Artigo Revisado por pares

Doraemon and Your Name in China: the complicated business of mediatized memory in East Asia

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 60; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/screen/hjz016

ISSN

1460-2474

Autores

Alexander Zahlten,

Tópico(s)

Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics

Resumo

In order to understand the deeply significant role of film, media and mediation in some of the remarkable recent economic, political and attitudinal dynamics in East Asia, this essay will map a number of ways in which mediatization and memory interlock between China and Japan. By looking at the recent spectacular box-office success in China of the animated films Stand By Me Doraemon (Yamazaki Takashi and Yagi Ryûichi, 2014) and Kimi no Na wa/Your Name (Shinkai Makoto, 2016), I will track some of the implications of what Andrew Hoskins calls ‘connective memory’,1 which he and others see as a departure from the model of collective memory. On the one hand, the question of memory can help map lines of unruly connections that traverse common rupture-based periodizations such as ‘reform era’ or ‘post-Tianmen’ (or, for South Korea, the ‘Park Chung-hee era’ or the ‘period of democratization’). On the other hand, considering the prospective aspect of memory – how memory is fundamental to any imagined future – also highlights how in East Asia the convergences and divergences of commonly imagined futures, as well as of imagined common futures, are significantly co-determined by shared media memories. Of course it is more complicated than that – ‘that’ being the idea of a fixed and shared reservoir of works, characters and storyworlds. One significant such complication is that memory itself is increasingly mediatized.2 Another is the fact that specific media technologies and mediatization are themselves increasingly becoming guiding metaphors for how we understand the workings of societies and cognition.

Referência(s)
Altmetric
PlumX