| Popis: |
This book explores the hundred-year history relationship between Japanese media and social subjects through an analysis of the connections between cinema audiences and five significant discursive terms: minshū (the people), kokumin (the national populace), tōa minzoku (the East Asian race), taishū (the masses), and shimin (citizens), which circulated in different periods from the 1910s through the present, while also overlapping in a way that indicates that the history of Japanese social subjects has unfolded in a multilayered rather than linear manner, through periods bounded up with and impacted by various political and economic issues, ranging from capitalism and total war to neoliberalism and risk society. The book shows how in each context these five terms have not necessarily been deployed as a set of lexically defined, fixed, and stable meanings but have entailed certain discrepancies and contradictions among a diverse range of standpoints, their different interpretative valence changing according to historical context. Sometimes used to define the self and sometimes to define a given other, as well as being enunciated through discourses, the terms have been enacted by physical bodies. The book empirically and analytically elucidates a dynamic, multilayered history of cinema audiences in Japan as part of a larger relationship between media and social subjects and examines cinema audiences as simultaneously shaped by and shaping social history. In so doing, it brings a new perspective to the history of Japanese society and culture in its global context from the early twentieth century up to the early twenty-first century. |
