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"Covering a broad scope, this collection examines the cinemas of Europe, East Asia, India, Africa and Latin America, and will be of interest to scholars and students of film studies, cultural studies and postcolonial studies, as well as to film enthusiasts keen to explore a wider range of world cinema."--Jacket.
In A Sense of the City, Gala Maria Follaco examines Nagai Kafū’s (1879-1959) literary construction of urban spatialities from late Meiji through the early Shōwa period. She argues that Kafū’s urban critique was based on his awareness of the cultural sedimentation of the cityscape and of the complex relationship that it bore with the historical framework of modern Japan. With the overall aim to define Kafū’s position within pre-war Japanese literature, Follaco touches upon key issues such as memory, class difference, and language ideologies; draws connections between his sojourn abroad and strategies of “mapping” the city of Tokyo in his literature; and takes into account works previously understudied, including his biography of Washizu Kidō and his photographs.
Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) spent more time abroad than any other writer of his generation, firing the Japanese imagination with his visions of America and France. Applying the theoretical framework of Occidentalism to Japanese literature, Rachael Hutchinson explores Kafū's construction of the Western Other, an integral part of his critique of Meiji civilization. Through contrast with the Western Other, Kafū was able to solve the dilemma that so plagued Japanese intellectuals—how to modernize and yet retain an authentic Japanese identity in the modern world. Kafū's flexible positioning of imagined spaces like the "West" and the "Orient" ultimately led him to a definition of the Japanese Self. Hutchinson analyzes the wide range of Kafū's work, particularly those novels and stories reflecting Kafū's time in the West and the return to Japan, most unknown to Western readers and a number unavailable in English, along with his better-known depictions of Edo's demimonde. Kafū's place in Japan's intellectual history and his influence on other writers are also discussed.
This study examines how Japanese policy toward Middle East security issues is shaped by the need to both maintain Japan’s security alliance with the US and its oil relationship with states in the Middle East. Yukiko Miyagi introduces the historic roots of Japan’s policy, and then focuses on the major contemporary cases – the Iraq war, the Iranian nuclear crisis, and the Arab-Israeli conflict, to expose and explain how clashing interests and dilemmas were negotiated to arrive at policy outcomes. The author also sheds light on the utility of mainstream International Relations theories for understanding Japan’s behaviour. How do we understand the policy of a self-declared ‘anti-milita...
Readers worldwide have long been drawn to the foreign, the exotic, and the alien, even before Freud’s famous essay on the uncanny in 1919. Given Japan’s many years of relative isolation, followed by its multicultural empire, these themes seem particularly ripe for exploration and exploitation by Japanese writers. Their literary adventures have taken them inside Japan as well as outside, and how they internalized the exotic through the adoption of modernist techniques and subject matter forms the primary subject of this book. The Alien Within is the first book-length thematic study in English of the alien in modern Japanese literature and helps shed new light on a number of important auth...
This Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to the latest research on role-playing games (RPGs) across disciplines, cultures, and media in one single, accessible volume. Collaboratively authored by more than 40 key scholars, it traces the history of RPGs, from wargaming precursors to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons to the rise of live-action role-play and contemporary computer RPG and massively multiplayer online RPG franchises, like Baldur’s Gate, Genshin Impact, and World of Warcraft. Individual chapters survey the perspectives, concepts, and findings on RPGs from key disciplines, like performance studies, sociology, psychology, education, economics, game design, literary studies,...
This book examines the local, regional and transnational contexts of video games through a focused analysis on gaming communities, the ways game design regulates gender and class relations, and the impacts of colonization on game design. The critical interest in games as a cultural artifact is covered by a wide range of interdisciplinary work. To highlight the social impacts of games the first section of the book covers the systems built around high score game competitions, the development of independent game design communities, and the formation of fan communities and cosplay. The second section of the book offers a deeper analysis of game structures, gender and masculinity, and the economic constraints of empire that are built into game design. The final section offers a macro perspective on transnational and colonial discourses built into the cultural structures of East Asian game play.
Over 30,000 Japanese children are in the care of the state. This study describes what happens to them in a country that has no professional social workers and little tradition of adopting or fostering children in need of care.
The female gaze is used by writers and readers to examine narratives from a perspective that sees women as subjects instead of objects, and the application of a female gaze to male-dominated discourses can open new avenues of interpretation. This book explores how female manga artists have encouraged the female gaze within their work and how female readers have challenged the male gaze pervasive in many forms of popular media. Each of the chapters offers a close reading of influential manga and fancomics to illustrate the female gaze as a mode of resistant reading and creative empowerment. By employing a female gaze, professional and amateur creators are able to shape and interpret texts in a manner that emphasizes the role of female characters while challenging and reconfiguring gendered themes and issues.
The corporate salaryman and professional housewife stand as hegemonic archetypes of masculinity and femininity in Japan. However, these rigid gender roles are being challenged by women who are seeking to move beyond the strictly defined confines of their traditional roles as caregivers and homemakers. Through interviews with a range of Japanese women, this book explores how women’s gender roles are both reified and undermined in Japan today, and uncovers the prevalent themes, or ‘discourses’, that are utilized to construct gendered identities. It shows that while dominant discourses formulate notions of femininity within the domestic sphere, these are simultaneously resisted and proble...