Abstract
The cultural celebrations of Japanese immigration to Brazil in 2008 were dominated by a discourse that connected this immigrant presence in the country to the increasingly global popu-larity of Japanese pop culture. A number of texts and exhibitions that set out to memorialize this immigrant history in Brazil both construct Japanese immigrant identity in terms of unchanging tradition and associate it with what Henry Jenkins describes as the “pop cosmopolitanism” of global anime and manga fan culture.1 In the “Tokyogaqui” exhibition held in São Paulo and the special edition of the comic book magazine Front discussed in the Introduction, Japanese culture in Brazil is presented as being at once sedentary, deeply connected to the land, and both the symbol and agent of untethered global mobility. The focus of the present chapter is the way in which a strong tendency in the centenary celebrations attempted to inscribe the history of Japanese immigration into a version of Brazilian identity suitable to an era of pop cosmopolitanism. The texts that I will explore are explicitly concerned with the connection between Japanese immigration and changing conceptions of Brazilian national identity. The paradoxical attempt to at once reproduce and capture discursively the movement and flux associated with Japanese postmodern culture is, I argue, part of a wider discursive strategy to forge a flexible national identity suitable to an age of neoliberal multiculturalism. The hesitation between imposing continuity on identities and accommodating flexibility is a central characteristic of the discourse of virtual orientalism that I am tracing right through this book.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2006).
Tim Cresswell, On The Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York, NY, and London: Routledge, 2006), 1.
Mimi Sheller and John Urry, 2006, “The New Mobilities Paradigm,” Environment and Planning A 38: 2 (2006), 209.
Tim Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28: 1 (2009), 18.
Caren Kaplan, “Transporting the Subject: Technologies of Mobility and Location in an Era of Globalization,” PMLA 117: 1 (2002), 35.
Jeffrey Lesser, Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil: 1808 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 3–4.
Ricardo Giassetti and Bruno D’Angelo, O catador de batatas e o filho da costureira (S ã o Paulo: Editora JBC, 2008).
André Uesato, Renata Corrêa et al., O vento do Oriente: Uma viagem atrav és da imigrac ã o japonesa no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: IBGE, 2008), 13.
Rachel Bowlby, Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (London: Faber, 2000), 25.
Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004), 51.
Sianne Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 31 (Summer 2005), 816.
Saulo B. Cwerner, “The Times of Migration,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27: 1 (2001), 16–18.
Scott Bukatman, The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit (Berkley, CA, and London: The University of California Press, 2012), 34.
Valérie Cools, “The Phenomenology of Contemporary Mainstream Manga,” Image & Narrative 12: 1 (2011), 80.
Benoît Peeters, Lire la bande dessinée (Paris: Casterman, 1998), 91.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida trans. Richard Howard (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1981), 96.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York, NY, and London: Verso, 1983), 18.
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (New York, NY, and London: Verso, 1993), 7.
Ian Christie, The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World (London: BBC Educational Developments, 1994), 17.
Thomas Lamarre, “Manga Bomb: Between the Lines of Barefoot Gen,” in Comics Worlds and the World of Comics ed. Jacqueline Berndt (Kyoto: Kyoto Seika University, 2010), 266.
Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar, “Race, Orient, Nation in the Time-Space of Modernity,” in Antinomies of Modernity: Essays on Race, Orient, Nation ed. Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 262.
Copyright information
© 2015 Edward King
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
King, E. (2015). Graphic Fictions of Japanese Immigration to Brazil: “Pop Cosmopolitan” Mobility and the Disjunctive Temporalities of Migration. In: Virtual Orientalism in Brazilian Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137462190_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137462190_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-46831-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-46219-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)