the media user but to the milieu in which media use happens, what might be called the infrastructure of feeling. Japanese or Japan-related media objects offering alternative histories and parallel worlds such as Ken Liu’s short story “A Brief History of the Transpacific Tunnel” are central in this unit, for they associate shifts in infrastructure with shifts in sensibility.
A second aphorism offers guidance for considering the relation between infrastructure and sensibility in relation to the prior units. The feminist philosopher Hasana Sharp, writes, “The personal is political, the political impersonal.”[19] Together with “The empire is in the details,” this aphorism provides a constant reminder to students and to me that, while the local is personal and geopolitical, we may also need to non-personalize the local in order to counter contemporary geopolitical and imperial configurations. For historical reasons, the formations we call global media sit on the threshold where the local is at once personally and non-personally political. The examples of global media used in class can be used to highlight this threshold, for they often place the ethical burden on individual characters to resolve the global problem of race and imperial racism on their own, through interpersonal relations, in highly localized situations, and yet, at the same time, characters and interpersonal relations are always to some extent typical or typified. A closer look at the ways in which individuals and interpersonal relations work with and against typification provides a way to move past stereotypes and archetypes and to consider non-personal forms of polarization arising through global media. Strange mediators and dark precursors for global media appear if we listen for them, legacies of regionalism and supranationalism as well as urbanism and cosmopolitanism. This is how the deeper historical intersections of sexism and racism within empire help to situate the study of global media, resolutely in the local.
Thomas Lamarre (he/him) teaches in Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His publications on media, thought, and material history include work on communication networks in 9th century Japan (Uncovering Heian Japan, 2000); silent cinema and the global imaginary (Shadows on the Screen, 2005); animation technologies (The Anime Machine, 2009) and infrastructure ecologies (The Anime Ecology, 2018). Major translations include Kawamata Chiaki’s Death Sentences (2012), Muriel Combes’s Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual (2012), and David Lapoujade’s William James, Empiricism, and Pragmatism (2019).
Chua, Charmaine. “Anti-Asian Violence,” an introduction to the forum on anti-Asian violence, Society+Space, https://www.societyandspace.org/forums/anti-asian-violence ↑
Etienne Balibar, "Racism and Nationalism." Nations and Nationalism: A Reader (1991), pp 161-72. ↑
Leo Ching, Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia (Duke University Press, 2019) ↑
Rey Chow, “Foucault, Race, and Racism,” in After Foucault, ed. Lisa Downing (Cambridge University Press, 2018). ↑
Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). ↑
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Race,” Re-inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 79-109. ↑
Naoki Sakai, “‘You Asians’: On the Historical Role of the West and Asia Binary,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 99: 4 (2000): 789-817. ↑
Gayatri Spivak, “Our Asias — 2001: How to be a Continentalist,” in Other Asias, (Blackwell 2008), 209-238. ↑
Prasenjit Duara, “Between Empire and Nation: Settler Colonialism in Manchukuo,” in Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2012), 73-92. ↑
Kōhei Hanazaki, “Ainu Moshir and Yaponesia: Ainu and Okinawan Identities in Contemporary Japan,” trans. Mark Hudson, in Multicultural Japan: Paleolithic to Postmodern, ed. Donald Dendoon et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 117-131. ↑
Laura Hein and Mark Selden, “Culture, Power, and Identity in Contemporary Okinawa,” Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power, ed. Hein and Selden (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 1-31. ↑
Katsuya Hirano, Lorenzo Veracini, and Toulouse-Antonin Roy. “Vanishing Natives and Taiwan’s Settler-Colonial Unconsciousness,” Critical Asian Studies 50: 2 (2018): 196-218. ↑
Wendy Matsumura, “Introduction,” The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor and Theorization of Community (Duke University Press, 2015), 1-26. ↑
See, for instance: Pär Kristoffer Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford University Press, 2011), 3-14; Julien Go, “Global Fields and Imperial Forms: Field Theory and the British and American Empires,” Sociological Theory 26, no. 3 (2008): 201-229; and Turan Kayaoğlu, Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and China (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 191-204. ↑
Catherine Lutz, “Empire is in the Details,” American Ethnologist 33: 4 (2006): 593-611 ↑
Nicole Starosielski, “Fixed Flow: Undersea Cables as Media Infrastructure.” In Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, (University of Illinois Press, 2015), 53-70. ↑
Ruth Oldenziel, “Islands: The United States as a Networked Empire,” in GabrielleHecht, ed., Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 13–42. ↑
Deborah Cowen, “A Geography of Logistics: Market Authority and the Security of Supply Chains,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 100:3 (2010): 600-620. ↑
Hasana Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2011). ↑
