NZASIA_Wellington_2009

Photos from the 18th New Zealand Asian Studies Society International Conference 2009 - Victoria University of Wellington, 6-8 July, 2009, Downtown (Pipitea) Campus,

Panel: Popular Cultural Representations of History in Manga

Rebecca SUTER: Fantahistory and Gender-bending in Michiyo Akaishi’s AMAKUSA 1637

Ellen VAN GOETHEM: Historical Manga and Anime: Increasing Knowledge or Perpetuating Stereotypes?

Yasuko CLAREMONT: The Graphic Art of Hiruma Hiroshi

Roman ROSENBAUM: Reading Showa History through Manga: Astro Boy as the Avatar of Postwar Japanese Culture

Chair: Sean Redmond

Abstract:

The nascent discipline of Comics Studies is gaining momentum on a global scale. Combing the narrative elements of

writing with the graphic arts, manga as a relatively new ‘global’ medium has the potential to display history in previously

unimagined ways. Boundaries of space and time in manga become as permeable as societies and cultures across the world.

This panel will investigate the authorship of history by looking at various different attempts to render pre-modern/modern

history through the popular cultural media of the story-manga. As Carol Gluck, Tessa Morris-Suzuki and others have

shown, it has never been easy to encapsulate the complex narrative of emperor-based Japanese historical periods. How do

manga rewrite, reinvent and re-imagine the historicity and dialectic of bygone epochs in postwar Japan? Several different

graphic artists’ attempts to display historical eras are investigated, including those of Otsuka Eiji, Mizuki Shigeru, Hiruma

Hiroshi, Michiyo Akaishi, and others.