volumes
Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga and the Fan Arts published by the University of Minnesota Press.
While the focus of the journal is manga and anime, we see these not as objects but as arts whose production, distribution, and reception generate networks of connections. Thus our subject area extends from manga and anime to game design, fashion, graphics, packaging, and toy industries as well as a broad range of fan practices related to popular culture in Japan, including gaming, cosplay, fan artwork, anime music videos, anime improvisations, etc.
Mechademia solicits work not only from academics and critics but also from filmmakers, publishers, artists, and writers, so as to represent the full range of commentary available in this field.
Our publisher is now taking orders for Mechademia Vols. 1 through 6.
Call for Papers
MECHADEMIA 8
TEZUKA OSAMU: MANGA LIFE
We seek submissions for the eighth volume of Mechademia, an annual forum for critical work on Japanese manga, anime, and related arts. The theme of volume 8 is “Manga Life: Tezuka…”
Tezuka Osamu is one of Japan’s most renowned anime and manga creators, often regarded as an origin figure in Japanese popular culture. Published in conjunction with a major exhibit of Tezuka’s Work to be held at the Weisman Museum in Minneapolis Minnesota in 2013, Mechademia 8 will attempt to provide some new perspectives on Tezuka—including his context and his legacy–through the broad rubric of “Manga Life.”We imagine this theme to encompass:
—Tezuka’s profound interest in the relationship between human and non-human life forms
—drawn or animated characters as quasi-autonomous life forms at the center of multimedia franchises or media mixes, a development Tezuka’s work (across manga and anime, for example) helped foster.
—the emergence of professional manga creators; the ability of artists and writers to live a “manga life” as manga production emerges as a viable livelihood.
— links between popular culture and daily life, with attention to the transformations in everyday life in Japan during the span of the Shôwa period (1926-1989), which corresponds almost perfectly with Tezuka’s life (1928-1989).
We invite submissions that deepen or complicate our understanding of these areas, centered on any aspect of Tezuka’s work and life, as well as on related artists and work. We particularly welcome essays exploring historical and political implications of Tezuka’s “manga life.”
Submissions for volume 8 are now closed.
MECHADEMIA 7:
LINES OF SIGHT
The critique of Cartesian perspectivalism has had a profound impact on art history and criticism, film studies, critical theory, and philosophies of the body and experience. Critics have called attention to how Cartesian ideals of rational universal knowledge were reinforced by, and grounded in, an insistence on linear or one-point perspective in the visual arts. Cartesian perspectivalism thus became the dominant mode for visuality and knowledge in the modern era, extending the hegemony of the modern rational subject to arts as diverse as painting, photography and cinema, and to knowledge of nature, the human body, and experience.
The critique of Cartesian perspectivalism also has a long history in Japan, from a phenomenological emphasis on the lived experience of the body in prewar philosophy to Azuma Hiroki’s recent claim that superflat art and manga present a total break with Cartesianism.
Today, where the hegemony of Cartesian perspectivalism once seemed everywhere in evidence and called for incessant critique, we instead encounter perceptual modes and knowledge formations that are seemingly non-Cartesian ― in manga, video games, animation, fan activities, media art, information technologies, social theory, and in philosophies and sciences of embodiment. We now confront the question of how to address and evaluate the implications of these new modalities of perception and knowledge in arts and theories.
Thus we propose ‘Lines of Sight.’ In keeping with our mission to forge links between different communities of knowledge and to challenge the conventional channels for flows of information, in Mechademia 7, we invite contributors to explore both the critique of Cartesianism and the emergence of non-Cartesian modalities ― the vectors of perception that traverse audio-visual fields, with the emergence of subjective effects rather than perceptual positions or fixed identities.
Submissions for volume 7 are now closed.
MECHADEMIA 6:
USER ENHANCED
The call for papers for Mechademia 5 produced such a strong response that the editors decided to extend our discussion of fans and fan practices across two volumes: Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies will be followed in 2011 by Mechademia 6: User Enhanced.
Volume 6 will take the conversation one step further by examining alterations fans have effected in themselves through the enactment and reception of various performances and processes—alterations that have become part of their identities as fans.
STYLE GUIDE
Download the Mechademia Style Guide (vers. 3.8, June 2009) – pdf format
FOR QUESTIONS ABOUT THE SUBMISSIONS PROCESS
Please contact Wendy Goldberg, Submissions Editor
submissions AT mechademia.org
FOR OTHER INQUIRIES
Frenchy Lunning, Editor-in-Chief, Mechademia
frenchy AT mechademia.org
Mechademia In The News
“…the volume is organized in a manner that strengthens the pieces by virtue of their placement and the pacing of the whole. If one wanted to draw on the metaphor of the meka, a reader could imagine Lunning sitting in the pilot’s seat of an unwieldy robot monster of essays, orchestrating its cumbersome movement so that it appears smooth, organic and all of a piece.”
—Image Text: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, Dept of English, University of Florida“Volumes four and five of Frenchy Lunning’s excellent annual journal, Mechademia, continue the tradition which the previous three editions have established of bringing together extremely well written, provocative, and important essays on the state of the art of Japanese animation, both moving and static.”
— Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies“…as accessible as it was provocative and enlightening. Anybody interested in posthumanism will reap something from it.”
—D. Harlan Wilson, Science Fiction Studies 37
“…the journal…provides a vital platform for intelligent discussions of anime and manga. I look forward to the next.”
—Jasper Sharpe, Midnight Eye“With volume three … Mechademia has achieved a new level of excellence”
—Ed Sizemore, mangaworthreading.com“Mechademia 3 is a smart read, but never so smart that it gets ahead of itself or that it isn’t understandable.”
—activeanime.com“…recommended for all academic and public libraries.”
—Steve Raiteri, Library Journal“…an informative and inspiring read for those curious beyond the skin of anime, and even more so for those who wish to read more into the impacts of Eastern culture on the West.”
—Nichi Bei Times Weekly
