March 2011: Fabienne Darling-Wolf

This Friday is the next talk in the PCMS series.

"When Candy met Asterix: Japanese animation’s voyage to France and the shaping of global culture"

Fabienne Darling-Wolf (Temple University)

Respondent: William Gardner (Swarthmore College)

Temple University Center City campus (TUCC)
Room 420
(bring ID to show front desk)
Friday, March 18, 5:30 pm





Abstract:
Based on a translocal comparative analysis informed by qualitative interviews with Japanese and French media consumers, this paper considers what the long history of Japanese animation and manga’s presence in France can tell us about the nature of contemporary globalized cultural forms and their local negotiation, particularly when considering the wide variety of cultural environments these texts—often originally based on European or American literary works—propose to represent (including France’s “native” culture). Pointing to significant differences in the nature of the genres’ influence in the French and American contexts, it concludes with a discussion of the dangers of assuming that the United States can be taken as representative of an essentialized “West,” often opposed, in turn, to an equally essentialized and exoticized “non-Western Other.”

Bios:

Dr. Fabienne Darling-Wolf is Associate Professor of Journalism in the School of the Journalism and Theater at Temple University in Philadelphia. She also teaches and supervises graduate students in the school’s Mass Media and Communication Doctoral Program.

Dr. Darling-Wolf’s research focuses on processes of mediated cultural influence and negotiation in a global context, paying particular attention to how such processes intersect with gendered, racial and ethnic identity formation. Her work has been published in Communication Theory, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journalism and Communication Monographs, New Media and Society, Popular Music and Society, Feminist Media Studies, Popular Communication, Journalism, Journalism Studies, Communication Review, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Visual Communication Quarterly and Journal of Communication Inquiry.

William Gardner is an associate professor of Japanese at Swarthmore College. He is author of Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s (Harvard University Asia Center, 2006) and “Literature as Life-form: Media and Modernism in the Literary Theory of Okuma Nobuyuki,” Monumenta Nipponica (2008). His current research is on science fiction and on media and virtuality in contemporary fiction.