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furyofvissarion ([personal profile] furyofvissarion) wrote2011-04-09 01:49 pm

catching up again!

Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism - Patricia Hill Collins. I had to return this to the library before I could write it up, but this was a good grounding of intersectionality & how racism, sexism, & heterosexism intersect in the lives of African Americans. She talks about constructions of black femininity & masculinity, from the days when lynching was an everyday occurrence up to the present, & demonstrates convincingly how different forms of oppression hurt even people who are not members of the group it's aimed at (homophobia's effects on straight people, etc.). I think this would be persuasive for readers new to these ideas, but the book also was thought-provoking for me, as someone at least familiar w/the basics of what she discusses.

Rocket Girls - Housuke Nojiri, translated by Joseph Reeder. Teenaged Yukari is looking for her father, absent through her entire childhood. She follows the trail to the Solomon Islands, where she agrees to become an astronaut in exchange for the help of the Solomon Space Association in searching for her dad. It was hard for me to get into this book: there's a fair bit of exotifying of the Solomon Islanders (so primitive & low-tech! So spiritual!), & also I found the ruthlessness of the Space Association off-putting. I did manage to read around that, eventually, & found myself interested in Yukari & her half-sister Matsuri. The last bits of the book are genuinely exciting (although I wonder how much of the portrayal of Soviet astronauts is based in truth versus stereotypes). I'd probably read the next book if I happened to find it somewhere.

Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America - Daryl J. Maeda. This book mainly focuses on anti-Vietnam War activism by Asian Americans, which Maede concedes was necessary to make the book a manageable whole. Lots of good information on the community organizations that sprang up, & I especially liked reading about the links w/black radical movements.

As with many Asian American political books, the question of the term "Asian American" itself comes up. Lots of political radicals from this period seem to decry the term being used in a demographic sense, because it came into use as a political term, to express solidarity not only across Asian ethnic groups but with all people of color. I can appreciate & respect that, but at the same time, it seems impossible to deny that it is a useful demographic term as well. Perhaps most or all people who would use it to describe themselves do so out of at least a little bit of a political motivation (even if they wouldn't admit it); perhaps we should take it as a triumph that the idea of an Asian American community (as fraught as that is) has now made its way into things like the census.

Succubus Heat - Richelle Mead. More fluff about reluctant succubus Georgina Kincaid, who lives in Seattle & works in a bookstore. This time she has her immortal powers temporarily stripped away, which means that the only barrier between her & true love Seth Mortensen is gone... temporarily. Fun & still does a good job distinguishing itself from the shelves of other paranormals out there right now.

Mechademia 3: Limits of the Human - Edited by Frenchy Lunning. I enjoyed a lot about this collection of academic essays about anime & manga, but must point out the utterly ridiculous sentence with which its preface begins: "Everyone, regardless of his or her position in culture or location on the earth, is aware of a distinct shift in the idea of what is human." Really? Everyone? I almost laughed and put the book down right there.

Anyway, the anthology is composed of three sections: "Contours - Around the Human," "Companions - With the Human," and "Compossibles - Of the Human" (as well as the usual review/commentary at the end). The most interesting to me was Michael Dylan Foster's "The Otherworlds of Mizuki Shigeru," which talks about the cultural meaning of youkai in the post-war period and how that's shifted today. Others I liked: Theresa Winge's "Undressing and Dressing Loli: A Search for the Identity of the Japanese Lolita," about lolita fashion as an empowering performance ritual; "The Signal of Noise," which is a super old-school cut-&-paste zine-style comic about Lain (written & adapted by Adèle-Elise Prévost & illustrated by MUSEbasement); & Teri Silvio's "Pop Culture Icons: Religious Inflections of the Character Toy in Taiwan," which draws a line between collecting religious icons & collecting character toys. There's also Thomas LaMarre's "Speciesism, Part 1: Translating Races into Animals in Wartime Animation," although I take issue w/his appropriation of the term speciesism, which he acknowledges he's removed from its animal rights context.

I found the reviews and commentary section to be much improved from the last volume in the series, as well; I would particularly like to read Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou after Marc Hairston's review.

Mechademia 4: War/Time - Edited by Frenchy Lunning. This installment of the Mechademia series was rather a slog for me; I just wasn't interested in a lot of the articles, although I think that's much more of a comment on me than on the content.

My favorite piece was Michael Dylan Foster's "Haunted Travelogue: Home Towns, Ghost Towns, and Memories of War," a follow-up piece to his article in the last volume on Mizuki Shigeru. Thus it's unsurprising that I also liked "Monsters at War: The Great Yokai Wars, 1968-2005," a piece by Zilia Papp, which like Foster's articles, looks at the symbolism of youkai & how it's connected to war, nationalism, nostalgia, and memory. I did find fascinating Rei Okamoto Inouye's "Theorizing Manga: Nationalism and Discourse on the Role of Wartime Manga," which discusses how manga, previously viewed as fluffy & lowbrow, needed to be reinvented as a serious art form in order to be wielded as wartime propaganda. Also Michael Fisch's "War by Metaphor in Densha Otoko" caught my attention: it's about military metaphors used online in otaku forums to discuss & offer advice to the titular Densha Otoko, an otaku who meets a girl on a train & then seeks advice & support online while their relationship develops.

As ever with this series, I would like to hear more from Japanese scholars themselves.

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