EASC Colloquium

PRESENTER: Christopher Bolton (Comparative and Japanese Literature, Williams College)

TOPIC: From Ground Zero to Degree Zero: Akira as Origin and Oblivion
DATE: Friday, December 2, 2011

TIME: 12:00-1:15 p.m.
LOCATION: Ballantine 004

(Light refreshments will be served. You are also welcome to bring your own lunch.)

Ōtomo Katsuhiro's anime film Akira is often identified as the work that ignited the anime boom in the U.S. This characterization is motivated in part by the graphic image of an explosion that opens the film, an image that seemed to herald a destruction of old paradigms and the arrival of new media when it first flashed on U.S. movie screens in 1988. But paradoxically this work that marks an origin or turning point for anime has also been strongly identified with a postmodern aesthetic that seems to erase the very notions of origin and history. In contrast Ōtomo's Akira manga (upon which the film is a based) is a 2,000-page epic that foregrounds origins of all kinds--historical, political, and graphic. This talk will compare these two versions of Akira to ask what strengths and limitations manga and anime each have as media, when it comes to locating ourselves in history, in political culture, or in space.

Christopher Bolton is associate professor of comparative and Japanese literature at Williams College. He is the author of Sublime Voices: The Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction of Abe Kôbô (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), co-editor of Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), and a senior editor for Mechademia, an annual forum for critical work on Japanese anime, manga, and popular culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2006-present).

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