Himalayas or Iceland? Yali or Aslan?: Understanding the In-between Material Genesis of Contemporary Indian English Fantasy Fiction for Children and Young Adult

This talk studies the terrain of contemporary Indian English Fantasy fiction for young adults, whose appearance can be dated to around two decades ago. Navigating the works of some key fantasists like Giti Chandra, David Hair and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni among others, the presentation sheds light on the ways in which the proliferating genre of Indian English fantasy fiction makes a distinctive yet hybrid case for itself. I argue that it is crucial to understand how this genre has come into being, an understanding that necessarily drives us to a scrutiny of prevailing forms of writing from which this genre originates and differentiates. These forms include Indian English writing, realistic children’s literature, and mythological literature, and it is against the literary tendencies of this group that the newer fantasies form their narratives. From a disavowal of the Indian nation as occupying the central imaginative space, to a search for hybrid spaces, characters and objects, to a conscious deployment of the series-fiction form that dramatically elongates the shortness of existing fairy and folk tales, contemporary Indian fantasy fiction uses numerous strategies for its inventiveness, while simultaneously deriving from the logic of the global market and contemporary, everyday living that governs the production of fantasy fiction in general.

Siddharth Pandey

Breaking the Boundaries of Adulthood and Childhood in Contemporary Japanese Animation: Omoide no Marnie (When Marnie was There) and Meitantei Conan (Detective Conan)

In this presentation, we will discuss concepts of childhood in two major contemporary works of Japanese animation, to examine their cultural roots in modernist Japanese literature, and their challenges to stereotypes associated with normative childhood, particularly cultural framings of aetonormativity (Nikolajeva 2009). For the first part of this talk, we will discuss child detectives, specialist knowledge and adult-child identities, in relation to the long-running manga and animated series Detective Conan (1994-). Detective Conan, a manga and anime by the best-selling manga artist Gosho Aoyama, has been running since 1994, and the manga has sold around 250 million copies worldwide. The second part of the talk will examine visions of intergenerational solidarity and complex intimacy that take place in When Marnie Was There (2014), directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi for the renowned Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli.

Child detectives raise a challenge to the distinction between adult and child based on the adult’s (supposedly) superior knowledge and intelligence. A detective is a holder of specialist and specific knowledge, beyond the remit of most non-specialist adults, and so for a child to hold that knowledge undermines the aetonormative assumptions of children’s innocence, or relative ignorance. In Detective Conan, the ‘child’ detective is a teenager, Kudo Shinichi, whose body has been shrunk back to pre-teen childhood by a mysterious criminal syndicate. He goes to elementary school under the name Edogawa Conan, and is later joined by another victim of the evil syndicate, a female scientist shrunk to a child, who calls herself Haibara Ai. Ai and Conan’s specialist knowledge and intelligence separate them not only from the children around them, or ordinary adults, but even set them out as unique among the many adult detectives on the show. While they are not children in their own minds (Shinichi is a teenager, and we do not know Ai’s age before she was shrunk), they are perceived as young children by those around them, they feign childhood to keep their identities secret, and have a powerful impact on the intelligence and detective skills of the real children around them. Drawing on the cultural roots of Detective Conan in the works of the Japanese author Edogawa Ranpo, we will examine how this manga and television show present a complex challenge to stereotypes of both childhood and genius.

When Marnie was There is based on a British children’s book, by Joan Robinson, drawing strongly on the age-bending elements of its source text, with Marnie transforming from the heroine Anna’s grandmother into her young friend (around age 12). However, the film transposes the text both literally, from Norfolk to Sapporo, and figuratively, into Japan’s cultural world and attitudes to “westernness.” The film uses fantasy to disrupt the linear temporality of child to adult: through the transformations it depicts, communication comes to be seen as happening among “equals.” Marnie is able to help Anna process her family issues in talking to her through the appearance of a child about her own childhood trauma, and is simultaneously helped to process that trauma by Anna. These connections bypass typical aetonormative structures and social expectations, to allow for communication without idealising the adult’s purported “knowledge” nor the child’s supposed “innocence.” Marnie envisions identities that move beyond “adult” and “child” through these non-linear transformations, which also align with the ideas of non-linear develop for queer children in Kathryn Bond Stockton’s work The Queer Child (2009). Moreover, Anna’s queerness is conveyed through the film in a number of non-verbalised scenes of physical intimacy and intense looks between her and Marnie. Anna’s attraction to Marnie is intertwined with Marnie’s apparent ‘western’ physical appearance, with blonde hair, blue eyes and pale skin, which is strongly inflected by the Japanese context of exoticising and eroticising Western appearance, notably in modernist fiction such as Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s novel Naomi (1924).

In summary, this talk will analyse two works of Japanese animation for children that question the boundaries of adult and child in nuanced ways. These texts both draw on a range of western and Japanese cultural sources for their narratives, and in particular they respond to the ideas evident in the works of modernism Japanese authors (Ranpo and Tanizaki) who were themselves reflecting on western cultural influences, and how Japan might respond to them, in the early twentieth century. The literary and cultural norms embedded in the Japanese context reshape the story, to represent diversities of childhood, queer attraction, and child genius, and can effectively decentre visions of childhood from western cultural norms, specifically around children’s ‘innocence’ and ‘ignorance’.

Aneesh Barai and Nozomi Uematsu