Hello All,
We are seeking a third member for our panel for the 2026 Conference in Vancouver.
The title and CFP abstract are below. Naturally, we'll adjust the abstract to reflect the third paper's content.
with the following details:
- Paper Title & Abstract (maximum 250 words)
- Contact details: Full name, email address, affiliation, rank (student, professor, assistant professor, etc.)
We look forward to hearing from you!
Adam DeCaulp
PhD Candidate Department of Comparative Literature, Department of Asian Studies
Pennsylvania State University
Camila Gutiérrez
Assistant Professor in Arts and Humanities College
Department of Communications Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
Working Panel Title
Visualities of time in Japan-global collaborative imaginaries
CFP Abstract
From the permanently premodern Japonism to the forever-future cyberpunk, the aesthetics associated with Japan bear not only a timestamp but an essentially temporal characteristic. The Japanese studies scholarship interested in the relationship between Japan, (self)representation, and time, typically places Japan as the object of inquiry, asking "How was Japan, how did the West see Japan, or what could Japan become?" This panel places Japan in the subject position. Shifting focus to cultural and aesthetic objects in visual media, we are interested in the distinct conceptualizations of time found in global collaborative imaginaries that incorporate, without being confined by, the Japanese lens. In these collaborative imaginaries, Japan is not the object on display. Instead, Japan hybridizes with other localities and yields new means and modes for the expression of time.
Cyberpunk and shōnen manga provide two exemplary instances of these co-figural aesthetics. Cyberpunk imprints bodies and environments with post-atomic technologies and degradation, eliminating pre-radioactive futures to reveal a world constrained within a perpetual present, as seen in William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy and the Ghost in the Shell franchise. Meanwhile, shōnen manga's stylistic figural density and page composition are utilized to draw the battle scenes of a comic about ancestral Mapuche warfare and cosmovision (NAO 2024). This gives a distinctive narrative pace and atemporality to the Araucanian mythos, similar to how many shōnen manga detemporalize shintō. This panel seeks papers that explore other Japanese-inflected genre media, attending to their contents and structures, to convey the playfulness that relates time, visualization, and presence.