Date: 2024-10-2 (Wed)
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Mode of event: Online (Zoom link will be provided upon request)
Registration: https://cuhk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUpcO-vqj8tHtc8z-zX1hSByV1ADYOV89Vz
Speaker:
Prof. Jinying Li, Department of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University (Book Author)
Moderator:
Prof. Jia Tan, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, CUHK
Introduction:
Why has anime, a “low-tech” medium from last century, suddenly become the cultural “new cool” in the information age? Through the lens of anime and its transnational fandom, Jinying Li explores the meanings and logics of “geekdom” as one of the most significant sociocultural groups of our time. In Anime’s Knowledge Cultures, Li shifts the center of global geography in knowledge culture from the computer boys in Silicon Valley to the anime fandom in East Asia.
Drawing from film studies, animation studies, media theories, fan studies, and area studies, she provides broad cultural and theoretical explanations of anime’s appeal to a new body of tech-savvy knowledge workers and consumers commonly known as geeks, otaku, or zhai. Examining the forms, techniques, and aesthetics of anime, as well as the organization, practices, and sensibilities of its fandom, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures is at once a theorization of anime as a media environment as well as a historical and cultural study of transnational geekdom as a knowledge culture. Li analyzes anime culture beyond the national and subcultural frameworks of Japan or Japanese otaku, instead theorizing anime’s transnational, transmedial network as the epitome of the postindustrial knowledge culture of global geekdom.
By interrogating the connection between the anime boom and global geekdom, Li reshapes how we understand the meanings and significance of anime culture in relation to changing social and technological environments.
Speaker’s bio:
Jinying Li is Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she teaches media theory, animation, and digital culture in East Asia. Her first book, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), explores the connection between the anime boom and global geekdom. She is now completing her second book, Walled Media and Mediating Walls. She co-edited two special issues on Chinese animation for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and a
special issue on regional platforms for Asiascape: Digital Asia. She is currently co-editing the volume The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Digital Media. Jinying is also a filmmaker and produced two documentary TV series that were broadcasted nationwide in China through Shanghai Media Group (SMG). She is one of the co-writers of the animated feature film Big Fish and Begonia (Dayu Haitang, 2016).
More details:
https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517916282/animes-knowledge-cultures/
Co-organized by the MA in Intercultural Studies Programme and the Centre for Cultural Studies, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, the Chinese University of Hong Kong