Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s lectures on Edgar Allan Poe, and the influence they exerted on his own works.

Benedict Cumberbatch fandom in Japan

When Jackie Chan was introduced to Japanese audiences in the early 1980s, he was promoted as the answer to the void that popular martial arts star Bruce Lee had left upon his death in 1975. The mischievous ‘monkey’ to Lee’s more ferocious ‘dragon’, Chan’s films were aggressively marketed to an audience of male martial arts fans; yet this…[Read more]

Recent years have witnessed the growth of a body of literature concerned with what Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu has termed “Chinese cinemas,”1 sparked by the increased international visibility of films from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and characterized by an emerging interest in the ways that such works negotiate both “the triumphantly…[Read more]

A Bakhtinian Analysis of Language and Multiculturalism in Iwai Shunyi’s Swallowtail Butterfly

Scholarship on representations of East Asian women has honed on the ubiquity of a ‘geisha’ stereotype in Asian-themed Hollywood films: women who willingly acquiesce to the prerogatives of Western men and, in so doing, symbolically affirm the subordination of East Asian political autonomy to a paternalistic United States. Within this context, the…[Read more]

When I proposed this paper, the idea was to examine a number of global iterations of Sherlock fandom from a transfandom perspective. However, as doing this in fact involvesgoing ‘deep’ in at least two popular cultural contexts in order to effectively pull out examples of how I believe transfandom works more generally in a transnational set…[Read more]

In December 2012, Benedict Cumberbatch arrived in Japan for the first of two “Star Trek Into Darkness” junkets and was greeted at the airport by 500 Japanese fans of his work in the BBC drama “Sherlock” (2010-), the first two seasons of which had aired on subscription satellite channels to niche acclaim. This unanticipated turnout did not go…[Read more]

Michael Newman and Elana Levine observe that “much of what we identify as Quality, complex, and sophisticated in American television since at least the 1980s achieves that status in part through its ability to mark itself off from soap opera” (2012, 99), particularly through the rejection or containment of signifiers of soap opera’s feminine orien…[Read more]

This dissertation offers a historical materialist perspective on the Japanese female fandom of Hong Kong stars that arose in the mid‐1980s and peaked in the late 1990s. This fandom was unique among non‐diasporic, transnational audiences of Hong Kong cinema for its female composition and its star‐centeredness, which together constitute an alter…[Read more]

In this discussion, we advocate for a broad(er) model of transcultural fandom studies that, in shifting focus to the affective affinities that spark fan interest in transcultural fan objects, is intended as a corrective to nation-centred analyses of border-crossing fandoms. It is our contention that the binary approach to transnational fandom…[Read more]

The late nineteenth century was a crucial moment in Japan, driven by new conceptions of authorship and literary narratives. An influential world of collecting and compilation gave birth to those changes, but its workings are still poorly understood. By showing how compilers assembled the 1894 Kōtei Saikaku zenshū (The Edited Complete Works of Sa…[Read more]