Suchergebnisse

Introduction: Why the Japanese media? / Fabienne Darling-Wolf -- The rise of Japanese media -- Media, nation, politics and nostalgia -- Japanese identities plural: race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary media -- Japanese media in everyday life -- Japanese media and the global -- Conclusion: Final reflections on the Japanese media's global voyage / Fabienne Darling-Wolf.

Introduction: Why the Japanese media? / Fabienne Darling-Wolf -- The rise of Japanese media -- Media, nation, politics and nostalgia -- Japanese identities plural: race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary media -- Japanese media in everyday life -- Japanese media and the global -- Conclusion: Final reflections on the Japanese media's global voyage / Fabienne Darling-Wolf

Introduction: a translocal approach to imagining the global -- Un-American idols: how the global/national/local intersect -- Holier-than-thou: representing the "other" and vindicating ourselves in international news -- Talking about non-no: (re)fashioning race and gender in global magazines -- Disjuncture and difference from the Banlieue to the Ganba: embracing hip-hop as a global genre -- What West is it? anime and manga according to Candy and Goldorak -- Imagining the global: transnational media and global audiences -- Lessons from a translocal approach? or, reflections on contemporary glocamalgamation -- Conclusion: getting over our "illusion d'optique."

This project explores how lower class individuals living in a small rural Japanese community employ digital media in their daily lives and how this use of technology shapes their sense of self. Drawing from ethnographic research, it considers the locally specific ways in which individuals have embraced digital technology and how the technology's "imagined affordances" intersect with their cultural, regional, and class identities, both locally and in relationship to national and global contexts. It argues that despite community members' active use of digital technology, numerous barriers (both imagined and actual) continue to limit their ability to fully engage in digital culture and discusses how these barriers lead to a sense of simultaneous connection and disconnection from both urban contexts and an imagined global community. It concludes that more carefully situated local accounts of digital praxis are a necessary step toward developing a deeper understanding of the digital world.

While recent analyses have helped to challenge commonly-held stereotypes of fans of popular cultural texts as freakish individuals 'without a life', few studies have focused on texts produced and/or consumed outside the United States and Europe. Even fewer have considered the particular significance of the advent of the internet as a tool for intercultural fan activity. This is what this study attempts to accomplish through an ethnographic and textual analysis of an online community of fans of Kimura Takuya - one of the most popular Japanese male celebrities of the moment - dispersed across 14 countries. It explores, in particular, how participants defined their fan, gendered and cultural/global identities through their involvement with each other and with their favorite star, and negotiated as a group the complex process of virtual cross-cultural identity formation.