Drawing Anime Into World-Making Practices: A Speculative Reimagination of Bodies, Space, and Place

• In Event: Engaging Popular Culture as World-Making: The Everyday Practices of (Re)Storying Histories, Futures, and Positionalities

Abstract

Objectives
In this paper, I explore how the remixing of anime characters with everyday images offers a speculative reimagination of bodies, space and place and visually disconnects a place and its people from a history of oppression (Posadas, 2014). Through a case study about a youth illustrator’s playful social media artwork that brings together two contradictory images –a city that has seemingly been in a time-wrap and characters from the world of anime, I highlight how anime brings in a stateless quality (Naylor & Helford, 2014) to offer the viewer a place from which to reimagine their city as one that is not colonized. By juxtaposing anime pictures on images of a city that faces a turbulent past, present, and future, the city x anime produce, transform, and define each other (Thompson, 2007).

Perspectives
This research draws upon Thomas & Stornaiuolo’s (2016) conceptualization of restorying to understand how youth use digital tools to “restory the self and the world” (p. 314), provide a counternarrative to the erasure or silencing faced, and present a diversity of perspectives. Further, this research engages with the scholarship on worldmaking (e.g., Goodman1978) to pay attention to how people re/make worlds from the worlds already on hand and invite us to think, to feel and move in the (their) world as a way to build connections between worlds (Stornaiuolo & Author 1, forthcoming 2022).

Methods and Data
To study the worldmaking practices on social media of the youth I used small stories research (Georgakapoulou, 2015) as it offers a critical micro-perspective on social media engagements. Its emphasis on worldmaking practices and the telling of everyday events serves as an epistemology whereby the researcher listens to make these stories hearable. I used digital methods to capture the fleeting (ephemeral) stories on this social media handle. Data included field notes, direct message exchanges with the youth, screen capture videos and images of posts, stories, and comments. I have not used any platform scraping methods to collect data keeping in mind the hyper surveillance of texts / media shared and produced by marginalized youth.

Results and Significance
Since 2019, I have been following social media handles of a few youth from a region in South Asia that has faced years of militarization, to understand how they use digital media as sites of resistance and expression even when the digital is itself under surveillance. Young artists and digital media creators from this region use their art to not only voice dissent, resist, build solidarity and mobilize support, but also as a way to reimagine their place (and themselves). By drawing upon the global anime fandoms in their speculative reimagination, the youth and their land move away from the primitive to a transnational identity, in conversation with and connected to other modern states and subjects (Suan, 2018) even as they never transcend physical boundaries. By using popular culture artifacts in their everyday media creations, young people’s worldmaking practices can offer a powerful counter to the continuously existing colonial representations imposed on both the place and bodies (Carrington, 2015)

Author

• Rabani Garg, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author