What can media studies contribute to critical race studies in the context of Asian studies? This question has usually been addressed through analyses of representations and strategies of racial othering. The talk proposes a complementary track, taking up questions about infrastructures (what is sometimes called new television) and the emergence of “media regionalism” in order to consider two different ways of understanding “Asianism” and “Asianness” in a contemporary global context. First, looking at infrastructures allows for another perspective on regionalism: regionalism appears at once as supranationalism and as something “infranational,” a halo of connections, stuff clinging to nationalized networks. Second, tracking the transmedial and transnational movement of two Japanese multimedia series shows how the sense of an Asian region has come to oscillate between something coming into common (culturalism) and an extralegal logic of inclusive exception (militarism). It is at this level that we might begin to articulate what Gayatri Spivak calls a politics of other Asias.
About the Speaker
Thomas LAMARRE teaches in East Asian Studies and Communications Studies at McGill University. He is author of numerous publications on 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), animation technologies (The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation, 2009) and television and new media (The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media, 2018).
Download file: 12.7.18-LAMARRE-FLYER-p5-jhw.pdf