Ekphrastic Anxiety in Virtual Brazil: Photographing Japan in the Fiction of Alberto Renault

Abstract

The novels of Alberto Renault explore a similar preoccupation with postmodern Japanese culture as the pop cosmopolitan tendency within the centenary celebrations in Brazil. A foto, published in 2003, and Moko no Brasil, published in 2006, narrate the lives of a group of young models and art photographers as they shuttle back and forth between Japan and Brazil. Both novels set out to capture the deterritorialized sensibility and transnational imaginary of a generation brought up in a globalized network society. The characters who populate Renault’s novels are gripped by two fascinations: the ecstatic alienation of high-tech postmodern Japanese culture and the mass cultural images that seem to proliferate and spread across media platforms. The connection between these two cultural fascinations is constitutive of the discourse of virtual orientalism. In a way that echoes the “Bem-vindos ao Japão” edition of Turma da Mônica Jovem (discussed in chapter 3), the troubling Otherness of network technologies is displaced onto a cultural Otherness embodied by Japan. And as with the comic discussed in chapter 2, anxieties about how cognitive and affective life is increasingly distributed across computer technologies are projected onto a fear of the monstrous vitality of images. This belief in the life of images is projected onto Japanese culture.