15 Mar 2011

NEW ROOM NUMBER FOR Prof Yomota and Dr Kinsella on Kawaii and Aging

PLEASE NOTE THE NEW ROOM NUMBER FOR THE EVENT "Matureness and Unmatureness in Contemporary Japanese Art and Culture: Aging and Kawaii":

Room 541
Birkbeck College Main Building
Torrington Square (Malet Street)
London WC1E 7HX
Building number 1 on this map

6pm Friday 25th March

10 Mar 2011

[NEW VENUE] Prof. Inuhiko Yomota and Dr. Sharon Kinsella on Aging and Kawaii

Matureness and Unmatureness in Contemporary Japanese Art and Culture: Aging and Kawaii
A talk by Prof. Inuhiko Yomota
Respondent: Dr. Sharon Kinsella

6pm Friday 25th March

[PLEASE NOTE THE NEW ROOM NUMBER]
Room 541
Birkbeck College Main Building
Torrington Square (Malet Street)
London WC1E 7HX
Building number 1 on this map

FREE AND OPEN TO ALL
but booking is essential, please email lapcsf@gmail.com


In this special event for LAPCSF, celebrated critic Inuhiko Yomota will contrast the culture of kawaii—so prevalent in manga, anime, and East Asian pop culture in general—with the aesthetics of aging within Butoh dance and other performing arts. Traversing from the figure of the girl warrior in the anime Sailor Moon and Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls, to the “immortality” of legendary Butoh performer Kazuo Ohno, this talk promises to be a tour de force from a unique voice in cultural criticism.

Prof. Inuhiko Yomota’s publications range over film history, literature, manga, and even food culture. His One Hundred Years of Japanese Cinema has been translated into German, Italian, Korean, and Chinese, while his books on kawaii and manga have been published in Chinese and Korean translations. Among the prizes he has been awarded for his writing are the Kodansha Essay Prize, the Kuwabara Prize, and the Saito Ryoku’u prize. He has also translated works by Paul Bowles, Edward Said, Pier Paulo Pasolini, and Mahmoud Darwish into Japanese. He is Professor of Motion Picture History and Comparative Literature at Meiji Gakuin University, and he has been a visiting professor at Konguk University, Columbia University, the University of Bologna, and Tel Aviv University, among others.

Dr. Sharon Kinsella is author of Adult Manga: Culture and power in postwar Japanese society and Girls as Energy: Fantasies of rejuvenation in contemporary Japan. She is lecturer in Japanese Visual Culture at the University of Manchester, and has previously held positions at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, MIT, and Yale.

Dr Lisa Leung on East Asian Media Circulation



We are pleased to announce the latest meeting of the London Asia Pacific Cultural Studies Forum with Dr Lisa Leung from Lingnan University in Hong Kong. In this informal meeting, Dr Leung will initiate the discussion by sharing some of her most recent thoughts, yet to be published in a full paper, on East Asian Pop Culture. She will talk about the ‘different layers of appropriation' that complicate the critical rethinking of East Asian media circulation, between Hong Kong, China, Korea and Japan. She will also combine this with the challenges of doing audience consumption research on the internet, something which is more current to her research. Please let us know (lapcsf@gmail.com) if you would like to attend. Drinks afterwards, as always!
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Whither is the transnational? Some tentative thoughts about the challenges of East Asian TV dramas reception studies

Lisa Leung, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University

Date: Friday March 18th (6:00 to 8:00 PM)
Room 629, Birkbeck Main Building (Torrington Square) 

Scholarship around the transnational reception of East Asian media and cultural products has epitomized the challenges of popular culture research, which has been attempting to capture the interplay between globalized consumerist culture, cultural negotiations as well as geo-political tensions in the region. After a decade of research and publications on the topic, Dr Lisa Leung shares about her critical evaluations of the contributions of, as well as the challenges, facing East Asian media reception studies, in terms of its conceptualizations as well as methodologies. How will the ‘layers of appropriation’ of transnational audience to the media products interplay with the shifting geo-political dynamics in the East Asian region? How can the internet, which has transformed (transnational) viewing landscape pose new challenges to the research methodologies surrounding reception studies?

Bio: Dr Lisa Leung has researched and published extensively on the transnational circulation of Japanese and Korean media and cultural products. While her specialty is in audience studies, she has also researched and published on the interplay between (global) popular culture and social movements. Her more recent interests include creative industries, ethnic minorities and multiculturalism, as well as community media.