Suchergebnisse

The COVID-19 pandemic has put in the foreground the dramatic actuality of global and local inequalities, undermining neo-liberal, communitarian, democratic or cosmopolitan projects of collective identity. In the light of intersecting inequalities such as class, race/ethnicity and gender, an explosion of Sinophobia, social stigma and physical attacks targeting people of East Asian and Southeast Asian appearance or heritage has been widely reported in Euro-American media. This article will focus on the case of Italy during the initial stage of the pandemic in early 2020. Italy has not only been the first European country to be exposed to the pandemic and to undergo national lockdown but also a country where the wave of racist assaults started in late January 2020, even before the first clusters have been detected. The critical investigation of Italian media discourses will highlight how deep-rooted, colonialist and ambivalent assumptions about the 'Oriental', 'Asian', 'Chinese' and 'yellow' other may have been crucial to the reproduction of racism against specific people, cultures and civilizations, regardless of nationality, class and gender. It will refer in particular to the concept of 'yellowness', resulting from a process of bio-cultural racialization within the hegemonic frame of 'Western', 'White' or 'Italian' identity. Furthermore, it will indicate how this process of racialized othering has emerged, but has also been contested, within the specific context of citizenship, Asian immigrants and governmental actions in contemporary Italy. The overall aim is not so much to denounce higher levels of racism in Italy compared to other Euro-American countries; rather, this article refers to the Italian case to stress how both global and local trajectories do mutually overlap to shape, and eventually to transform, a national context, offering further insights on the glo-calization of the civilizational 'West'/'East' divide in the 21st century.

Axis Powers Hetalia (2006–present), a Japanese gag comic and animation series, depicts relations between nations personified as cute boys against a background of World War I and World War II. The stereotypical rendering of national characteristics as well as the reduction of historically charged issues into amusing quarrels between nice-looking but incompetent boys was immensely popular, especially among female audiences in Japan and Asia, and among Euro-American manga, anime, and cosplay fans, but it also met with vehement criticism. Netizens from South Korea, for example, considered the Korean character insulting and in early 2009 mounted a protest campaign that was discussed in the Korean national assembly. Hetalia's controversial success relies to a great extent on the inventive conflation of male-oriented otaku fantasies about nations, weapons, and concepts represented as cute little girls, and of female-oriented yaoi parodies of male-male intimacy between powerful "white" characters and more passive Japanese ones. This investigation of the original Hetalia by male author Hidekaz Himaruya (b. 1985) and its many adaptations in female-oriented dōjinshi (fanzine) texts and conventions (between 2009 and 2011, Hetalia was by far the most adapted work) refers to notions of interrelationality, intersectionality, and positionality in order to address hegemonic representations of "the West," the orientalized "Rest" of the world, and "Japan" in the cross-gendered and sexually parodied mediascape of Japanese transnational subcultures.