From Rodney King to Burma: An Interview with Witness's Sam Gregory (Part One)

I came back from the USC DIY Media Event with a whole range of new contacts. One hallmark of this outstanding conference was that it brought together people from very different social networks -- people who are working in parallel across different communities to explore the potentials of participatory culture. I've already featured through this blog an extensive interview with independent filmmaker and critic Alex Juhasz exploring her efforts to teach through and about Youtube. Today, I want to showcase another participant in the USC event -- human rights activist Sam Gregory. Gregory's comments about the strengths and limitations of Youtube as a site for media activism were eye-opening to me and I hope you will find them equally illuminating. In the interview which follows, Gregory describes the evolution in the thinking of his organization, Witness, from the aftermath of the Rodney King video, to the recent use of Youtube as a platform for the Burmese democracy movement. Drawing a phrase from Jamais Cascio, Gregory speaks here about the "participatory panopticon," the potentials of a world where citizens can use light weight portable cameras, including those built into their cellphones, and video distribution platforms to alert the world about human rights violations in their country. The past decade plus of DIY activism has taught veterans to be skeptical about some of the more utopian claims of the previous generation, even as they are learning to be more effective at exploiting every available opportunity to capture and distribute harsh realities that much of the world doesn't want to watch.

Sam Gregory, Program Director, is a video producer, trainer, and human rights advocate. In 2005 he was the lead editor on Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism (Pluto Press), and in 2007 he lead the development of the curriculum for WITNESS' first ever Video Advocacy Institute. Videos he has produced have been screened at the US Congress,the UK Houses of Parliament, the United Nations and at film festivals worldwide. In 2004 he was a jury member for the IDFA Amnesty International/Doen Award. He was a Kennedy Memorial Scholar at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where his Master's in Public Policy focused on

international development and media. He has worked as a television researcher/producer in both the UK and USA, and for development organizations in Nepal and Vietnam, and holds a BA from Oxford University in History and Spanish. He is on the Board of the US Campaign for Burma, and the Tactical Technology Collective. He speaks fluent Spanish, conversational French and basic Nepali.

Can you tell us something about the thinking which led to the creation of WITNESS? How has your organization's vision shifted over time in response to shifts in the nature of participatory culture?

In the late 1980's, our founder, Peter Gabriel had been participating in the Amnesty Human Rights Now Tour, travelling the world and meeting human rights activists at each concert stop. And in many cases, it struck him that their stories were not being heard, and that new tools like the consumer video-camera could perhaps change that. Fast-forward a couple of years, and the Rodney King incident brought the possibilities home. From the window of his apartment George Holliday filmed a sequence of graphic human rights violations that generated massive media attention. That provided the impetus for the creation of WITNESS - founded in the assumption that if you could place cameras in the hands of the people who chose to be "in the wrong place at the right time", i.e. human rights advocates and activists around the world living and working with communities affected by violations, then you would enable a new way to mobilize action for real change.

For the first decade of our work we wrestled with how best to operationalize this idea. In the early 1990's we were focused on the technology. We distributed hundreds of cameras to human rights groups around the world, assuming that they would be able to gather footage that could get on television or be used as evidence -two polar extremes of usage, one very specialized and targeted at a judicial fact-finder or jury, the other playing to a vast, undifferentiated court of public opinion.

In those first years we learnt that without technical training, you could shoot raw video but you could not create the finished narratives that matter in most advocacy contexts outside of providing raw footage to the news media. We evolved to a strategy of working intensely with a select group of 10-12 'core partners' - human rights groups on the ground who approach us to collaborate in helping them integrate video into their campaigns; as well as doing extensive trainings, producing online training materials like our Guide to Video Advocacy and writing books like 'Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism' to promote effective ideas in our community. And most recently we embarked on a new project, the Hub, which is the most DIY part of our work - a participatory media site where individuals and organizations can safely upload footage of abuses and finished advocacy videos, share it, learn how to deploy it in their campaigns, and present clear context and links to more information, groups working to address the issues, and actions that viewers and supporters can take.

Over the past fifteen years, a number of factors came to characterize the WITNESS approach. We focus on the empowered voices of those who are closer or closest to rights violations - including victims, survivors, community members and engaged advocates on behalf of affected communities. And until recently we've generally sought to use "smart narrowcasting" rather than "broadcasting" to reach key audiences. So for example, the video 'Bound by Promises' was framed for and used in screenings to government officials and legislators in Brazil to push them to prioritize concrete programs to reduce rural slave labor. Our work has also always blurred the line between amateurs and professionals in terms of using video -we are training human rights workers, and now concerned citizens, to use video as an everyday facet of their work, rather than to turn them into documentary film-makers.

We've seen a progressive expansion of the participatory possibilities of video: first, increased access to cameras, the increased access to editing capacity, then the dramatic growth of online video-sharing for distribution. And in the past three years we see the possibilities for increased collaboration in editing and production, for online distribution, and for more immediate and widespread filming - all facilitated by a digitally-literate youth, by mobile technology with still image and video capability and by new online tools.

What role does do it yourself video play in heightening public awareness of human rights issues around the world?

I would identify three spheres of usage of DIY video in raising awareness of human rights issues around the world: advocacy videos, witness documentation and perpetrator video. All three are facilitated by ubiquitous technology for documentation (via video-cameras, digital still cameras with video functionality, and cell-phone cameras), by increasing digital literacy, and by increased opportunities for sharing, remixing and re-circulating.

To date most of our focus has been on advocacy video and on working to find the spaces where bringing the visual story into the virtual or real room can make a difference. Here we're trying to change the vernacular language of human rights advocacy, to make a space for the voices from outside, and to push a new way of communicating around rights abuses.

Frequently we've promoted an approach that's all about smart narrow-casting, speaking to a particular audience at a particular time, and seeking a distinct change in policy, behavior or practice. Videos are always part of a continuum of action -- and a strategy -- rather than stand-alone. Here we're working in the middle ground between the extremes of undifferentiated mass media attention and direct evidence in the courts. This could include showing video to an international or regional tribunal (we've been involved in a precedent-setting case to present video before the African Commission on Human and People's Rights, on land rights in Kenya), it could involve bringing to the voices of victims and the visual evidence of abuses in Burma into a Congressional briefing or a meeting of Security Council representatives, and it can involve engaging communities themselves to take action on a rights issues, for example by showing a video on voluntary recruitment of child soldiers in villages across eastern Congo. Videos always provide a 'space for action' by the audience, encouraging them to participate in solving the problem.

The scope of this use of video is increasing by the day, alongside more traditional human rights documentaries. We can see it on the Hub, where many of the videos uploaded are produced by NGOs, both at a national and an international level - for example, Video Volunteers' 'Stop the Privatization of Water, films by Amazon Watch, and 'Drying up Palestine.

The two modes that we're seeing now in increasing prevalence are witness documentation and perpetrator footage. Both are circulating increasingly in online video sharing contexts, and in the blogosphere. It's partly in response to the radically increased possibilities for participation in creating human rights video online that we've created our Hub project. In some senses with both witness documentation and perpetrator footage you're revisiting a Rodney King moment - only this time, there is a potential global audience of both activists and publics who can have access to the footage, and there are distribution options to get it to them, and knowledge about how to frame action around them. It's an exciting moment as people experiment with what can work with this radically expanded access to production and distribution.

Our founder, Peter Gabriel talks sometimes about "little brothers" and "little sisters" watching Big Brother, and this world of the 'participatory panopticon' as Jamais Cascio calls it - is one filled with emancipatory potential as long as we can make sure that the footage that circulates helps facilitate voice and change, rather than enable repression.

You've written that the project was initially shaped by assumptions about the "transparency" of the video medium. Explain. What happens to human rights video as we become more self conscious about the properties of the medium and the ways that it can be manipulated?

Our starting point was what the scholar Meg McLagan has succinctly termed a moment of "1990s technophilia and (with a) model of change based on the transparency of media". So it was very technology-focused and grounded in a perhaps naïve belief in the indexicality of the image - a firm conviction that 'seeing is believing' and that seeing would create action, in the same way that the Rodney King had seemingly inspired mass outrage and in the same way that at first.

Our initial assumptions about audience and how footage would be perceived and used, were not correct. In those days before widespread online video sharing, the modes to access broad publics were ineffective. We focused on video in judicial processes, and sharing video with the mass media - both of which are premised on the 'evidentiary' value of human rights footage. Yet both news media and evidentiary settings were challenging to access. The Rodney King experience was anomalous. Although George Holliday's footage permeated the mass media and was used in the subsequent state and federal trials, the overwhelming majority of human rights video cannot and does not reach those venues. And if it does, as many marginalized groups have experienced in their media advocacy, it is often presented in ways that are contradictory to the desires and intentions of the communities affected by the rights violations. The reasons for this - of course -- vary. But the result is the same. In some countries it may be that media is government, or corporate-controlled, or won't screen graphic imagery -- or is only interested in screening graphic imagery. And in many cases news media focuses on episodic framing that emphasize individual actions, victims and perpetrators, and is less interested in structural violence, systemic challenges or the ongoing problems that characterize many of the most pernicious abuses, and especially violations of economic, social and cultural rights. So, for example, a group I work with in Papua, Indonesia documents the systematic, ongoing and pervasive exclusion of indigenous Papuans in an economy dominated by migrants from other parts of Indonesia, and in a justice system that moves rarely against the powerful. In seeking widespread media attention they will face the triple barrier of government censorship, popular neglect and an issue that is not easily reduced to blow of a security force baton.

Similarly, trying to use the video as evidence frequently does not work. The rules of evidence are hard to navigate. And even if the evidence is admitted, we need only see how the Rodney King footage was flipped around and manipulated both to prove that the Los Angeles Police Department officers were following the training they had been provided to deal with a resisting suspect, and to demonstrate the grotesque abuse of power evident in the fifty-six strikes delivered on Rodney King.

So what this boiled down for us - alongside some re-thinking on audience --- was the need for framing and narrative to create effective advocacy videos. This framing can come both within the video and in the way it is presented within a campaign. Rather than relying on the 'visual evidence' in and of itself, you have to place this in a rhetorical framework that explains it, and offers ways to act. Seeing may be believing, but it may also lead to pessimism, and compassion fatigue in the absence of opportunities to act. We're not promoting a journalistic model of studious neutrality - our experience is that marginalized voices are excluded enough, without the need to balance their voices in a one-for-one ratio to the voices of authority or perpetrators. So most advocacy videos do have a point-of-view and an outcome in mind, but the best do this with clear respect for the facts of the situation.

You've argued that some of the most effective videos for dramatizing human rights issues have come not from activists but from the oppressive regimes themselves. Can you cite a few examples? Why were these videos produced in the first place? What new significance has been ascribed to them as they move into new contexts?

The futurist Jamais Casco has suggested that the 'Rodney King' moment of the digital camera era may hav e been the Abu Ghraib photos, and I would argue that the analogue for cell-phones was the footage of Saddam Hussein's execution. Yet both sets of images were filmed by perpetrators or by insiders, not by concerned citizens, advocates or observers. More broadly we can see a proliferation of images, particularly of torture by police, security force and military personnel.

One of the most viewed videos on the Hub is a redacted version of footage shot by Egyptian police in which they humiliate a Cairo bus driver by slapping him repeatedly. These and other more graphic videos that include the sodomization of another driver were filmed by the police themselves. They were then used to humiliate the victims - including by sending the images to other drivers-- and to intimidate other people by demonstrating what would happen if they didn't follow police orders. They share many similarities with the psychology of happy-slapping: adding for the victim the humiliation of the act of filming, as well as the humiliation of the probability of preservation, and allowing the perpetrator to relish the memory, and share it with their friends. Similar cases have galvanized debate in Greece, Malaysia (the notorious Squat-gate incident) and a number of other countries. And of course, footage is also shot increasingly by government to document and apprehend protestors and dissidents - here in the US, there has been the contentious suit around the NYPD and activists filming at the Republican National Convention in 2004, while most recently we can see official cameramen in the footage of protests from Burma and Tibet (for example, at 00:32 in this clip).

What happens is that these videos then circulate beyond the circles for which they were intended - and are re-ascribed new meanings. For example in Egypt, bloggers and journalists lead by Wael Abbas and Hossam el-Hamalawy circulated leaked cell-phone videos to challenge repeated denials of accountability for police brutality and torture by the government. By circulating the videos, and connecting online to both a local and international audience, they were able to generate media attention, and force an official response. Although the government initially tried to discredit the activists, it was very hard to deny the truth of the images, and for the first time, there was an investigation into the conduct of police officers in two of the leaked videos leading to a prosecution.

One issue that does arise is around the re-victimization of individuals featured in the footage. They are often doubly humiliated in the first instance - by what happens to them in custody, and by the act of filming, and then they are further exposed as the footage achieves widespread circulation. We've tried to address this in our own practice - for example, by respecting the victim's wishes in the Squatgate case and not re-posting the video on the Hub pilot project, but I think the most important thing we can do institutionally is to support the growth of norms in the online video community that are respectful of individuals' dignity and rights (the Transmission community has been leading on this concept)

Human rights videos, you've claimed, need to be thought of as "transnational stories." What are the implications of that statement? What factors insure that the video will achieve its desired effect as it encounters alternative audiences?

Much human rights activism is still about speaking to distant audiences, often to generate a 'boomerang' effect in your home country. In these cases you are telling transnational stories that must speak to an audience inevitably less grounded than you in the everyday realities of the oppression. So, the footage in the video produced by our partners working undercover in Burma 'Shoot on Sight' must speak to activists not only within Asia, but to government officials, decision-makers and solidarity supporters in North America and Europe. Most human rights situations are embedded in contexts of structural complexity, long histories of repression and reaction and many actors with different agenda. As activists and concerned citizens create human rights advocacy videos they face a dilemma. They want to resist a globalization of local images stripped of their meaning, by keeping intact local voices in local contexts, and in a way that is faithful both to the direct visible violence of a situation as well as the underlying structural causes. But at the same time as you move testimony and images between different advocacy and media arenas it often 'helps' to strip out some of the markers of specificity. From experience, I know that with many audiences too much analysis of the particularity and nuance of a testimonial story may undermine it as an advocacy call.

You are balancing the ethical demands to be true to the people who speak out, a recognition of the real complexities and the desire to make viewers genuine ethical witnesses, against the need to convince, shame or horrify a distant audience with a medium whose power often lies in directness both visually and in narrative. You also have to make tough choices in balancing the visceral power and problems of raw visual evidence (for example, of graphic violence) with the use of testimony.

Now as human rights video circulate increasingly unmoored from its original location - i.e. embedded, shared, remixed - it becomes key to place context and ways to act within the video and imagery itself rather than outside it since no sooner has your video been forwarded from YouTube, the Hub or elsewhere it becomes de-coupled from options to act unless those are built into the video itself, and unless your message comes through loud and clear.

Ordinary Men in Extraordinary Times: An Interview with Iranian Underground Band, Kiosk

If you have seen the film or read the graphic novel of Persepolis, then you will recall the joy that the young protagonist took in listening to western Rock music and the risks that she was willing to take to get access to tapes of recent heavy metal or punk recordings. In many ways, music was the gateway into her political consciousness. Talieh Rohani, an Iranian-born CMS graduate student, recently wrote a paper for my Media Theory and Methods proseminar which shed light on what has happened to the rock music scene in her home country and suggested the ways that new digital tools for production and distribution were impacting the Iranian underground music scene. These insights emerge from an interview she did with Kiosk, an Iranian underground band which recently immigrated to America. An Interview with Kiosk

By Talieh Rohani

The 1979 Islamic revolution of Iran brought so many social changes and so much repression to the lives of Iranians including the decision to ban the western music. The young generation found it impossible to access any music from the rest of the world. As a result, pop music abruptly stopped progressing in Iran. At the same time in the Western World, the progressive rock scene was allegedly terminated by the arrival of punk rock, because many punk admirers incorporated progressive elements and were inspired by progressive rock bands.

Although the Iranian youngsters had already been influenced by progressive rock music from the late sixties to the late seventies, the war years made it irrelevant for the younger generation to listen to and embrace this musical goldmine. But with the arrival of satellite the Iranian young generation became aware of the current world rock music. The introduction of the Internet and the possibilities it presented allowed the Iranians to participate in the music scene.

Iranian underground music became an alternative to the mainstream pop Persian LA music. Most Iranians started to recognize this revolutionary movement. Underground bands like 127, Hypernova, Kiosk, and Abjeez have received great support in their debuts outside of Iran. And as a result, a new taste in music has emerged within Persian communities that are no longer satisfied with the mainstream LA music. What you'll be reading is an interview with the underground Iranian rock band Kiosk conducted in Boston in November 2007. Kiosk is a Persian Blues/Rock/Jazz band established in Iran's basements. The band's first album Adame Mamolli (Ordinary Man), released outside of Iran by Bamahang Productions, was known as one of the most successful of Iran's underground music recordings.

Over the past few years, Arash Sobhani, the founder and the lead singer of the band, left Iran to US and released his second album Eshgh-e Sorat (Love of Speed) in May 2007. What distinguishes "Kiosk" from other Iranian bands are the social commentaries in their lyrics. The music video clip for Love of Speed has been viewed almost 400,000 times on YouTube.

Babak Khiavchi is the founder of Bamahang Productions, which aims to help Iranian underground music gain recognition across the globe. He is also one of the main guitarists of Kiosk. Babak talks about the restrictions that were enforced on the Iranian Music Scene. He says he finds the red lines invisible but he cannot ignore their existence. According to Babak musicians cannot address certain things in their lyrics. In order to produce an album, the musician needs to get permission to start a band from Iran's Cultural Ministry. He will also need to get permission for the lyrics, the music and even the vocals of the singers. If the ministry feels that the band is imitating a famous Persian singer in Los Angeles, it probably won't give them permission to sing unless that music promotes the government. Babak talks about something called Laleh Zar Mafia that basically controls all music productions and distributions in Iran. This mafia knows both the audience and the market and has a monopoly on it. He refers to O-Hum group. Their lyrics are all from Hafez and Rumi and there is nothing illegal about that. However, O-Hum could not get permission for production in Iran because it was trying to fuse traditional Persian music with Rock music. This is something that is not acceptable in Iran.

According to these red lines, any presentation of Western values and style is considered decadent. Babak doesn't face such restrictions in the American music scene. When he started working in the IT industry about 10 years ago, he decided to help his friends in Iran who were trying to get their music recorded and heard.

Babak claims that Kiosk's Ordinary Man album was probably the first Persian underground band that was officially released and copyrighted here and he managed to add it to the iTunes catalog. He thinks that is a big step and it gives a lot of motivation to all these underground musicians in Iran to know that there is a channel for underground music on the Internet and there is an audience there for the music they are producing.

Babak believes that one of the significant things about O-Hum is that their sound engineer, Shahram Sharbaf, recorded everything on his home computer using Pro-Tools software and some other sound engineering devices. He showed everyone that they can do this at home and they wouldn't have to go to a multi-million dollar studio. Babak strongly believes that it is the content and the idea that matters. From his perspective, it is okay to have a low quality production. But the originality of styles and ability to integrate culture into music makes it attractive to people. Babak claims that everyone followed O-Hum example and learned how to use the software and started recording. "The qualities aren't good," he says, "They are mostly demo quality. But even the demos have so much raw emotions."

He compares it to the LA music market. From his point of view, the underground Persian music has so much emotion that the audience tend to forget about the quality. "You really feel the pain and frustration that these musicians burden and how they found music as an outlet to express themselves," says Babak.

Arash sees a life that is going on in Iran underground. He describes the ways people meet and socialize with each other in underground parties. Arash says, "What you see on the streets and on TV is different than what the true life is". This reminds him of the movie Underground. "The majority of people in Iran live underground," he says. Arash believes that most Iranians do not live according to the values that are reinforced on TV or the Islamic values that the government wants people to live with. So he finds underground music as a medium that is exposing the emotions of those people who cannot talk on TV or newspapers to reflect their opinions to others. That's why "These people turn to underground music and blogs...This gives voice to majority of people who do not have access to any kind of media to get heard," Arash says.

On the other hand, Babak finds the restrictions imposed on the music scene to be the main reason for the emergence of underground music. According to him, the music produced and distributed in the LA area, although they have many resources available to them without any limitations, has no content. "What suffers here is art itself. If art is the means of self-expression, and if you can't do this through the legal channels, and the channel that gives you the most audience, you just have to go and find your own channel underground and express yourself the way you want to be heard," says Babak.

Some people commented that their two albums have major differences in terms of culture and restriction. The first album, Ordinary Man was made in Iran facing government restrictions. The second album, Love of Speed was released here in the US facing none of those restrictions. It took Arash three years to write the lyrics of the first album. It covers three years of his life when he was going through "different emotions," he says, "than when I moved to San Francisco". Most of the social commentaries of Love of Speed were created in Iran. And he only polished them here. He calls it the process of growing up. Different things are more important for him now than four years ago. I wonder what those different things are. Arash says, "Nostalgia".

When Arash was writing the lyrics of Ordinary Man, he never planned on recording and releasing this as an album. He used to write for other people to sing and after Babak heard his demos he told him that he had to sing it himself instead of giving away such good songs. When he was writing Love of Speed, he knew he had more room to express himself. There were fewer limitations. He knew he had a chance to talk more about the social issues instead of just on a personal level.

Arash does not see the existence of censorship within his personal life in Iran as a positive factor in forming his music. He says that he did not plan to release the first album when he was writing it. He was doing it for himself so the red lines didn't matter to him. He claims that after Khatami's presidency, many people felt sorry for waiting for 8 years to see a progressive stable change in the society. And after, this guy, Ahmadinejad, came and took over and ruined everything. So he does not have that much time for personal songs anymore, he explains.

Kiosk received two major criticisms from people within the underground music scene. First, many people consider Mohsen Namjo Music revolutionary because it introduced new sound and rhythms to the Iranian Music. Some people believe that Kiosk has nothing new to offer other than the lyrics, and it's an imitation of Dire Straits and Bob Dylan. Secondly, many people believe when the underground musicians moves from Iran to US, they can no longer be a part of the underground music scene. In order to be known underground, the music will need to remain underground. Kiosk no longer suffers the restrictions and limitations in underground music scene in Iran.

Arash accepts that his music sounds like Dire Straits but he says he is proud of that. "I don't know any band that wasn't under the influence of any other band," says Arash, "And I don't know any good band that wasn't influenced by Bob Dylan." According to him, the challenge was to use the Farsi language in a rock context, using guitar and bass. Adapting Farsi with its own music. Arash describes that this challenge started in the 70s with Koroush Yaghmayi, Farhad and Faramarz Aslani. They tried to challenge different angles. He says that the best they could do was to take poems from Rumi, Hafez and other traditional songs and mold them to Rock music.

Kiosk's success is that it adapts Farsi lyrics to Rock and Blues. In the second album, Love of Speed, they were trying to find their own sound, similar to other rock bands that are always looking for their unique sound. "Dire Straits' first album was influenced by JJ Cale," claims Arash. From his perspective, everyone starts with an influence. "The important thing is that everyone is trying to find his own sound" Arash says. He thinks the second album was a big step for Kiosk in trying to establish a new sound and he finds himself hitting in a right direction.

In Babak's opinion, if you want to get the audience's attention, the best approach is to start from an angle that the audience is familiar with. "If you listen to "Dailiness(Roozmaregi)" you might think that it sounds like Dire Straits but it actually reflects Iranians' social issues," claims Babak. He argues that in Love of Speed there is a lot less influence of Dire Straits.

Babak considers Kiosk as an underground band still. He explains that they always try to call themselves an alternative to mainstream Persian music generated in Los Angeles. "Not that there is anything wrong with LA music. We all like to dance," Babak says. Apparently Andy played in his wedding. Babak argues that Kiosk is trying to give people another alternative. "People are fed up with recycled ideas of the same old cheesy lyrics about eyebrows, eyes, lips and how tall she is," claims Babak.

Babak mentions that they are not promoting themselves through any mainstream channels. All their concerts are being organized by grass roots support. They rely a lot on Persian student organizations in all cities that they go to. They approach them directly and ask for help. Students volunteer to do the CD sales and T-shirts. "You never see any of the big Persian promoters backing us," says Babak.

I wonder if they know their audience and if they define underground as an alternative to the LA Mainstream music, what they would tell those people that think that Kiosk has lost the reality of Iran by immigrating here and can no longer be the voice of the underground life. Arash is concerned about that. But he believes that fortunately or unfortunately, many things has happened to him in Iran that he has content to write for many more years, he says it while laughing hysterically. But he is concerned that sooner or later he will be talking about things that people in Iran can no longer relate to. He is trying not to fall in that path. "Once we become distant from contemporary Iran we will also join others to write about hips and eyebrows." he laughs.

Babak recalls when they started in basements. He says that they are trying to stay close to the vibes that they came up with in the basements. According to him, they were never concerned about the audience. They just did it for themselves. Fortunately there seems to be a wide range of Iranians all over the world who could relate to their music. They are from all ages. "We hear from them through emails, fan communities and social networking sites," says Babak. They have some fans that are analyzing every word in their lyrics. He believes that no one ever sees Persian lyrics being analyzed this much. "If people would analyze LA Persian music, maybe they could do better by now," he says sarcastically. He says that the first feedback they have got was from Persian middle-aged divorced men. Recently they have had a much younger audience. Arash thinks that is because people got exposed to their music through the Internet. They were underground and they couldn't be played on radio or TV. So their audience was among those who had access to the Internet. Mostly educated and mostly divorced!

Arash explores more the issues regarding the restrictions on music in Iran. He reminds us that Iran has the youngest population in the world. The Islamic republic is backing up inch by inch. He remembers the time that VCRs weren't allowed in Iran. And when satellites came around the government removed restrictions on VCR and video clubs. And then Internet came and they accepted it. So Arash believes that the government is giving room but very slowly. And the young generation wants more. They want more concerts and more music and this is not something that the government has allowed. This is because Iran is young and they need music and Radio Payam is the best they can get, says Arash. There are no other resources available to people. In Arash perspective, that's not even what people want.

Babak recalls an incident in Iran. There was a raid at a party in Karaj (a city close to Tehran). It was a private concert in which two hundred people participated. The police arrested all of them. And the news agency announced that it was the gathering of the devil worshipers. Babak believes they were just a rock band and maybe someone was wearing an Iron Maiden metal t-shirt. In his perspective, this proves that there is a demand for rock music.

Traditional Persian music just wouldn't satisfy Iranians. He believes that people need to have the energy of Rock music. The government knows that there is a big demand for this. That's another thing that is pushing the boundaries in his opinion. So he believes that in the long term it might work out.

Talieh Rohani studied filmmaking at Soureh University in Tehran, Iran, before going on to do a BFA in Image Arts/Film Studies at Ryerson University in Toronto and to pursue an MFA in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University. She has directed four short films and worked, variously, as a director, art director and production designer, cinematographer and editor. She is interested in the emergence post-revolutionary popular culture in lives of young Iranian women and in the larger impact of technology on the development of a new global imagination. She sees CMS as a place to broaden and strengthen the ideas and skills that she hopes to bring back to her flimmaking practice.

Field Notes from Shanghai: China's Digital Mavens

As I was getting ready for the trip, I stumbled onto a recently released study, produced by IAC and JWT, which compared the centrality of digital media in the life of teens in the United States and China. I used these statistics in my talk at the conference to suggest the importance of fostering new media literacies and ethics among Chinese youth. Here are some of the report's findings:

• Almost five times as many Chinese as American respondents said they have a parallel life online (61 percent vs. 13 percent).
• More than twice as many Chinese respondents agreed that "I have experimented with how I present myself online" (69 percent vs. 28 percent of Americans).
• More than half the Chinese sample (51 percent) said they have adopted a completely different persona in some of their online interactions, compared with only 17 percent of Americans.
• Fewer than a third of Americans (30 percent) said the Internet helps their social life, but more than three-quarters of Chinese respondents (77 percent) agreed that "The Internet helps me make friends."
• Chinese respondents were also more likely than Americans to say they have expressed personal opinions or written about themselves online (72 percent vs. 56 percent). And they have expressed themselves more strongly online than they generally do in person (52 percent vs. 43 percent of Americans).
• Chinese respondents were almost twice as likely as Americans to agree that it's good to be able to express honest opinions anonymously online (79 percent vs. 42 percent) and to agree that online they are free to do and say things they would not do or say offline (73 percent vs. 32 percent).

In almost every category, Chinese youth expressed an even deeper investment in the online world than their American counterparts. It is particularly compelling the degree to which they use digital media to escape constraints on their real world experience, whether local constraints imposed by parents and schools or larger societal constraints imposed by governments.

We need to be careful about framing these findings through Cold War discourse which stresses the free west against the repressive east. It seems more useful to think about the different constraints on participation teens in each country face in their offline lives and the ways that online experiences may allow them at some limited experiences of transcending those constraints. Of course, in both countries, there are ongoing struggles about how much access to and what kinds of participation teens should enjoy in the online world.

Several people I've spoken with here, however, have sought to qualify the picture of Chinese digital youth culture represented through the study. They note, for example, that while Chinese youth have extensive access to blogging technologies they have little to no access to social networks like MySpace and Facebook and they are blocked from being able to use Wikipedia except through elaborate proxies. (I've struggle while I have been in China with having my own access to wikipedia cut off behind the firewall.) Others suggested that Chinese youth have been very active in helping to translate western media content, including the work of participatory culture, into Chinese but have been much slower to embrace such cultural practices themselves. Some have adopted judgmental perspectives on this participation gap suggesting that the Chinese take but do not give to the culture of the web.

Certainly, we can point to the visible contributions of amateur Chinese media makers to YouTube -- most notably, of course, the Back Dorm Boys. (See an interview here conducted by my CMS colleague Beth Coleman as part of her Project Good Luck initiative designed to better understand the rise of digital culture in China.) Yet, I am told they have been much slower to embrace re-mix or modding practices or to generate their own fan fiction, though some have told me that this is starting to change at a rapid pace.

One might hypothesize that Chinese and American teens deal with the uncertainties of the digital environment in different ways: many American teens are unaware of the potential consequences of posting their own content on the web, showing ignorance or naivity about the intellectual property implications of such activities or the long term impact of digital content on how they are perceived by schools or future employees. The Chinese youth, living in a very different cultural and political context, seem less willing to take risks and probably much more awareness of the potential ramifications. They seem to value the freedom they find online all the more because they know what the stakes are in their exercise of those freedoms.

Others stress that the difference may have to do with the language barrier of the online world. Chinese young people may have more skills at translating English content for their own community and may have stronger incentives for wanting to access that western content; Chinese youth perceive the west as having little interest in what they have to say and little willingness (not to mention capacity given how rare it still is for schools to offer courses in Chinese languages) to help close that gap in terms of translating their content into English.

Games and Social Responsibility -- Perspectives from Shanghai

Shortly after the start of 2008, I traveled to Shanghai to attend the International Games and Learning Forum, an event organized by the MIT Education Arcade team in collaboration with Peking University and funded by the Hewlett Foundation. The gathering brought together some leading American thinkers (including Sasha Barab, Eric Klopfer, and Scot Osterweill) about the pedagogical potentials of games with their Chinese counterparts in education, government and industry. Special thanks to Alex Chisholm who organized the event. This fascinating series of conversations started broadly with a consideration of the current context of digital games in China and ended with a concentration on the value of games as a resource for teaching foreign languages. Here I want to share with you some impressions about the current state of games in China which emerged from these exchanges.

The concept of the 'social responsibility' of games companies was a much more central concept to these conversations than in an American context. The western discussion of 'serious games' is framed by the assumption that pedagogy is an unrealized potential of the medium but without any expectations that games companies have an obligation to create games which might transform societies. Perhaps because of the ways that media industries in China seek to walk a line between some emerging capitalist impulses/opportunities and an overarching state economy, the industry representatives at this event sought to continually reassure participants that they were fully aware of their ethical and social responsibilities. These responsibilities operate at multiple levels -- not simply a repressive notion of ethical responsibility (focused on what they exclude from games in order to protect impressionable young people) but also a generative notion (what they included in games in order to promote national culture or ethical self-consciousness). And it is this affirmative or generative notion of social responsibility which holds open the greatest promise in terms of promoting a serious games movement in China.

One attendee went so far as to link this focus on serious games to the United Nation's statement on children's rights which identified a 'right to play' as a fundamental expectation. (It's hard to imagine such a U.N. resolution playing a central role in any American discussion of games given our national disdain at the moment for such international agreements, but one can imagine such a fit carrying greater weight in China at a time the country is courting global respectability through hosting the Olympic games.)

Game Addiction

Let me break this down a bit more. First, I was struck by how little of the conversation about the negative social impact of games centered around issues of media violence or even sex. I had noted a similar disinterest in games violence when I had visited China five years ago in the wake of a tragic fire in a cybercafe started by a high school student frustrated that he was not being allowed to access the internet or play games. My essay on this incident for Technology Review is reprinted in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers. Basically, I argue that the Chinese had little interest in the argument that games violence causing real world violence. Rather, the incident was read in terms of concerns about the breakdown of traditional community life and the loss of the moral influence of the extended family in Chinese culture, both of which were seen as a consequence of rapid cultural, technological, and economic changes. The incident was also read partially in relation to a focus on 'games and internet addiction.'

We need to be careful about taking this 'addiction' rhetoric at face value even though there are some highly publicized incidents where Asian youth played games to the point of physical collapse. For one thing, Chinese youth used cybercafes as their point of access to both games and the internet. To some degree, the Chinese government is using a rhetoric of addiction to rationalize their periodic crackdowns on young people's digital access, knowing that concern about media effects is more likely to be accepted by western governments. In that sense, addiction rhetoric does some of the same work that the Firewall does in terms of restricting youth participation in the online world.

The addiction rhetoric, though, carries force within China where it is connected to a number of concerns which the Chinese have about their children's culture. First, at a time when aspects of capitalism are reshaping Chinese society (especially in Shanghai), addiction rhetoric gives the Chinese a way to talk about the impact of leisure culture and consumer capitalism on their lives. Playing games is problematic precisely because it is unproductive (or seen as such). This focus on unproductive play rather than productive labor takes on particular significance when you recognize that time spent playing games was time “stolen” from exam preparation in a culture where one's future (and that of your family) often rested on how well you perform on standardized testing. It is the high pressure nature of Chinese education which helps to account for the attractiveness of games as a cultural outlet.

Of course, this focus on play is not unique to Chinese youth, even if the forms that play takes breaks along generational lines. On most residential streets, you can see people squatting around a card game, Chess, or Mah Jong, the game providing a context for face to face interactions within the adults of the community. Many of the public parks we visited on this trip included plastic playground equiptment, not aimed at small children but rather targeted at senior citizens, who used them to exercise. Seniors are being encouraged to play but that play is organized around keeping young and improving their physical health (that is, play is redefined as enabling self improvement). Chinese youth, by contrast, are more likely to be interacting online (or within the closed space of the cybercafes) and often to be playing games with people they do not meet face to face.

This brings us to a second aspect of gaming from a Chinese perspective: government policies have promoted birth control and the single child family. Several folks in the Chinese games industry stressed the ways that online gaming reflected the loneliness and isolation of single children who were forced to reach out beyond their own families or even local communities in search of playmates. Whether understood literally or metaphorically, this link between the one child family and the debates about games addiction helps to explain the intensity of this concern.

Finally, the games addiction debate takes on a historically and geographically specific reference point. Several of the speakers talked about the addiction to western games as the modern equivalent of the opium wars, with games suspected as vehicles for inculcating western values or simply as distractions which insured that Chinese youth would under-perform in other aspects of their lives. Here, we can read the introduction of games consoles alongside ongoing debates in China about the appropriateness of recognizing Christmas, an alien holiday which never the less fit well with the gift giving focus of traditional Chinese culture (and in effect, extended the shopping season around Chinese new year.) Walking around Shanghai one saw strange overlaps between the decorations that still lingered from Christmas sales campaigns and the decorations which had already appeared in anticipation of New Years celebrations. I was amused by a sign I spotted in the Shanghai airport wishing visitors a "Merry Chris". The rest of the world talks about putting the Christ back in Xmas, but here, it is the Mass which has dropped off altogether as Kris Kringle and not the Christ child becomes the icon for this merchant's festival. Games, not surprisingly, are popular gift purchases during these holiday seasons but like Christmas, they were often understood in terms of unwelcomed western influences upon Chinese cultural traditions.

So, on one level, the social responsibilities of games companies were framed in terms of managing games addiction with the companies falling all over themselves to talk about devices and programs they have developed to limit the amount of time Chinese youth spent playing games. There are parential controls which allow adults to set and enforce fixed limits on how long their children can play. And games produced by Chinese companies are designed to provide stop points appropriate for the anticipated limits set on game play. One speaker at the conference even suggested a plan which linked access to game worlds and assets to performance on exams. Good test scores might translate into tokens which could be redeemed in games, thus providing gamers with a stronger incentive to spend time studying.

There was also a great deal of discussion about the need to develop games which encourage families to play together, insuring that gaming helps to reinforce strong family ties rather than representing one more factor of modernity which separated youth from the influence of their parents. (This is a society where a group sitting down to lunch is still given a single menu with the expectation that the patriarch will order for the entire group.) One Chinese games industry speaker described the ways that games focused on national culture might bridge generation gaps: young people could use games to help older players to master new technologies while adults could use game play to transmit traditional cultural values and practices.

Serious Games

On the other hand, many of the speakers defined the social obligations of games companies in a more generative sense -- in terms of the introduction of elements into the game play which are seen in more positive terms by the adult society. Games in China, then, are seen as part of a national cultural policy aimed at restoring pride in Chinese history and cultural traditions, traditions which were severely disrupted by the Cultural Revolution and just now beginning to gain some traction in the society once again. Parents worry that their offspring are being drawn to alien cultural experiences --not only games but also anime and comics from other parts of the world -- rather than embracing aspects of their own cultural tradition which adults want to see transmitted to the next generation. The computer here is seen as an important educational resource, one which prepares Chinese youth for a greater engagement with the world beyond their borders.

At the conference, several Chinese game designers proudly displayed games which included historically accurate and precisely realized recreations of historical villages and cities from pre-20th century China. They have filled these historical recreations with artifacts replicated from cultural museums or used them as settings to re-enact cultural rituals, such as wedding ceremonies. Many of the games were based on classical Chinese literature, especially Three Kingdoms.(For more on the relation of games to Chinese cultural policy, check out this earlier blog post.)

One participant noted that western games did much better in the cities but Chinese games rooted in traditional cultures were expected by more rural consumers. Such a distinction makes sense if we see games as part of the process of modernization, westernization, liberalization, and capitalization of China. Those young people who will have the most contact with western travelers or business men were being educated through their play to understand the world beyond while those who would have the least contact were more invested in protecting their national culture from outside influences.

Social responsibility was also being expressed in terms of promoting games which encouraged ethical reflection and thus transmitted the country's philosophical traditions and in terms of the potential educational uses of games. Games companies had a much stronger commitment to the development of serious games, even though most of them were no closer towards developing a business model to support edutainment titles than their counterparts in the west.

One unfortunate downside of this emphasis on games as a means of transmitting national culture was a tendency to link the idea of educational games to a particular kind of content -- to this idea of historical reconstructions -- rather than to a pedagogical process. Several of us in the group of westerners attending the conference were struck by how little our Chinese counterparts spoke about game play as a learning process, saying very little about what you did in the games and much more about the worlds that players could observe. At a western conference on serious games, there is much more likely to be a schism between educators who have a curricular focus and game designers who insist that good game play is necessary for games to be able to motivate or facilitate learning. As a result of this conceptual gap, the two delegations spent a lot of time talking past each other rather than sharing insights about the challenges of designing educational games.

The western participants were more likely to embrace games in terms of a conception of enrichment activities -- things we might learn which went beyond national standards and exams. The Chinese were, as a whole, much more likely to embrace drill and practice models of educational gaming with all education understood in relation to school policies and testing practices.

Piracy and the Chinese Games Industry

This discussion was also shaped by the particular character of the Chinese games industry which is being profoundly shaped by the culture of media piracy. All we had to do was to walk outside of our hotel and we could see a thriving business in the sell of illegal copies of western media content -- games, software, films, television series, and music. I spotted several Hollywood films on dvd which had not reached the screens in the states at the time I had left for the trip. Walk anywhere in the city and you will get accousted by row after row of merchants asking you to "Lookie, Lookie" at their "Watches, DVDS, ipods, suitcases, pocket books, shoes", all knock offs or copies of western produced goods.

I spoke with one college aged young woman here who offered a range of explanations: western copyrighted materials were priced too high for most people to afford; the government set limits on how many western media properties could be imported legally and there was aggressive censorship of anime and manga (with almost no Japanese content available legally here). The black market was the only place they could go to access such cultural goods, allowing them to work around both political and economic obstacles to access.

Yet, the presence of the black market also made it difficult to make a profit off the distribution of their games in this country and caused equal difficulties for local games producers. The game company folks explained that there was almost no legal market in China for platform or pc based single player titles since there was no way to stop the rapid distribution of such materials at low prices through the black market. The only kinds of games which could make money were multiplayer games, where companies could create incentives for buying legal copies. These games were funded on subscription models or on the basis of the sale of assets and services. This focus on multiplayer experiences, then, forced the Chinese companies to compete within a space where production costs and labor demands are highest and this made it very hard for commercial companies to embrace a serious games model, even in the face of the other strong policy incentives for them to do so.

Another factor pushing against the wide spread embrace of instructional games in China has to do with the technical infrastructure of their schools. A government official from the Education ministry described a 10 billion dollar national program to insure that every school in the country had at least one computer. While Urban Chinese youth enjoyed increased access to digital technologies at home, at school, and through the cybercafes (more on this next time), the rural youth still had little or no direct access to computers. So, a school which has only one computer would not be equipt to integrate computer games into its normal instructional practices as anything beyond the focus for teacher demonstrations. No wonder there is so little focus in their thinking about game play experiences: games may be seen much more as a simulation technology performed in front of the classroom than as anything that young people get to actually play themselves.

Live Action Anime? Only at MIT!

When I heard several months ago that some of my MIT colleagues and students were helping to stage a performance of Live Action Anime, I knew I had to be there. I anticipated the experience with a kind of "only at MIT" amusement -- not sure what to expect but knowing that the results would be dazzling.

The performance, Madness at Mokuba, opened with a spectacular battle between two giant robots (see the image above) staged against the backdrop of projected anime images and accompanied by an awe-inspiring soundtrack of metallic clanks and engine sounds which instantly reminded me of my first experience watching RoboTech and Star Blazers several decades ago. I didn't know what live action would look like but as the performance continued, I was more and more impressed with the craft and research which went into this performance.

The show was staged by SLIPPAGE: Performance, Culture, and Technology, a collective of artists and researchers established in 2003, which seeks to explore "connections between acts of performance, formations of culture, and interventions of technology toward an end of

original theatrical storytelling."

Madness was scripted by Ian Condry, an associate professor of Japanese cultural studies in the MIT Foreign Language Program. Condry is the author of the recently published Hip Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization. Some readers will recall an interview with Condry I ran some months ago about his research into Japanese popular culture. Condry is now working on a new book, tentatively titled Global Anime: The Making of Japan's Transnational Popular Culture, which emerges from field work spent in Tokyo animation studies. (I was lucky enough to tag along with Condry during one his trips to Japan, getting to visit Studio Ghibli, and getting some behind the scenes perspectives from the producer of Pokemon. I've described some of my impressions of seeing cosplayers in Yoyogi Park in a previous blog post.)

Condry runs the Cool Japan program, a joint efforts between Harvard and MIT, which regularly brings to Cambridge leading researchers, producers, writers, and others involved in the production and distribution of Japanese popular culture. In an e-mail interview, Condry shared some of the thinking which went into this production:

One of the things that interested me about the live action anime project is that it got me thinking about the many ways that anime crosses over from the "virtual" to the

"real." The most obvious example is cosplay and the many forms of licensed merchandise,

such as toys and models, that in effect bring anime through the screen and into

people's hands. When fans take anime and manga characters, and use them to create their

own fanzine manga (dôjinshi), a similar kind of translation effect is underway, that

is, taking imagined characters, re-imagining through our own minds, and the creating

something new in the world.

It shows how inaccurate in some ways the distinction between virtual and real is, and I

think that partly explains why debates about the division between the two worlds has

slackened in recent years.

During fieldwork research in Tokyo, I have also been struck by how often the term "real"

(riaru, in Japanese) comes up when anime creators talk about what makes particular works

distinctive. Anime creators always struggle with challenge of bringing the "real" into

the "virtual" space of animation.

The original Mobile Suits Gundam series, which began airing in 1979, is looked back on now as the moment when "super robot" anime, with its happy heroes, child audiences, and 30-minute resolutions, gave way to "real robot" anime, in which war was represented in a

more realistic manner. Real had other connotations in this context as well. In real

robot anime, so-called heroes are often despised for their violence and wanton

destruction, audiences were older, and the stories seldom had clean-cut endings, but

rather meandered through the gray zones of war's ambiguities, hypocrisies, and senseless

violence. Gundam turned robots from heroes into mere weapons of war.

In the end, the notion of live action anime may be paradoxical, but it also reflects

some of the most fascinating aspects of anime as a medium.

Anime fans have long debated whether Anime is best understood as a genre (or perhaps a set of related genres), as an aesthetic style, as a mode of production, or as a transmedia phenomenon. Informed by Condry's theories and research, the MIT show managed to cover all of these bases and then some.

The show's characters (see below) each embody archtypes from the anime tradition, collectively taking us on a tour of its core genre elements and linking them to larger trends in Japanese society and culture, including "giant robots, a Japanese schoolgirl, a lovelorn otaku, a masterless samurai, a gamer woman, evil media magnates, and a vengeful deathgod who all battle for truth, justice, and the anime way."

As the story opens, the protagonists, including Schoolgirl and her sidekick, Sam Rye, and their arch rivals, Flux and Ota Ku, are preparing their robots for the Makuba Institute of Technology's annual giant robot battle. Yet, something strange is going on. Their classmates are falling prey to VIRTIGO, a strange mental illness which involves altered states of consciousness. We learn that the illness has been manufactured by an evil media conglomerate (The Infinite Channel Network) in order to produce a state of constant consumption, transmitted through the use of flash rhythms similar to those that alarmists claimed caused epileptic seizures when Pokemon was first released. Falling prey to what is described as a "Neo-Postmodern Trans-subjectivity syndrome," victims "fall from one reality into another." As the corporate scientists spell out their plans to use anime to achieve global dominance, they become the vehicles for Condry and the show's cast to explore the historical evolution of the anime movement. As scenes from Astro Boy, Gundrum, Neon Genesis: Evangelion, and Pokemon, among other defining texts in the anime tradition, are projected on the wall, the cast stages a gender-bending re-enactment of key moments, such as the creation of Astro-Boy. There's a very funny re-enactment of Pong with actors moving a giant cardboard ball between two massive paddles. Cyberpunk has long been a vehicle for authors and animators to reflect upon the influence of media on contemporary culture and this high tech plot provides an ideal vehicle for Condry to express his own insights into the cultural and economic factors which have enable anime to straddle genres, to reach across multiple media platforms, and to shape youth culture world-wide.

The performance loving captured the anime aesthetic. While the performers are live, the voices are dubbed, capturing the slight mismatch between lips moving and spoken language which is part of most westerner's experience of watching anime. (During the question and answer period, one anime saavy spectator asked when they might see the subtitled edition of this performance and offered to help launch a fan sub project!) The soundtrack wittily samples effects from classic games and anime which sparked some audience members to shout out the references -- and trust me, at MIT, a high percentage of those attending the show were deeply immersed in games, anime, and other aspects of geek culture.

The acting style was designed to convey some of the limited animation techniques most closely associated with anime -- even including repeated gestures which hint at the longstanding practice of recycling footage at certain generic moments -- transformation scenes for example -- in some series.

The show's director, Thomas F. DeFrantz, who is a Professor of Theater Arts and the current head of the MIT Program in Women's and Gender Studies, shared with me some reflections about the stage design and choreography for Madness:

To construct movement for the piece, I often had my dancers think of themselves as if 'in camera.' I asked, "if you were the animator, how would you draw this moment?" The piece is based on stillness, rather than on motion. In many anime, you don't see every bit of a gesture, just the edges. This took a technique of 'clenching' the body, strangely enough, to reveal the edges of each silhouette that stood for a character emotion. More than anything, we had to work against the casualness of everyday gesture, in which there might be many silhouettes of little interest to an animator or someone watching anime. For this work, we had to focus on the silhouettes that could reveal character, attitude, and opinion all at once. The performers developed their 'signature poses' and we worked from those to generate a language of motion. In the end, it was much harder than I thought it might be, to go through the entire piece in this sort of 'physical karaoke' but without ever speaking a word. It helped us reconsider the importance of breath and sound as components of human expression, because in the live action anime, working with the pre-recorded soundtracks, the performers never got to make a sound.

The costume and make-up were equally iconic, designed to transform the student performers into cartoon characters. Here, for example, is a portrait drawn by castmember Ashley Micks of Ota Ku, one of the young people who helps overcome old school rivalries and work together to defeat the evil corporations.

Milo Martinez, an undergraduate major in the Comparative Media Studies Program, describes the challenges he faced bringing this larger-than-life character to the stage:

I can honestly say that Live Action Anime was an experience worth having. As a Dancer, Cosplayer, and Anime-fan, I saw it as a perfect fit for me. The entire piece is gesture based, and a lot of focus was placed on creating phrases with our bodies. "How can our body say this sentence for us?" was a common question we asked ourselves while constructing the choreography. Since our voices were "dubbed over" we had to make sure that our movement could speak for us.

We were very particular in everything we did, each character had a walk, pose, attitude, and each needed to agree with the others. As an Anime fan, it was important to me to try and make my movements big and crazy, if it looks like it hurt, then it probably did. How fast can I run from this side of the stage to the other? How high can I jump? A lot of this show I pushed my body to its limits to try and create a character that had indeed walked out of a screen.

As his comments suggest, Milo came to the show with extensive experience in cosplay, a form of costuming and performance which thrives within the anime fan community. Indeed, Milo was interviewed on camera as part of a series of short documentaries on cosplay we have been producing for Project nml (New Media Literacies). Here's a segment from this documentary, which is still in production, which features Milo talking about his cosplay experience and suggests the ways that these fans are, as Condry has suggested, already involved in finding ways to translate the look and feel of anime into physical reality.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Nineteen, Part Two): Lori Hitchcock Morimoto and David Surman

Mastery and Expertise DS: There are so many overlaps between film and game fandom Lori, which I sense both domains are subject to some of the same conceptualizations. In my own experience, it was the depth of the fandom that brought new knowledge to bear in the pre-internet days. I remember, in particular in games culture, how anecdote and fuzzily understood Japanese names would circulate among our group, as a form of ill defined knowledge, which nonetheless enabled us to evidence our commitment to the medium. At a time when US and European game adaptations would feature designers and developers in the end credits using arcade-style acronyms, such as 'Maki1000', I remember the particular case of Yuzo Koshiro, the musician behind the Streets of Rage Series (Burning Knuckle in Japan), and other Sega games throughout the early-to-mid nineties. Koshiro was distinct in that his name was featured on the attract screen of the arcade machines for the Streets of Rage games. Knowing the name of a particular person within a Japanese games production, and being able to associate it explicitly with good practice (the music was particularly good!) meant that, certainly within my own limited childhood experience, there was a palpable sense of connoisseurship and expertise that emerged from what today I objectify as fandom. The 'scars' of Americanization were no longer naturalized into the mediascape we had become accustomed to. Our commitment to complexity, with its associated passion for knowledge concerning origins, authenticities, modes of production, was profound, and manifested in ways exactly reminiscent of what you describe in the language play in women's HK film fandom.

There was a discernable sense of a 'private contract', much like what Anderson calls 'communities of the imaginary', at the point these unknown authors acquired names and faces. I felt a powerful sense of authority that came from the absolute ignorance of my parents, whose views of Japan and Asia still chimed with wartime anecdote and tragedy. We felt like a collective of codebreakers, learning languages, both Japanese and those of semiotic media literacies, in the course of resolving the burning questions that arose from games as subculture. I think that the contemporary relationship to authorship in videogames is still inflected by the revelations of the nineties.

As a teenager, the gender and transnational dimension emerged in the ambiguity surrounding Japanese names to provincial British kids like us. Is it a boy's name or a girl's? From that ambiguity rolled out other questions (certainly compounded by my own questions surrounding sexuality), as a young aspiring artist; for instance, do girls make/like these violent beat-'em-up games? And likewise, are there boys out there designing characters with the sexual charge and ambiguity like Prince Ali in the Sega roleplay game Beyond Oasis, imagining new paradigms of male beauty and power which stepped outside the hyper-masculine fantasies of the British and American teen culture I had been exposed to until that time?

LHM: What you write reminds me of what my partner says about his own mid/late '80s anime fandom. He's Japanese-American, and says that he had a particular (and peculiar!) credibility among American anime fans at the time because he 'looked' the part of a Japanese person AND had some cultural knowledge to impart as well. This emphasis on cultural specificity (in contrast to, say, authenticity) seems to be a contrary impulse to what Iwabuchi describes as "odorless" transnational popular culture; fans' knowledge of the originating culture may be incomplete and even wholly 'inauthentic', but - particularly within the fandom itself - it still holds considerable cultural capital.

This seems especially the case with Anglo-American interest in yaoi fan fiction; slash writers have moved into yaoi fiction and make a distinction between the two (one that I don't wholly understand, but which seems to be based at least in part on yaoi's emphasis on 'beautiful boys'), but this is as far as their appropriation of the Japanese practice goes. For many such writers, the term 'yaoi' seems to have taken on a life of its own, independent of its Japanese origins. We might ask if the same is true within other Asian (eg: Korean) yaoi-style works, given the very different role played by Japan, as a nation, within those contexts.

Indeed, this is one problem with the monolithic characterization of transnational media fandom that you describe above: if our conversations are confined to comparisons of "Western" and, in this case, "Japanese" media and fans (with each being described in terms of the other), we are left not only with a limited understanding of how media circulates and is used by such fans, but also with narrowly defined points of origin and destination.

Soft Power and Shallow Consumption

DS: I want to return to the specifics of the transnational relation in my fandom in academic terms, but first describe an anecdote from my teaching that certainly supports my ideas. At Newport we run Japanese lessons as part of our community-learning program, and every year a large cohort of undergraduate games design and animation students sign up, passionate about anime, games and Japanese popular culture in general. As an evening class, it doesn't compete with their core study, and the class is almost always three quarters constituted by my students, with the remainder members of the general public interested in learning a new language. After a number of sessions, the numbers start to drop off radically, most after the first. We are left with a committed core that will go on to finish the complimentary program (it is interesting to note that those who generally remain are young women). While there are numerous explanations, including their study workload, and the first year undergraduate experience in particular, I have often thought about the particular relationship between fan knowledge and fandom generally, which in many cases brought them to undergraduate studies in these areas, and the acquisition of orthodox knowledge (such as learning the language) in these areas.

It reminds me of suggestions Koichi Iwabuchi was making in the mid nineties about transnational multiculturalism, in the particular case of relations between 'Japan' - and its constructed 'Japaneseness' - and the 'West'. He frames the discussion in terms of Self and Other, and discusses the construction of Japaneseness both by the orientalizing rhetorics of the West, and Japan's self-orientalizing position in relation to its perceived 'others', in particular America and its Asian neighbours. He writes that the West from Japan's view had been '...discursively created in a quite systematic way...' and that most importantly, '...what had mattered was the ideas of the West that the Japanese had created for the purposes of self-definition. The real West was irrelevant.' Much of what I see in the contemporary fandom for Japanese games, film and anime chimes with Iwabuchi's suggestion, albeit from the inverse position. The pattern of their consumption and the scope of their connoisseurship have much more to do with their own identity politics than with any substantive enquiry into another culture. The new mobility and accessibility of Japanese popular culture provides new imaginary negotiations with archetypes of gender, class and power which are highly attractive to contemporary young people, insofar as they act as a means to configure selfhood, and as a source of information from which cultural capital can be drawn and parlayed between sympathetic peers. I think that sometimes this solipsism is written out of the account of transnational media fandom, the idea that something so global can have such domestic drivers.

LHM: I have to say, I'm very intrigued by the fact that the majority of remaining students in your language curriculum are women. When I was a Japanese language teacher back in the late 80s, the bulk of our students were men, drawn to Japanese language study by tall tales of all the money to be made in Japan's then-booming economy. The parallels between this shift from Japanese business to cultural attractiveness, and from male to female students, seems worthy of study in its own right!

I both agree and disagree with last point above; or, rather, I think it's something that's less an "either/or" than "both/and" situation. I agree with you that while we've moved away from early work on Western anime fans, in which they are characterized as almost wholly divorced from any awareness of, or interest in, Japan, we have yet to fully integrate our understandings of what the specific "domestic drivers" of transnational media fandom might be in the conversation. Are there aspects of specific transnational media that resonate with specific fandom practices in the target country (slash and yaoi again come to mind here)? Particularly in the case of such apparently different countries as, for example, Japan and the United States, the question of what exactly it is about anime texts (and its modes of production and distribution) that is so attractive to transnational fans is one that had yet to be fully interrogated.

Yet the word "substantive" is a sticking point for me, insofar as it seems to ask fans to justify their interest in non-native popular culture - something that we simply don't ask of fans of domestic media. Failing this, critics such as Iwabuchi tend to dismiss what transformative work the fandom might perform, and yet my own experience and that of the women I've interviewed suggests that, for at least some fans, this work does in fact occur. This would probably be your "committed core" of language students; they may not represent the mainstream of anime fans (and not all of them may even be fans), but that even a few take a very personal interest and parlay it into something that exceeds their fandom suggests that, at the very least, the question of what constitutes "substantive" interest in the cultures of other nations needs to be revisited.

DS: I think you are right in the sense those who go the distance are transformed by their engagement with the subject, though the degree to which this relates to their capacity as fans or as learners is a conversation in itself. To come back to your point about the play of language, in the Q&A session at a conference a few years ago I heard Western anime and game fandom being described as an 'infinitely shallow pool', in which fans circulated information about the latest series of gameworld which incredible rapidity and energy, but that any single encounter with that media was not defined with particular depth. The anecdote of kids torrenting hours and hours of Naruto, Inuyasha and the like, but never getting round to watch it, constructed this contemporary archetype of the cable-internet-fuelled frenzied collector. While I don't find this sort of illustration particularly illuminating, writers like Thomas Lamarre have observed that contemporary otaku spectatorship can be understood as a process of 'scanning' a series, or vinyl figure, or manga, for affirmative traces of textual tropes, which chime with established genre and representation conceits, understood by the fan community. Extending from this, fans knowledge of the Japanese language follow its yoked association with signification important to the currency of fandom. And so, to return to that first Japanese lesson filled with my students, they will certainly know the word for cat, neko, since feline-eared characters are a mainstay in the manga/anime/cosplay world. The language of anime is the currency, not Japanese per se. Language and world are intimately bound in this fandom; is the labour intensive investment in learning conversational Japanese measured against its use within the fan community, when the rhetoric of fandom legitimates and even celebrates what to orthodox eyes is 'partial knowledge', but which, in the case of fan subculture, constitutes a world of signs all of its own.

So, in contrast to the picture you posed of conversations across borders, I think transnational fandom in animation and games is not so much the cosmopolitan conversation it might have been portrayed as previously. I think that the majority of young people in this country who actively hunt out Japanese manga/anime/games/film do so with a view to pursuing a passion (albeit an increasingly mainstream one) that provides them with a means to re-imagine themselves outside of the relative confines of their domestic experience. I am trying to speak from the perhaps mythic position of a 'general fan', and I think such a thing exists, since commercial culture is now configured so absolutely to provide consumers with a means to invest in an experience of fandom as much as a text in itself. The organization of comic book, music and media stores are optimized to create the sensibility of the collector, and with manga imports, invariably the pricing and sale pitching compound this effect. Rarefied media are no longer the golden chalice they once were, where transnational media relations were evidenced in import/export flows. Transnational dimensions to contemporary media are found in its production of meaning through narrative and representational cues, which assume unforeseen levels of literacy in a wide variety of territories, along with the serialization and multimedia distribution of franchised intellectual properties. In this space, fan endeavour is characterized by a systemic filtering of proliferating media around a core text. Finding the good stuff assumes that you know the bad when you see it, and implicit to this assumption, is that almost any franchise will not exist as a single series, film or manga, but will spawn unforeseen ancillary media texts claiming to extend its scope.

The face of popular culture is merging into one, with transnational flows moving with a frightening intensity. When I was a teen Japanese popular culture was monolithic and exotic, now kids have Korean Chinese and their own homegrown media, which has followed the Japanese mould. But still, most interesting to me are the generic realities of Japanese culture that are coded as gendered. Shojo and Shonen, girls and boys genres, and beyond that Seinen, Bishonen, Yaoi. The specification of genres featuring action stories for boys, or stories of beautiful boys for girls in Japan, or for British queer teenagers who revel in the Bowie-like anti-heroes, I think the enduring influence on fandom that has come from transnationalism has been the complication of archetypal gender roles. While the people I speak to consider themselves fans, they choose to operate in shallower waters than the first generation of fans that aimed for the stars, and they nonetheless return to the enduring influence, through games/manga/anime of these new subjectivities, and for instance the subversive power of explicitly queered male heroism. Its amazing to me how the image of young men nowadays, through bands like Fallout Boy/AFI/Lost Prophets, draw on the image culture of imported anime from the eighties and nineties. Not quite dandyism, since a certain sobriety is key, the hair and the attention to detail is suffused with anime influences, and the gender play most explicitly betrays this heritage. Through Japanese performers like Gackt whose influence can be traced in the contemporary 'scenester' and 'emo' aesthetics, the softening of male aesthetics is perhaps the most enduring evidence of how fandom went mainstream here in the UK.

Wrapping Up

LHM: Given the really nascent state of writing on gendered (and gendering in) media fandom in the transnational context, I feel like we've only been able to begin to think through some of the issues at work here. We seem to be performing a dance around issues of in/authenticity, transcultural and transsexual masquerade, and carnivalesque language play that I'd love to see picked up and discussed more in the comments. Thanks for a rigorous and thought-provoking discussion, David.

DS: Yeah, writing late in the gender and fandom series has meant so much ground has been covered, I have found myself drawing a lot on my own experiences. I think that the potential for a further discussion on issues of authenticity in fandom is huge, since it plays such a decisive role in the structure and hierarchy of communities. As you say, it would be good to take it further in the comments. It's been great fun Lori.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Nineteen, Part One): Lori Hitchcock Morimoto and David Surman

Introduction LHM: I'm Lori Hitchcock Morimoto, and my academically sanctioned biography states that I'm a PhD candidate at Indiana University, working on a dissertation that examines Japanese female fans of Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. Normally, I would not include the information that I just now plopped my daughter in front of an episode of Dora the Explorer in order to buy some time to write, but that information - as well as the fact that I'm presently seven months pregnant - turns out to be relevant to the ways in which I'm thinking about female fandom in my dissertation, as well as the ways I'm thinking about academia in my own life. In essence, I'm interested in unruly fans (and unruly academics).

My own fan experiences, like those of the women about whom I'm writing, are very much a product of personal transnationalism. I spent my formative years living in Hong Kong; there, I was a fan of Hollywood blockbusters and took every opportunity to fill Chinese embroidered scrapbooks with movie stills culled from the Japanese movie magazines Screen and Roadshow. Later, I paradoxically 'discovered' the unique pleasures of Hong Kong cinema in Japan, and, as a fan, I've invested my fair share of hard-earned cash in star and movie memorabilia, quaked with excitement upon realizing that the Hong Kong restaurant I happened to visit was the backdrop of a favorite scene in Peter Chan's He's a Woman, She's a Man, and shaken Leslie Cheung's hand at a concert in Osaka. This is all by way of saying that fandom, for me, has been - first and foremost - a very personal and highly affective experience. As with many of the female fans I've talked with over the years, it stems from passion - for a narrative, for a genre, for a star. The fans with whom I identify are messy - to borrow from Martti Lahti and Melanie Nash, we're "those girls": the ones who exceed predetermined parameters of fan/star interaction, who allow our lives and our fandom to commingle to an unseemly degree.

DS: My name is David Surman, and I am founding Senior Lecturer in Computer Games Design at the University of Wales, Newport. Fandom brought me to university, where I studied animation, with a view to working in the games industry. I was chaperoned through childhood by a Sega Mega Drive, and as a teenager I was consumed by an expanded passion for Japanese animation, games and popular culture; I guess I would qualify as one of the first wave of UK game otaku. I was caught up in the cloud of excitement around anime and manga generated by Jonathan Clements and Helen MacCarthy in magazines like Manga Max and Manga Mania, at a time when British and American animation was a dust bowl. Even though retailers sold the limited number of titles available at mercenary prices, over the years I acquired numerous videos with my meager allowance. I came to them knowing something of the controversy but nothing of the pedigree in anime.

My own media mixing put Kaneda and Tetsuo headlong along the same highway as the Gunstar Heroes and Joe Musashi on horseback. Videogames, manga and anime became the counterpoint to boredom at school, and university provided me with an opportunity to deepen those interests in an almost-legitimate way. No sooner had I got there, my interests began to broaden, through a patchwork exposure to film studies and classic film and animation. I found a passion for European experimental and North American limited animation, and these in turn deepened my appreciation of anime. My masters and PhD work followed the path set during the degree; I have sought to bring film studies methods to bear on transnational videogame and animation cultures. I guess, in this process, I have been examining my own fandom. I don't think that my experience is in many ways idiosyncratic; it always amazes me how many of my students share biographical details, motivations, dreams and desires, having spent their childhood committed to the same mediums as me.

In several recent essays I have vainly vindicated my own abstruse feelings about games fandom. My film studies prejudices come to the fore in the essays on Fable in the Animated Worlds anthology, and on StreetFighter in Videogame/Player/Text. Until relatively recently game studies have tended to focus on matching the sociology of play to the dynamics of gameplay. Along with a few other guilty parties, some of whom have contributed to this gender and fandom series, I am interested in the relationship between game aesthetics and fandom, though I suspect aesthetics is sometimes too weighty a term. Game art, images, advertisements and merchandise fascinate me, in particular when they betray particular cultural and generic assumptions about gender and games.

The 'Messiness' of Transnational Fan Culture

Whenever I think, "what am I doing?," I remind myself of what I consider one of the great fan studies texts, Barthes' The Language of Fashion. His summary exclamation, 'The most seemingly utilitarian of objects - food, clothes, shelter - and especially those based on language such as literature (whether good or bad literature), press stories, advertising etc., invite semiological analysis.'

I have tended to work with an emphasis on close analysis within the systems of games representation. Like Barthes I guess, the sum of my interests in games, animation and fandom pass through another lens, sexuality, which shapes my thinking, and my consumption of images and play experiences. I think I qualify as one of your messy fans, Lori. In my recent work I have become interested in female transnational/transmedia character archetypes (phew!), as loci for fan investment, authorial refinement, and cultural commentary.

LHM: Actually, I'm intrigued by your parenthetical "phew!" there at the end of your self-introduction, since it really is a mouthful but, at the same time, something that's part and parcel of contemporary globalized (or transnational or transcultural), gendered fandom. Since we've both written on media fandoms in a transnational context, I think this is something we might be able to talk to in addition to issues of gender. In my own work, I've found that the sheer amount of exposition necessary to bring a more general audience up to speed in terms of the specific culture(s) I'm talking about often acts as a barrier to discussing those cultures in terms of broader issues of fandom. In an English-speaking Western conference setting, for example, comparatively little background information is needed for speakers and audience members alike to engage in fairly high-level theoretical discussions of, say, Doctor Who or Lord of the Rings fandom. But in the case of characters like Kaneda and Tetsuo (who I was pleased - and mortified, but only because it dates me - to recognize), theoretical discussion often seems to take a back seat to exposition. My feeling is that, as a result, such discussion tends to get ghettoized or relegated to 'specialties' within academic discourse on fan cultures.

DS: Specialties indeed; your description of the challenge facing new territories of media research chimes exactly with my experience over the past 5 years or so, as games in particular have entered the mainstream as a object worthy of intense scrutiny. The stellar growth of the games and animation research fields has not been matched by moderate methodology, and there is still a substantial problem regarding the sensitivity with which scholars and critics figure transnational relations, and even the principle of national identity, in their research questions.

For me, one of the crucial issues in fan critique is the discrepancy between the needs of industry, journalistic, academic and general fan opinion, in relation to the expression their views on subjects, for instance national identity, and oriental/occidental constructions. I recently commented on this issue on the DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) listserv. Distinctions between East and West require sensitive disentangling in academic thought, and such demands aren't generally expected of those in other domains.

I think it is absolutely crucial in this sort of comparative discussion that the category of the 'West' is not positioned as a coherent singularity, where narrative/generic/ideological operations can be thought relative to opposing and equally pejorative notions of 'Japan', which is somehow taken out of its Asia-Pacific context. The conceit of 'Japan' juxtaposed against a singular 'West' depends on outmoded assumptions about the dynamic topography of transnational media relations. It seems essential to figure into aca-fan thinking the internal complexities within Western media culture, and to further measure those against a similarly nuanced discussion of Asia-Pacific media culture, within which Japan is placed. The uncomplicated singular construction of 'Japan' as a media producer recurs time and again in animation and game scholarship, and it's not useful, especially when justified in relation to an equally mythic West. Woeful industry, journo and fan conceptualizations of East and West should be left for them to ruminate. A discussion of transnational media relations needs to proceed from a more nuanced set of assumptions, am I right? You wouldn't get away with it in any other field...

LHM: It's the challenge of articulating heretofore discrete fields of inquiry - area studies, in particular - with disciplines that have only just begun to confront your "dynamic topography of transnational media relations." These days, it's become more difficult to talk about fandoms within the American television mediascape without at least a passing knowledge of shows such as Torchwood or Naruto (or even Are You Being Served? - and I'd love to see a paper that really delved into the apparently bottomless popularity of that dinosaur in the U.S.!), yet because of those persisting notions of national coherence that you describe above, we seem to have a hard time breaking out of a framework that emphasizes cross-cultural exchange at the broadest national (or regional) level. At the risk of appearing sycophantic, given the forum for this conversation, I would mention that recent work by Matt Hills and Henry Jenkins emphasizing "semiotic solidarity" and "pop cosmopolitanism," respectively, offers a means of making sense of transnational fan networks that takes us outside traditional notions of the individual and the nation.

Of course, once gender enters the conversation, we're confronted with an even more complex nexus of identity construction. These days, we're relatively comfortable talking about 'otaku' in the context of transnational fan cultures centering on anime, but it's generally a foregone conclusion that, in the Japanese case, 'otaku' are men and, thus, comfortably "Japanese." When the discursive construct "Japanese woman" is introduced to the conversation - along with centuries' worth of baggage about her ostensible subservience and cultural/political disenfranchisement - discussion about what role Japanese female fans might play in furthering our understanding of how fan cultures work across national borders gets shelved in favor of trying to understand the women themselves. Scholars such as Brian Larkin have written exceptional work introducing non-Western media fans to discussions of how transnational media are consumed across borders, but these fans are almost exclusively male; the conversation about non-Western women and media consumption seems to be stalled in debates about resistance and subversion - debates that the mainstream of fandom studies has called into question. And given the contested value of any kind of "cosmopolitanism" in fostering mutual empathy among media consumers within a framework that privileges resistance and, in particular, cultural authenticity, it becomes all the more difficult to break out of old models of national identity in attempting to make sense of globalized patterns of media consumption on the part of non-Western female fans.

Performing the National

DS: I remember reading Volker Grassmuck's early work on otaku culture, and being amazed when his first interviewee was a female game otaku. I think problems associated with women's fandom emerge from a complex historical construction of women's work, play, recreation and entertainment. Early games culture was profoundly male dominated, with only a few women of exceptional resilience able to stand the grunts and smells of the old arcades! I guess a comparative analysis of women's recreation between different cultural spaces would no doubt shed new light on how we conceive the operations of fandom. Like Lawrence Grossberg suggested, I think we need to bring it these sorts of issues closer to home if we are to see rich new avenues opening up. William Gibson has drawn some interesting parallels between British and Japanese culture, mutually juxtaposed against American culture, he writes that '...the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today's interface of British and Japanese cultures.' Gibson has certainly contributed to the conceited picture of 'Japan' through his science fiction novels, but his statements in the Guardian are useful for illustrating the point that comparative analysis is best researched in discussions taking place closer to home than antiquated notions of East and West.

Making the effort to proceed from complicated beginnings might mean that, in the long run, we say much more sustainable and durable things about the subject in question, in this case gender and fandom. Work like Andrew Higson's early essay 'The Concept of National Cinema' in Screen from 1989 give a really sound explanation of why we can't permit brutish and uncomplicated discourse on the scale of transnational relations. A few lines are pretty useful:

'To claim a national cinema is first of all to specify a coherence and a unity; it is to proclaim a unique identity and a stable set of meanings. The process of identification is thus invariably a hegemonising, mythologising process, involved both in the production and assignation of a particular set of meanings, and an attempt to prevent the potential proliferation of other meanings.'

My question would be, to what extend does English-speaking fan film/animation/game criticism need a represented Japanese mode of production to perform a particular set of codes (and by extension narrative and ideological functions), against which it can define itself within a particular set of its own traditions? In increasingly globalised and mutually intelligible film/animation/games production cultures, where different production traditions rub shoulders in elective spaces such as the Tokyo Game Show or cable television channels, are such national/occidental/oriental discourses evoked out of 'fear of cultural contamination', as Iwabuchi would suggest?

Does the need for a coherent Western fan tradition (see responses to Dr Who, LOTR) arise from the new transparency of transnational games culture? Is that need for coherence the driver rather than the cause? In this case, do differing national fan subjectivities exist as a textuality of sorts in themselves, which compete within commodified fan culture as a form of generic reconciliation (the fight for shelf space in retail comic book stores for instance).

LHM: This last question is very intriguing, and it gets me thinking about the ways in which fans perform both their own, as well as target, national identities within the context of, for lack of a better term, non-native fandoms. For example, one female writer of Torchwood and Doctor Who fanfiction who I know from my own X-Files fanfiction writing days assumes what might be described as a stereotypically British personae when talking about these particular shows on LiveJournal: exclamations of "La!" and observations that "I'm so knackered" seem to express a kind of delight in - rather than fear of - cultural difference. The beauty of one of her exclamations - "He's lovely!" - is especially nice insofar as it refers to a Japanese anime character; this isn't the rigid Anglophilia of the PBS crowd but, rather, a messy and decidedly incoherent revelery in transnational fandom.

Equally, this kind of playfulness is at work in the Japanese female fandom of Hong Kong cinema, again manifesting itself in language. In this case, similarities between written Japanese and Chinese, which have typically been used to demonstrate discrete cultural affinities (often in the aid of arguments for the cultural "Asianization" of East Asia), become a site of excessive intra-fandom communication. For example, stars are referred to not only by their Anglicized stage names (ie: Jacky Cheung), but also by their Chinese given names (Cheung Hok-yau) and - most notably - Japanized versions of their Chinese names (Cho Gakuyu), which, in spoken Japanese, are intelligible only to other Japanese fans of Chinese stars. Japanese fans of East Asian popular culture have been used to illustrate Japan's rediscovered Asian belonging on the part of political and cultural elites, but such arguments are grounded in the maintenance of coherent borders between Japan and its East Asian neighbors. In contrast, this kind of play exceeds conventional understandings of linguistic and cultural coherence, and it emerges not from a perceived need to communicate across borders, but from the sheer pleasure and intimacy it fosters between both fellow fans and those fans and the stars they admire.

Given that this kind of transcultural play is especially evident in recent role-playing fanfiction (eg: Milliways bar on LiveJournal - http://community.livejournal.com/milliways_bar/), I wonder if this sort of thing is at work in transnational gaming culture, as well?

Looking Back: The Re:Constructions Project

In the fall of 2001, my graduate media theory seminar at MIT met every Tuesday and Thursday at noon. Classes had started a week before 9/11. The opening discussion focused on Thomas McLaughlin's concept of vernacular theory. I had emphasized that all kinds of groups for all kinds of reasons both produce and consume media theory, although they do so with different languages and with different institutional norms. From here, we had discussed the ways academic theorists might more fully engage with other producers and consumers of theory and how this would require a shift in rhetoric. We talked a lot about the concept of applied humanism, which is one of the cornerstones of the comparative media studies approach--the idea that insights from the humanities and social sciences need to be applied and tested at actual sites of media change. MIT has applied physics, applied math. It was time it had applied humanism. We challenged our students to do projects that had real-world impact and that confronted pragmatic challenges. I had to go almost immediately from hearing the news of the tragedy on 9/11 to conducting a seminar. As I walked toward the classroom, I passed graduate students huddled around radios or reading information off the Internet, many of them openly weeping. Afterward, everyone focused on New York City, but at that moment Boston was profoundly affected because the airplanes that had crashed into the towers had departed from Boston's Logan Airport. No one felt like class, yet nobody wanted to be alone. Since I live on campus, I phoned my wife to tell her I was bringing the class home to watch news reports.

Most of the students came with me. Some made calls on their cell phones to friends and family members; others channel zapped before focusing on BBC America, which MIT Cable had just added a few days before; and some used wireless laptops to glean information from the Web.

The students gathered in my living room hardly knew each other. Most had arrived on campus a week or so before. This was the most heavily international cohort we had attracted since MIT's Comparative Media Studies (CMS) Program had been launched three years earlier. The students were acutely aware of the tragedy's international dimensions and frustrated by how intensely nationalistic much of the coverage was.

Over the next several days, e-mails flew fast and furious on the departmental discussion list. When the class gathered again on Thursday, the students demanded to know what role theory might play now and wondered whether there was any way they as students at the beginning of their professional training could make a difference. We talked a lot about ways the program might respond and about some of the statements issued by public intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, and Edward Said. Many students found these statements unsatisfactory in their abstract tone and their "told you so" attitude. A meaningful theoretical response needed to be humane, to acknowledge the author's own emotional experiences, and to respect the reality of several thousand deaths. Political analysis might come later, although the Bush administration was already cutting short the mourning process and preparing us for military action.

We called a "town meeting" of all our faculty and students. Several ideas surfaced, the most compelling being to produce a Web site that would provide resources for people who wanted to lead discussions about the media coverage. Although the Web project, operating under the title re:constructions, would involve faculty, students, and staff, it was voluntary, outside formal class requirements.

Many of us--faculty and students--gathered the following day in an MIT classroom, where we outlined topics we wanted to cover and divided up the tasks. All the blackboards were covered with chalk and post-its by the end of the discussion. William Uricchio, then CMS's associate director (now my Co-Director), recalls:

What impressed me about the experience was that fellow faculty and students were bound together in a shared project far different than the classroom. In the classroom, we approach one another from different sides, with different agendas. In the case of re:constructions, we worked side by side, exchanging insight and expertise without ever sliding into the collaborative opposition that typifies the classroom. That this happened so early in the semester made for an excellent set of working relations for the rest of the year.

Some of the students formed teams to videotape events on campus and elsewhere, the more experienced students teaching novices how to use the equipment. Other students began scanning media coverage in their home countries or reaching out to friends and family members around the world. Our goal was to provide summaries and links to media coverage in as many countries as possible. We contacted additional faculty members and urged them to write short essays modeled after Raymond Williams's Keywords to explain the historical contexts behind some of the language being used to describe what had happened. Others read essays about news and propaganda, developing questions teachers could use to generate discussions. Students circulated drafts of their essays electronically, giving each other advice and feedback.

The work went on all weekend, with students coming in and out of our offices at all hours, day and night. One student, Philip Tan, did all the coding for the site himself, working eighteen-hour shifts, pasting in text as quickly as the other team members generated it. Alex Chisholm, a member of our staff, proofed everything as it passed across the mailing list. Sometimes, students and faculty would huddle for quick discussions about core theoretical concepts. Sometimes, faculty sent e-mails with advice. A few faculty expressed reservations, concerned that a programmatic response might be inappropriate or ill timed. Each of these exchanges produced animated conversation about what we were doing and why.

Often, we had to make quick decisions about how to deal with evolving controversies. For example, many different people sent us reports that CNN had recycled footage from the earlier Gulf War to give the impression that Palestinians were celebrating the attacks. We also received a detailed rebuttal of these charges allegedly issued by CNN insisting that the Palestinians were chanting Bin Laden's name and that he had not been a figure in the previous conflict. We were left uncertain which was more likely--that conspiracy theories with little foundation might quickly circulate on the Internet or that a major news organization might lie about its own production processes in order to manufacture consent. All of this gave us a greater appreciation of the decisions practicing journalists made as they generated the news coverage our site was critiquing.

As we read earlier attempts to theorize catastrophe, some rang remarkably hollow, preoccupied as they were with describing and critiquing discursive practices that they lost sight of the human costs. In other cases, theory proved enormously comforting, much as my colleagues in the arts and humanities took comfort in poetry or music.

Some of the most interesting discussions centered on the design of the site itself. Candis Callison, a second-year student, was the primary designer. She has written this description of her process:

Quite honestly, my original instinct . . . was to stay away from images entirely, fearing their power to repel, and mesmerize. But after receiving an e-mail from one of my classmates requesting the use of photos, I realized I was probably alone and quite likely misguided. Against my own desires, I plunged into the photo archives of Time, CNN, and others. This was a task I dreaded. The devastating impact of watching these acts of terror live on television or on video is one thing. Seeing these acts suspended through the lens of a still camera is another. Still photography often provides more detail, and more time for the enormity of the recorded events to sink in and stay awhile. I chose photos representative of what I had seen most often on television, thinking rightly or wrongly that if people had to see these photos, they might as well see those they most associated with September 11. From these photos, I created the first iteration of a collage for the front page of our Web site. I purposely blurred them and removed the color, trying somehow to dim the impact of the horror they represent. The response from our CMS team was overwhelmingly against this collage. Why? In a nutshell: too stark, too shocking, and not the right tone. What we were going for was reflection, compassion, and something different than what was available anywhere else. . . . I skimmed through images shot by my fellow classmates of MIT's Killian Court memorial gathering, the dedication of MIT's Reflecting Wall, and other gathering areas within MIT. What I found were compelling images of grief, compassion, and gestures that grasp at that understanding and hope in humanity we all so desperately desire.

We preserved both collages on the site to provoke discussions about the ethical implications of digital design.

By Monday morning, the site, http://web.mit.edu/cms/reconstructions, had launched with more than one hundred essays, including summaries of media coverage in some twenty countries or regions. Many of the students and some of the faculty found they were unable to complete projects they had started, but the efforts had drawn the community together, and the process of producing the site had enormous educational payoffs for everyone involved. Our introduction offered this rationale:

As millions of people around the world sit glued to their television sets, even as we write, we feel it is important to encourage critical analysis of the words, images, and stories which fill the media--as well as the ones we are not hearing or seeing. We hope this site will be used to help inform discussions in schools, places of worship, union halls, civic gatherings, and homes as people struggle to make sense of what is happening and to sort through their competing emotions about these events. We are not offering answers here so much as encouraging people to ask hard questions before they rush to judgment and action. We do not present these essays as the work of experts--although in some cases we have included pieces from important commentators, past and present. Most of us are still learning how to think critically and theoretically about the media ourselves. All of us are too torn apart by these events to have any certainty about the adequacy of our words and our knowledge to respond to such a situation. But we want to share what we know and what we think and what we feel. We want to see if these ideas might be useful in helping someone else begin a similar process of exploration and examination.

The MIT home page saluted our efforts, remodeling its logo to reflect elements from Callison's design. Within two days, word of the site had spread outward to major mailing lists for educators in the United States and elsewhere and Yahoo had chosen re:constructions as its site of the day. We continue to receive regular mail from teachers using the site.

Scholars and students elsewhere responded to the site's provocation to "let's think this through together" and contributed their own essays. One of the most compelling responses was a thesis project produced by a Massachusetts College of Art master's student, Kate Brigham, who developed a digital tool that allowed users to redesign the screens from a television newscast, the front page of a newspaper, and the layout of a news-magazine story on the events, enabling students to explore the ideological consequences of the different graphic choices that the news media had made.

Re:constructions has been referenced again and again across a range of classes and research activities. We put our ideals to a test and proved to ourselves that it was possible, at least for short bursts of time, to move theory out of the academy and into a larger public dialogue.

This article was written in 2003 and appeared in a 2004 issue of Cinema Journalfocused on academic responses to 9/11. We still receive a limited number of requests to reproduce some of the essays written during this intense period of activity. I am posting it here today so that we will never forget -- not only what happened on 9/11 but the many different ways we, as a society, could have processed and reacted to these events.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eleven, Part Two): Nancy Baym and Aswin Punathambekar

Articulating Attachment NB: I think people are often better able to articulate what stories mean to them in terms of the text itself: which characters they identify with (or don't), what they think about plot turns, etc. With music, it's very hard to find words to explain one's connection outside of the role songs played in that moment of one's autobiography. I have loved music more than stories most of my life but I can explain narrative conventions with some degree of competence and can't even begin to describe things like the common rhythmic or chord structures in the music that moves me.

AP: This is an interesting point, and I would readily admit that if someone were to ask me why I enjoy A. R. Rahman's music or why a certain playback singer's voice moves me, I would have nothing much to say. And as I quickly realized when I began speaking with fans of A. R. Rahman, this question doesn't move the conversation much. What would get me and other Rahman fans talking is this: tell me about your conversations and experiences interacting with other Rahman fans online. Attachment, in other words, was defined in terms of belonging in a community.

It is very important to recognize that this relates to taste hierarchies and the ambivalent status of film music in Indian public culture. The question of high culture vs. low culture fandom that Jonathan Gray and Roberta Pearson brought up is very relevant here. Given that music directors and playback singers are often trained in classical music and the fact that film songs draw on classical music, fan discussions do revolve around this. In the Rahman fan community, there are fans who are well-versed in the technical (or "formal"?) dimensions of music and go to great lengths to explain them to other fans. Needless to say, this expertise becomes a form of value and these fans quickly become leaders within the community.

In fact, film music's middlebrow status allows elite youth to claim a fan identity and belong in a fan community partly because it is not associated with lower class, lower caste, and "political" fan communities that form around film stars in south India.

NB: That's interesting, I don't see much of this in the music fandoms I spend time in. In fact, I think it's pretty unusual to see any fans talking about the formal elements that make songs sound as they do. When I read Daniel Levitin's (author of This Is Your Brain on Music) claim that the appeal of pop music is in the timbre, I had no idea what "timbre" meant, and I'd bet that most pop music fans don't. Musicians can have those conversations, but fans that aren't musicians rarely can, and I think this is very different from narrative where fans can not just articulate narrative conventions, but are often using them to write their own fan fictions. There is no music fandom equivalent of fan fiction except fan fiction about musicians, but that's a total form shift.

But I think it makes perfect sense to extend a fandom approach to "high" culture, and to look at how 'high culture' sorts of discussion permeate 'low culture' fandoms. On my blog, for instance, I've written about wine fandom and how that doesn't normally get considered "fandom" but that people who are into wine act just like people who are into a TV show or movie -- they hold gatherings, they read supplementary materials, they go on pilgrimages to wineries, they wear winery t-shirts and baseball caps, they try to connect with others who are into the same things (there are now at least 3 online wine-based social networking sites). I knew so many people who made pilgrimages to see Wagner's Ring Trilogy performed in its entirety on consecutive nights by the Chicago Opera.

Communities of Sound

NB: Another way in which the text at stake raises very different questions with music is how the social relationships formed around music differ from those formed around narratives. I love your point above that attachment is "defined in terms of belonging in a community." Music has ties to location in ways stories don't -- as you know! Where narratives have the fan conventions that bring the hardcores together, music has live performance that is integral to its very being and gets everyone from the hardcores to the curious together in place. This is again a huge contrast to, say, the fan con which is only going to get the hardcores together in space. How does music's connection to place affect the fandom that forms around it?

AP: I'm really glad you raised the issue of place.

As I said earlier, fandom has been considered an important element of film culture primarily because film stars in south India have been successful at mobilizing fans along linguistic and regional lines.

Given that the Rahman fan community is first and foremost a community realized online, and that fans bring diverse stakes and affiliations to bear on their participation, mobilization along axes of caste or language is, at a basic level, rendered structurally impossible. For example, fans based in Malaysia, for whom participation in the Rahman fan community is part of a larger process of claiming a Tamil ethnic identity, share little in common with second-generation Indian-Americans for whom dancing to a remixed Rahman song at a club speaks to a very different set of concerns. Focusing our attention on the realm of film music thus allows us to challenge the romanticization of fan culture as subaltern politics. The realm of film music fandom forces us to acknowledge other ways of being a fan and modes of belonging in fan communities.

Of course, this does pose problems. For instance, members of the Rahman fan community appear unconcerned with questions of class and caste that have been central to fan-based political mobilizations. In the very first interview I conducted, the moderator of the group made it clear that the Rahman fan community shared nothing in common with "rowdy" fan associations and went on to remark: "we're online, not on the streets!"

NB: I think one has to really stretch the definition of "politics" to argue it's an important component of the fandoms in which I spend time, but place is core. One of the topics I've been intrigued by is the role of online fans and fan communities in taking music out of place. For instance, in the Swedish indie music scene, outside of MySpace (and arguably there to an extent) the work of exporting this cultural product is being taken on by (often unpaid) fans in America, England, France, and other countries. Songs that would never be heard outside of Sweden, and might not even get heard in Sweden, are getting international audiences through mp3 blogs and online webzines devoted to that (and the broader Scandinavian) scene. Online fandom is spreading music well beyond its locations of origin on an unprecedented scale, but their place-based nature remains an important component. In terms of the individualizing function of music fandom, being able to identify with a foreign music scene is great - I could frame myself as a big fan of local music (and I've done so at other points in life), but being a Kansan who strongly self-identifies as a Swedish indie fan has a lot more potential to start conversations and allows me a lot more potential to turn local friends on to bands they'd otherwise never hear. And on the other side of that, having an online community of people who are into bands as obscure as these are in America allows me to continuously find new music and to get in-depth expertise on the bands I fall in love with. Many fans in this particular fandom are far more likely to check out a new band if they are Swedish than not, regardless of where they live themselves.

Relationship Building

AP: Relationship building is definitely an interesting issue. Fans of A. R. Rahman have positioned themselves very clearly as a grassroots marketing team. Some of them have business degrees and work as consultants, a large number work in the IT industry, and they've taken it upon themselves to figure out new ways of distributing Rahman's music, tackling digital piracy and p2p sharing, and so on. Rahman, for his part, has acknowledged these fans' efforts and has begun collaborating with them on a range of projects.

In the Indian mediascape, these new kinds of relationships between fans and producers haven't received much attention. And it would be fair to say that producers are yet to figure out ways to tap into the vast space of participatory culture that has emerged online. Fans are being courted, but only because their serve as information hubs. As I see it, talent competitions on TV are the only site where fans are able to strike up conversations with music directors, playback singers, lyricists, and others in the industry.

NB: I see a lot of norms about sharing in music fan communities, most of which prohibit fan distribution of anything that can be purchased except in the context of mp3 blogs, which often operate with the tacit approval of labels. But as I say, fans are certainly acting as distributors and publicists.

Another element that's interesting here is the huge boom in online sites built to create social relationship amongst music listeners in the name of music discovery. There are new "Music 2.0" sites launching weekly. With music we have sites that are being built from the ground up to track everything people listen to and make personal connections and music recommendations based on that. That ability to track it all and create collective knowledge algorithmically seems to be operating at a whole other level with music. These sites raise so many questions about the roles of shared taste in relationships. Looking at Last.fm, whether or not a person shares musical taste is the core issue in whether or not someone will "friend" someone they don't already know, but how well does that predict whether they'll have anything else to talk about?

Boys and Girls

NB: Meanwhile, aren't we supposed to be representing some sort of gender divide? Or talking about gender?

AP: I should make it clear right away that the stakes here are very different. Given that fandom has been neglected for the most part by academics who have written on media in India, there is, at this point, little concern about who is writing about fandom. Having said that, I would like to point out that paying attention to the domain of music does create an opportunity to talk about gender and participatory culture.

So far, the spotlight has been on fan communities that meet at street corners, at teashops, or outside cinema halls. Participatory culture, then, has been circumscribed as that defined by working-class (often lower caste) male youth in visible, public spaces. Once again, turning our attention to film music presents a way forward. For both commercial and cultural-political reasons, every new medium - radio, state-owned television, satellite television (MTV-India, STAR, etc.) - has drawn on film music and developed innovative programs. These film music-based radio and television programs have had a large fan following, and women's participation in these sites has been very prominent and visible. I would argue that examining these sites of participatory culture is critical for opening up the discussion on gender and fandom surrounding Indian cinema.

NB: Pop music fandom is so blatantly gendered it barely seems worth laying out just how. Short version: girl fans want to sleep with the bands, boys want to be them. (I wrote a longer piece about this here.)

It seems like gender is being taken in a couple of ways in the discussions in this series thus far. First is a question of authority in the academy -- those studying 'female' ways of doing fandom feeling excluded by more 'masculine' scholars. This is something I just don't identify with at all, and I suspect there are several reasons. One is that I align myself with interpersonal and online communication as my primary research foci, and see fandom as an important and neglected context in which to explore them. The study of personal communication and relationships is gendered female to begin with, so perhaps my internet-based approach is considered techie and therefore gendered more masculine than the norm. I do feel some frustration at the failure of fandom research to adequately address the interpersonal relationships I think are at the core of fandom. Perhaps that is inherently gendered since looking at the fan/fan relationship gets us back to the study of personal relationships which, as I said is gendered female. But in terms of academic authority, I've never felt that my focus on fandom or the way I approach fandom has lessened that.

Gender has also been brought into the question of how people engage texts -- to crudely oversimplify the discussion, girls explore nuance and boys create with a more business sensibility? The idea that an interest in the production/economy of fandom is masculine is again something I have trouble identifying with. I see many gender issues in how men and women engage music and with what consequences, but less in how they are conceptualized (though this gets back to the shortage of fandom research in music to begin with -- there's some, just nowhere close to that around TV). Sometimes I wonder if music fandom is itself so very sexist that anything we'd encounter in the academy seems negligible in contrast!

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eleven, Part One): Nancy Baym and Aswin Punathambekar

Who are we? Aswin Punathambekar: I am a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the Dept of Communication Arts (media and cultural studies) and will be joining the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan this fall term. My research and teaching revolve around globalization, culture industries, and public culture in contemporary India and the South Asian diaspora. These interests were shaped very strongly by my own experiences as an immigrant, and my participation in online fan communities began back in 1999 when I arrived in Athens, Georgia for graduate studies. I made the transition from fan to aca-fan in the Comparative Media Studies program and needless to say, was shaped strongly by Henry's work. Over the next few years, I hope to carve out a space for the study of participatory culture within the larger field of scholarship on Bollywood and other domains of south asian media.

Nancy Baym: I'm an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. I started studying fans when I became involved with the newsgroup rec.arts.tv.soaps in the early 1990s, a project that became my dissertation (I graduated from the University of Illinois in 1994) and which finally ended up as the book Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community. At KU, I teach courses about personal relationships, the internet, and qualitative methodologies. So far this decade, most of my published work has centered on the topics of online interactions in personal relationships and qualitative methodological issues in internet research (a book co-edited with Annette Markham on this topics is forthcoming from Sage Publications). Recently, though, I've turned my attention

back to online fandom, with my blog called, oddly enough, Online Fandom

(www.onlinefandom.com) and a just-published article about Swedish independent music fans

(http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_8/baym/index.html). I'm also just finishing up data collection for a study about 'friending' on Last.fm.

AP: I approach fan communities surrounding films and film music as a particularly compelling site for examining relationships among cinema, consumption, and citizenship in contemporary Indian public culture. And the specific group that I've been interested in is one that has cohered around a music director (A. R. Rahman) who composes music for Hindi-language Bollywood films, regional language films (Tamil and Telugu), diasporic films (e.g. Deepa Mehta's trilogy - Fire, Earth, and Water), and international projects like Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bombay Dreams. This is an online fan community, and brings together hundreds of Rahman fans from around the world (www.arrahmanfans.com). While a majority of the participants are of Indian origin, a growing number of non-Indian fans have joined this group over the past few years (although they lurk for the most part).

Given the immense popularity of film stars in India and in a number of countries with large diasporic South Asian populations (Fiji, Guyana, U.S., U.K., Canada, etc.), and the large number of online and offline fan communities that have emerged around these stars, the question that comes up right away is: why do I choose to focus on a music director?

Raising this question leads me to a broader one: What new questions can we raise by shifting the focus away from films/TV shows/stars onto the realm of music?

NB: I like that your focus positions you as a bit of an outsider to what seems to be the dominant domain of contemporary fandom research, American and British television fans. I've done plenty of work about American TV fans in my 1990s analyses of soap opera fans on the internet, but have always come at fandom from the outside in that my interests are first and foremost about how people create the social structures that organize them into personal relationships and communities, and how they use the internet in these processes. So I would place myself within internet studies before fandom, and that brings with it some different assumptions and approaches.

Fandom is a fascinating context to look at these things, though, because fans are always at the leading edge of using the internet in creative ways, and because fandom is a site where interpersonal and mass communication merge, which is often one of the internet's defining qualities. Like you, my attention has turned in recent years to music fandom. I've been working on projects about the role of online fans in the export of Swedish independent music and also the nature of "friendship" in the "social music" site Last.fm. With a few exceptions, fan studies has little to say about music fandom and I'm not convinced it's the same beast (or menagerie) as other fandoms, so yeah, what new questions get raised by looking at music?

The Text

NB: One question is simply (or not) the nature of "the text." I find when I read much of current fandom studies, I have trouble making the connection between what they're talking about as 'text' with many of the phenomena that interest me. I wonder how well you think all that theory that's been built up around people engaging narrative fits music fandom? It's particularly interesting in your case since you are looking at music that is tied to a narrative in film.

AP: For more than a decade now, Indian cinema has served as a key site for academics to re-think and rework our understanding of narrative, spectatorship, and participatory culture. I certainly see my work as contributing to this larger body of work (for a good introduction, take a look at the opening essay by Bhrigupati Singh here [http://www.india-seminar.com/2003/525.htm]). And you're right in pointing out that film music complicates the boundaries and definitions of a "text."

As is well known, songs have been an integral part of commercial films since the early 1930s when sound was introduced. While songs serve a variety of narrative functions within the film, it is critical to recognize that film songs have a well-defined circuit of production, circulation and consumption that is both tied to yet independent of the films themselves.

Film songs are released 3-4 months before a film hits the theatres, and are tied closely to publicity/marketing strategies. Clips of songs serve as teasers on numerous television channels, songs are played endlessly on FM radio, they are available on music websites such as musicindiaonline.com and raaga.com, and they are also circulated as cell phone ringtones. Songs circulate in the public realm long after the film itself does and song compilations (playback singer, music director, time period, actor/actress, etc.) sell exceedingly well. There are a large number of television programs around film music, and over the past decade, talent shows have become immensely popular (,em>Indian Idol, for e.g.).

The commercial value of film music has also meant that music directors and playback singers have occupied a key role in the industry from the very beginning. Film songs, then, are associated with music directors and playback singers just as much as with actors/actresses lip-synching on the screen (Neepa Majumdar uses the term "aural stardom" to argue that we need to think about ways to conceptualize stardom in the absence of glamour and the "invisibility" of playback singers).

All of these elements shape discussions in a site like the Rahman fan community. The "text," to put it simply, is never limited to a specific film or even to A. R. Rahman. Now, it is not enough to merely point out that the film song as a "text" is very different when compared to a film or a television show, or that the music director or playback singer is a different kind of "star." In the context of this discussion, perhaps the more relevant question is: in what ways do fan practices surrounding film music differ from those that cohere around, say, a film star? And for me, this involves challenging the dominant narrative of fan-politics in the Indian context.

Fandom has been considered an important element of film culture primarily because of its explicitly political nature. In south India, male film stars mobilize their fan base to organize electoral campaigns and run for political office. Fan clubs are, quite often, grassroots political organizations (and almost entirely a male space). Online spaces like the Rahman fan community have been ignored for no reason other than their seemingly non-political nature. Focusing on music, then, opens up an opportunity to develop other stories of fan culture (more on this later in the discussion).

NB: I guess one piece of my answer would be that the three minute pop song as "text" challenges many of the notions ingrained in fandom study. What does it mean to fill in the blanks of a text that tells no story to begin with or - in contrast to film scores - has no connections to stories? There are concepts ("neutrosemy" seems to be an important one), that kind of get there, but I'm not sure that treating meaning making as the core fandom process works as well for music fandom as it does for narrative fandom. It seems that music is in many cases a much more direct emotional experience than narrative.

Again, I find myself shifting away from the dominant focus of fan studies - how do fans engage texts as collectives - and toward what I think are much more central issues in music fandom: how do people use music as a means of constructing their own identities and connecting with others? These are not untouched issues in fan studies, but they seem to get marginalized by what I'd consider a more literary/cultural studies approach that foregrounds what they do and don't do in engaging the text itself.

Certainly some music fans concern themselves with lyrics, but for all the years I've been following music as part of various fandoms, I can probably count on one hand the number of discussions about what the words to a song mean that really went anywhere. In most of the fandoms I follow, lyrical discussion never gets past "and the words are clever" or "the lyrics stink, but the hooks are so good you can overlook it" or "I guess their drummer's suicide really influenced these lyrics." These just aren't rich discussion topics. There's much more discussion of extra-textual issues like recording dates and information, discography construction, concert chronology construction, arranging trades or torrents of concert recordings, and so on. Even when you look at a site that is specifically discussing the songs, such as Pop Songs 07 where every REM song is being blogged, the discussion is mostly about the personal experiences people associated with a song rather than what Michael Stipe meant in those words or what key the song is written in. To an extent, that's meaning making, of course, but it's quite different from what I saw with soap fans.

'Oh, Those Russians!': The (Not So) Mysterious Ways of Russian-language Harry Potter Fandom (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first of a two part series from Ksenia Prassolova, who was until just a few weeks ago a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies Program. Prassolova was in this country on a Fullbright fellowship, pursuing research on Harry Potter fan fiction as a literary phenomenon. She has now returned to Immanuel Kant State University of Russia (Kaliningrad). In the first section, she described the context in which Russian-language fandom operates including consideration of issues of intellectual property, translation, and the relationship of fandom to other changes in Russian culture in the post-Cold War era. In this next section, she deals directly with various forms of fan creative expression and the picture she paints shows both strong parallels to western fan culture but also significant differences. For those of you who are just coming to the blog through links on one or another Harry Potter fan site, you might be interested to check out my own thoughts about Harry Potter fan culture from earlier this summer.

"Professor Snape's Dungeons"

Translation was also one of the channels for fan fiction to find its way into Russian Harry Potter fandom: in 2001 fandom was mostly discussing the available four novels and their Russian versions, but by 2002 it already was busy reading at least two competing translations of Cassandra Claire's then work in progress, The Draco Trilogy. 'People's Translation' were among the first sites to open a fan fiction section, which hosted both translated fic and the infamous Harry Potter and Phoenix from the Order - written by the author named Constance Ice, this work is considered to be the first honest-to-Merlin Harry Potter fan fiction written in the Russian language (yet some claim that this title belongs to Harry Potter and the Order of the Broom, a parody fic posted by an anonymous author at Harry Potter Research Institute).

Approximately at the same time, a number of Snape fans joined efforts and started an on-line role playing game, which went on for a number of years at a site called 'Professor Snape's Dungeons'. The game's central character, Severus Snape - a brooding, Byronic hero - was mostly busy saving the world at various points in history and all damsels in distress he could find along the way. In the end, Professor Snape (or S.S., as he is referred to throughout the game) 'rebuilds the Tower of Babylon and finds Light'. This massive on-line project featured not only the text itself, but also some skillful artwork, analytical materials and carefully-collected soundtrack. The project also clearly outgrew itself: in 2003 the game, complete with sounds and fanart, was privately published as a set of 3 multimedia disks, and 2005 marked the appearance of a very impressive velvet-bound volume, Liber Lux et Tenebrae.

The picture below shows the book (part I) in its dust cover, and a random artwork spread; a curious reader will also make out the characters' names, which, for some reason, were left in English.

There are three reasons I am mentioning this project here: firstly, it included most of the fandom's big names of then (and of now); secondly, it set another mark as far as the tradition of publishing fan fiction is concerned; and thirdly, long before the appearance of Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince it established a very specific interpretation of the character of Severus Snape - the one that would gradually become all but canonic for a multitude of Russian Snape fans, even though they might have never heard of 'Professor Snape's Dungeons'.

The Shock of Slash

By 2003 fandom was already flourishing: it thrived on sites and forums; it was writing and translating fan fiction; it had its own version of the infamous Restricted Section; and it had discovered slash. As many other fannish concepts, the concept of slash came as is: through reading and translating of Western fan fiction and analytical materials. The new genre immediately acquired both dedicated followers and avid haters, and while it would be wrong to say that it split fandom in two, it did cause some distress along the way. Some people never caught up, and the general level of intolerance to slash and queer readings of the source text is still higher in Russian-language fandom than in English-language one. Intolerance in fandom comes from intolerance in society: until 1991, homosexuality had been a criminal offence; no wonder many still consider 'queer' offensive, the ban might have been lifted, but little has been done to promote tolerance and understanding. Slash in Russia is not taken for granted and in most cases requires a very open mind set from its readers, but in the end of the day, it does help to change personal attitude to queer people outside fandom, thus performing this huge educational function that might not be central to this genre as it is perceived by English-speaking fans.

It was not only slash that came into Russian-language fandom through translating fan fiction and participating in English-language communities: most of the terms (in/out of character, Mary Sue, hurt/comfort, etc.), popular pairings and pairing names (Pumpkin Pie; Snape/Hermione; Harry/Draco), clichés and ideas were also borrowed almost instantaneously. In October 2003, in the steps of Nimbus 2003, the first-ever Harry Potter fancon, the Institute of European Cultures at the Russian State Humanitarian University organized an unofficial academic Harry Potter event for adults, entitled Harry Potter and the Prisoner of the Philosopher's Chamber. No more than forty people gathered for the conference, most of them were presenters, only three people were presenting on the issues of fandom (the rest were deconstructing canon) and only two were not from Moscow. A very subdued and, at the same time, fascinating event, it still remains the only Harry Potter conference of its kind ever held in Russia. This past spring a number of Snape fans did gather in St. Petersburg to discuss their favorite character and present some few papers on the subject, but the event was not exactly advertised or open.

Russians And Global Fan Culture

While fan fiction and translation are thriving, and even vidding has recently become very popular, fanart is virtually non-existent in the Russian Harry Potter fandom. Those Russian-language artists who create something of interest prefer to participate in English-language communities for want of greater audience and appreciation: they may speak Russian or be physically located in Russia, but in reality they do not belong to this particular national fandom. Fans, on the other hand, troll foreign sites and communities for art they like and therefore do not really have the need for fanart that is produced 'domestically'. Since not everybody can speak English and thus navigate a foreign fanart site, since 'art belongs to people' and 'everything belongs to everybody on the Internet anyways', until very recently it has been a common practice to share your findings with your part of fandom; normally, the sharing would take the form of mass hotlinking, which brought the wrath of several well-known foreign artists on Russian fandom in general.

Russian fans are gradually catching up with essential netiquette, but sometimes still forget to ask when taking a fan fic for translation, for example: the most recent scandal involving translated fan fiction and Russian fans revolved around the 'table of proposed translations' that somebody had fished out off fanrus.com forums. A more detailed account of the run-in can be found here. It is fascinating how quickly Western fandom assumes the position of copyright holders whose rights have been violated and starts issuing C&D disclaimers in Russian against possible offenders. On the other side of the conflict, many of community moderators and site owners who cater to Russian-language fandom try to enforce the ask-first-translate-later and no-hotlinking rules to the best of their ability, and explain as clearly that 'grassroots communism' does not really apply to the way fandom operates on-line. In general, however, Russian fans still exercise more collective ownership towards the texts they are fannish about - be it canon or fan fiction: much as translation is a Pavlovian reaction to any text in foreign language (for a variety of reasons, including the language teaching methods practiced in Russia), taking and sharing with their own is a similar type of reaction to any text or piece of art that we are fascinated with; and in this respect translation is central to Russian fandom as it is the ultimate act of possession and making something one's own, domesticating it.

Potter-Mouthed Jokes

So far, the only popular fannish practice in Russian fandom that falls outside the pattern of translating, role-playing, or borrowing is telling various jokes about characters from canon: a practice that has deep historical roots, since jokes have always been an integral part of people's popular narrative in this country, and there is hardly a historical figure, popular character, or politician who hasn't made it into joke. In fact, it is considered that one has not become truly popular until there are jokes made about them. One of such popular Potter-related jokes takes on the connection between Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter:

"Frodo throws The One Ring into the flames. He exhales deeply and turns to go, as a bespectacled boy on a broomstick sweeps by, clutching something in his fist. 'Got' ya!' shouts Harry Potter with glee."

Another joke explores the complex relationship in the house of Malfoys, raising the theme of infidelity:

"'Narcissa, a couple of words'

'Yes, Lucius?'

'Avada Kedavra!'"

There are countless of other jokes: some original, some of them versions of older jokes with names substituted to fit new canon, some of them popularized sentences from various collections of quotes from badfics. Every fan fiction site nowadays hosts a collection of Potter-related jokes, those jokes are frequently exchanged between fans both on- and off-line constitute a powerful comic relief device: a number of Book Seven jokes are already circulating among the disappointed fans.

Parody is another 'specialty' of the Russian Harry Potter fandom and industry. In fan fiction, 'crack fics' (humorous stories exploring this or that fannish cliché) are a more common occurrence here than there are in the West, and source text parody is not unheard of: by some accounts, it was exactly the parody of the yet unwritten Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that became the first ever fan fiction written in Russian for this fandom. A more curious - and somewhat transcending fandom - case is presented when we look at the Harry Potter parodies that are published professionally in this country. There are several books written in the recent years that position themselves as 'anti-Harry Potter' or 'Harry Potter for Russians', yet there are only two whose authors claim parodies: the Porry Gatter series and Tanya Grotter.

The Strange Case of Tanya Grotter

Although Porry Gatter may not strike just everybody as particularly witty or funny, that it is a parody there can be no doubt; it is Tanya Grotter, first written in 2002 by Dmitry Yemetz and published by EKSMO publishing house that raised serious concerns of J.K. Rowling's representatives both in Russia and abroad. While there are numerous jokes in the text, Tanya Grotter does look more like a re-write, not unlike those by Volkov or Tolstoy: the first two Tanya Grotter books repeat the corresponding volumes of the original Harry Potter series verbatim, only the school of magic is located in Russia and the main character is a Russian girl. ROSMAN publishing house had initiated linguistic expertise of the text, which concluded that Tanya Grotter was a plagiarized version of Harry Potter, yet EKSMO dismissed all allegations, and no domestic legal action taken against them had ever been completed. EKSMO and Yemetz had to stand trial, however, when they made an attempt to translate the book and sell it abroad. The 2003 trial in the Netherlands ruled copyright infringement and banned the book from being sold outside Russia. Later Tanya Grotter books bore little resemblance to the original series, Yemetz continued in this stead for a couple of more years and eventually started a new series about a different character.

The story of Tanya Grotter doesn't end here: During the years this book has acquired a small fandom of its own - in parts, it overlaps with Harry Potter fandom (in a sense that a fan of Tanya Grotter is almost always a fan of Harry Potter as well, and the sites that cater for Harry Potter normally have a section dedicated to Tanya Grotter), in parts, it establishes its own presence, but it does exist and it does produce fantext. This past spring EKSMO publishing house had selected several of Tanya Grotter fan fics for publication and printed them in one bound volume that was released under the general umbrella of Tanya Grotter franchise. Whether or not the authors of fan fics were asked or informed about this is still unclear: when confronted about that during the Q&A session held in one of the stores, EKSMO representatives immediately proceeded to answering the other question. Moreover, the fics were published as is - that is, no editing had been done, out of context, and with no introduction save for small blurb (along the lines of 'fan fiction is fiction written by fans') on the cover. The book was thrashed by critics and not embraced by fans: a failure by all accounts, but a fine and interesting conclusion of a long-established tradition of published fan fiction in Russia.

Postscript

As I am writing this, the Russian Harry Potter fandom is still in uproar. The anticipation had been extremely charged and with the arrival of the final installment, tensions ran even higher. Some hated the new book, some denied its existence to the point of publicly burning their copy (this last movement raised a little wave of both approval and outrage of its own), yet most of us loved it. Many got their books lining up with other fans at midnight in bookstores across the world: I myself had extended my stay in the U.S. until July 22nd and invited my best friend so we could join the party and get the long-awaited copies. There was a feeling of 'being in this together', and in this respect - despite complicated translation games, the history of publishing the 'unpublishable', the 'art belongs to people' that still governs our attitude to all things fannish - we are not much different from all other Harry Potter fans across the world, not really. We would also like to join all other fans across the world and wish both J.K. Rowling and Harry a very happy birthday:

С Днем Рождения, Гарри и тетя Ро! Спасибо за книгу!

***

For more information on the history of Russian-language fandom in general, see fanhistory: it really is a fantastic resource for those who are curious about further details and want to know whether their fandom is represented in Russia. The site is in English.

I also encourage the members of other national fandom to take a look at the new project, fanlinguistics, and contribute to its development.

I would like to thank my speedy betas and everybody who has participated in this somewhat lengthy discussion of the mysterious ways of the Russian Harry Potter fandom. I would also like to thank Henry for this opportunity to talk about my fandom, and for his patience: this article should have seen light long ago.

'Oh, Those Russians!': The (Not So) Mysterious Ways of Russian-language Harry Potter Fandom (Part One)

In honor of J.K. Rowling's birthday, I will begin the week by running a two part series about Harry Potter fandom in Russia, written by Ksenia Prassolova, who was until just a few weeks ago a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies Program. Prassolova was in this country on a Fullbright fellowship, pursuing research on Harry Potter fan fiction as a literary phenomenon. She has now returned to Immanuel Kant State University of Russia (Kaliningrad), where she is completing her doctorate. It is perhaps fitting that the last time I saw Ksenia, we were both waiting in line together at the MIT COOP bookstore around midnight, waiting for the clerks to pass us our eagerly awaited copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. When I got my copy, I wandered off into the night in a daze and forgot to say goodbye. My wife and I took our his and hers copies back to Senior Haus with us and climbed into the hammock we have in our backyard, reading by flashlight as late into the night as we could muster, and then waking up at the first daylight to push on through. Our son was nice enough to bring us meals so we could shut out the entire world and just immerse ourselves into Rowling's world. And I am happy to say that we finished the books before the day was over.

Upon returning to Russia, Ksenia has sent me a long awaited series of blog posts describing what she calls Russian Language Harry Potter fandom. It's a fascinating account of what cultural theorists like to call glocalization -- suggesting that while Harry Potter is read around the world, local conditions of production and reception, including in this case especially issues around copyright and translation, shape how it gets read and in what contexts. Ksenia's first installment takes us through the history of Lord of the Rings fandom in her country which in many ways set the stage for what happened with the Potter books and then discusses the centrality of translation to sustaining and energizing the fan culture. (Of course, it helps that Ksenia's primary research background is in translation studies.) Next time, we will get deeper into fan fiction and other forms of fan cultural production in Russia.

'Oh, Those Russians!': The (Not So) Mysterious Ways of Russian-language Harry Potter Fandom

by Ksenia Prassolova

The first thing that should be said about Russian fandom is that it exists. It may come as a surprising and as a somewhat baffling statement, but not many people within English-language fandom realize that fandom is an international phenomenon, and even those who do understand the international part would still cling to the "exotic" image of Russia that doesn't really go together with something as native to the Western grassroots culture as fandom. Truth is, however, that ever since the Iron Curtain fell Russia has been doing its damnedest to catch up with the West: legally, politically, and culturally; new values were both imposed from the top and picked up eagerly by the young people who didn't exactly want to associate themselves with the Soviet past and had no romantic recollections of it.

Because both the concept of fandom and its practices were borrowed as is, what we now know as 'Russian fandom' is not, on a general level, that different from its American counterpart. Demographically, we share the same patterns: people of both sexes and of all ages discuss canon, those who are involved in writing fan fiction are mostly female (according to anecdotal accounts), and those who write slash are almost exclusively female. Most discussions and creative work used to concentrate on several sites and forums, but with mass migration to blogs Russians moved to livejournal.com and diary.ru (a Russian blogging facility). In fact, in Russia we rarely even call our fandom 'Russian', we call it 'Russian-language', because this implies that fandom is a universal concept that merely varies to a larger or lesser degree from one national 'incarnation' to another. Harry Potter fan fiction posted on hogwartsnet.ru is very similar to that posted on fanfiction.net - genres, clichés, slash and all; fanart is scarce, but fanvids created by Russians are pretty similar those created in the West; we do have ship wars just like everybody else and just like everybody else we were eager to find out whether Snape was good or evil.

I would be very far from truthful, though, if I said that there were absolutely no differences between the way fandom works in Russia and the way it works in the English-language community, borrowed concept or no. The differences are firmly in place and are due to a combination of historic, linguistic and cultural factors. In this post I will try to concentrate on the most notable of them. I will be mostly talking about the Harry Potter fandom, since this is the one I have first-hand knowledge of, yet one has to start somewhere, and in 'our' beginning there was Tolkien. The beginning, however, didn't happen until 1975.

Tolkien Apocrypha

Fandom-wise, Lord of the Rings was for Russians what Star Trek was for Americans. It also happened much later, and the gap between the emergence of canon and appearance of consolidated fannish activity around this canon was much wider in case of Lord of the Rings in Russia. This canon that started them all entered the Soviet scene gradually and in a most fascinating way. The first Russian translation of Lord of the Ringswas started in 1975 by A. Gruzberg, a linguist from Perm, and appeared in 1978; the entire trilogy was written by hand and was only available to friends and acquaintances of the translator. Later on it was transported to Leningrad, where it was published in Samizdat in 1981 (source). The first attempt at official translation followed shortly - in 1982 - and was comprised of two books, The Hobbit and The Fellowship, translated by by V. Muravjev and A.Kistjakovsky. This translation was abandoned, and the official Russian version of the trilogy was only published as late as 1990. By the time it happened the trilogy had already acquired a fair number of followers (those responsible for the non-official translations, for one) who would engage in a variety of fannish activities: from song and poetry writing to live action role playing games, which became extremely popular among the fans. In fact, the Hobbit Games of the beginning 1990-s were so well known that 'being fannish' is still associated with role-playing and Lord of the Rings in certain circles of fandom.

There are many reasons for Lord of the Rings to have become popular when it did in the Soviet Union and - later - the new Russian Federation. It was the only source of its kind available to Russians at that time: while the Soviet readers had enjoyed the long and rich tradition of science-fiction and gathered around what was known as KLFs (Clubs of Science-Fiction Readers), the genre of fantasy was relatively new. With it came new feelings and new attitude to the source text: I am not saying that the possibility of escapism was the only reason Tolkien's work became popular with Russian readers, but the bread lines of the late 80-s and early 90-s definitely were part of the equation. Apart from role-playing games, the fans of Tolkien would write verses and songs, learn Elven languages, and write what they called 'apocrypha': fan fiction that fell under the category of alternative history or alternative universe. By that time fan fiction had already been widely known abroad, and Western fandom started the colonization of the Internet, but international cross-fandom communication was scarce, and the name for this practice was re-invented rather than borrowed. The term 'fan fiction' has later been re-introduced into the Russian fandom, and there is now a lot of confusion as to whether 'apocrypha' are, in fact, fan fiction or fall into some specific category of fan writing. The debate continues, and no definite conclusion has been reached.

"Art Belongs to People"

An even more interesting question arises when we examine how those apocrypha/fan fiction works were distributed or, really, published before the Internet came along. Again, let us consider the history: the oft-cited quote of Vladimir Lenin's, "Art Belongs to People" pretty much determined the attitude to common cultural property in the Soviet Union. Communism in general (in its part where private property was dismissed) and that 'art belongs to people' motto in particular, became a convenient excuse for translating and/or re-writing ideologically safe yet culturally important content from the West. Two most notable examples of re-writing original content under the new name were Volkov's Wizard of the Emerald City trilogy, based on the Wizard of Oz, and Alexei Tolstoy's Buratino, based on Pinocchio (both published in 1936).

The interesting thing about the two was that although original creators were credited in the books and the tales were more translations than re-writes, their covers still bore those Russian authors' names. Many Russian kids, me included, first learned that there had been some Western original only long after reading the stories themselves, or never learned at all. In other, not as dire, cases the translators would get if not all, but at least as much credit as original creators. Thus, with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Russians would distinguish between 'Zakhoder's Alice', 'Nabokov's Anya' and 'Carroll's Alice in Wonderland', the latter being a common referral to a bunch of academic translations.

This mindset, in which culture was considered a common good for everybody to benefit from, held fast and strong even after the Soviet Union joined the Universal Copyright Convention 1793. Moreover, the 70-s and the 80-s brought the flourishing of 'Samizdat' - a non-official publishing and distribution network reserved for rare and censored literary and research content. Samizdat took many forms, from almost professional copying and binding to photographing pages and distributing the resulting pictures. Although Samizdat was a full-bodied publishing and distribution network for the underground, it was mostly used to deal with 'serious', 'original' content. Thus, while fans were able to write and share stories between themselves, they were - for the most part - unable to turn their individual networks into fanzine production because they simply didn't have the access to the necessary equipment. When the 90-s came, and suddenly the market was flooded with start-ups looking for profit, it was only logical that some fans sought to bring fan fiction to the printing press. Profit was, of course, as much of a consideration for those fans as the lack of an adequate fannish distribution network. By that time, the laws had been changed (and the new legislation had been adopted - almost verbatim - from the West), yet the values stayed, so the new publishing houses didn't think twice when presented with an opportunity to publish work based on popular sources.

The first fan fiction published in post-Soviet Russia was a collection of Sherlock Holmes inspired stories from the Novossibirsk society of Conan Doyle fans. This precedent, the lack of fannish distribution network, and a certain disregard for the new law lead to the appearance of a far more curious publication: Nick Perumov's Ring of Darkness - a novel-length fan fic set in the Lord of the Rings universe. Here is what Nick himself has to say on the process of publication:

"On October 16, 1991 , the contract on my book was signed with "Kavkazskaya biblioteka" publishing house. Royalties for my book amounted to a huge for that time sum of 75000 rubles, calculated according to the norms of Writers' Union . Many times I was asked one and the same question, how it could be possible for an unknown writer to be published without any connexions in the publishing house; be published in the period of total collapse and food cards. Now, ten years later I can't give the proper answer. I guess that such a phantastic affairs was possible due to the chaos and disturbance of early 1990s. Another favourable moment was in 1996, it was the First boom of the Russian fantastics. Anyways, "The Ring of Darkness" then caled "Pescending of Darkness" was published in "Kavkazskaya biblioteka". How it could have happend is another pair of shoes. " ( source)

It is interesting that while the content of Perumov's published fan fic is still a subject of fierce debate among Tolkien fans and followers, the legality of the publication is rarely questioned, and, to the best of my knowledge, there has been no legal action against Mr. Perumov or his publishing house(s); moreover, his Tolkien-based novels are still popular and are re-printed on a regular basis. The initial 1993 publication set another precedent, and other Lord of the Rings fan fiction shortly followed after The Ring of Darkness, most notable of them, of course, is Black Book of Arda - a Silmarillion-inspired alternative universe that tells the story of Arda from the point of view of its Evil.

As of the end of 1990-s Russian fans migrated to the Internet en masse. Shortly after that we finally caught up with Harry Potter, and then it was about translation all over again.

Potter Comes to Russia

First published in Britain in 1997, Harry Potter only appeared in Russian in 2000: Maria Spivak founded the 'Harry Potter Research Institute' (formerly located at www.harrypotter.ru) and posted the Russian translations of books one and two; Pauline started the 'People's Translation Project' and her team came up with their version of book one; and, finally, ROSMAN publishing house hired Igor Oransky to create the official version of the first book in Russian. Of all three translations, it was the official that was the sloppiest in its quality and latest in its arrival: by the time it was published fandom had already finished reading Spivak's rendition of Chamber of Secrets. Thus, two things happened in 2000: ROSMAN had lost the moment forever, and translation games began.

ROSMAN could not account for the relative unpopularity of Harry Potter in Russia (compared to the Potter-craze that took over the world, the success of this book in our country was modest at best) and kept changing translators: Oransky was dismissed after book one, and Marina Litvinova, a well-known Shakespearian scholar and a professional translator herself, was hired to work on books two through four. Of the three volumes she had translated, only The Prisoner of Azkaban did not receive annual mock award for the worst translation (Chamber of Secrets) or the worst editing job (Goblet of Fire). After it became known that Litvinova had not translated book four, but instead turned it into a seminar for her students (effectively letting her students translate it for her), a scandal broke out and ROSMAN was forced to change translators yet again. This time, Viktor Golyshev, Vladimir Bobkov, Leonid Motylev - all famous for their work as translators of sci-fi classics - were asked to do the job. They did a fine enough rendition of book five, but didn't linger for book six: to translate Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince, ROSMAN invited Sergey Ilyin, who was best known for his fantastic work with Nabokov's texts and Maya Lakhuti - a very talented translator of children's literature. Again, this team did a good job and a decent translation, but by that time it had already been six books too late.

The People's Translation Project

In the meantime, fandom was eagerly looking for flaws in official versions and engaging in translation projects of their own. Inspired by Maria Spivak, the 'People's Translation Project', high regard for translators in our country and the nagging 'I can do that, too' feeling, fans started to create both individual (Fleur, Yuri Machkasov) and collective (Snitch, The Phoenix Team, Harry-Hermione.net, HP Christmas Forum) translation projects, and by the time Half-blood Prince was released in Russia in December 2005, there had already been nine (sic!) independent translations on the Web, some of them completed not a week after the July 16 release of the English version. When the final Harry Potter book leaked five days before the official release, a new translation project made it their goal to have the initial job done by July 21.They succeded, which sets a curious record: an amateur translation appears before official translators' names are announced. This is a new project, too, the one that has not been working on any of the previous Potter installments. We already know of at least four projects that are continuing their work, and of two projects that have just started with book seven, and it is safe to assume there will be more of them. Understandably, amateur translation is a widely discussed phenomenon, and two main questions arise in all discussions: that of legality and that of quality.

Under the provisions of article 19 (p.2) of Federal Copyright Law, translation is 'fair use' as long as it is done for educational purposes and the length - or amount - of the translation suits the immediate educational need. That is, I can use Harry Potter in classroom during my 'Theory and Practice of Translation' class, but I am not supposed to have my students translate the entire series. One can, however, justify translating the entire book for the purpose of self-education: in fact, I know of at least three individuals who did translate books five and six to learn English better, and succeeded. While you can, arguably, translate books one through seven and get away with it, you can not share the result of your work. As of 2003, representatives of J.K.Rowling have been sending out C&D letters to various translation-related sites, which always resulted in the removal of translations from public view. At this point, however, sending C&D letters is like trying to stop an avalanche: the amateur translation projects multiply against all odds. For a number of reasons (the poor quality of the official translation; its late arrival; the translation tradition in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia; a growing number of Russians with a fair command of foreign languages; etc.), translation has become one of the games fandom plays: it is now as integral part of what we do as fans as fan fiction, fan art, filking or creating fanvids. In fact, once the name of the project, 'people's translation' is now a name of the practice that spread across fandoms: it applies to any fan translation project, in which not one, but several individuals are doing a fast collaborative translation and editing work. Normally, there would be 10 to 20 people working on a translation, the same people would then beta-read and edit each other's work, then a draft version would be compiled, which goes to the final editing and proof-reading performed by one or two individuals - usually those who are in charge of the project. It is their job to ensure smooth communication on the forum, to find substitutes if one or more of the translators have dropped out, and to mediate conflicts; and whether the team produces quality results depends on the leader.

People engage in amateur translation for various reasons: some want to improve their English, some want to improve the overall quality of the Russian Potterverse, some find that translation is a good way to participate in fandom. Whatever the reason, the issue of the quality of the result is quite important. The thing that is important to understand here is that not all amateur translation is done by amateurs. Many of the fan translators I know are also professional translators in their non-fannish lives, so they, at least, know what they are doing. As shown by Oransky and Litvinova, it is not always that a professional translator will produce good results: one also needs dedication and fascination with the source, and fans do tend to have those aplenty, so when it does come down to amateurs doing the job, their lack of skill or knowledge is often compensated by extensive teamwork, networking and overflowing enthusiasm. The results vary from 'extremely unreadable' or 'unfinished' to 'way better than the official', and each non-English-reading fan often finds themselves supporting this or that amateur translation. The choice has to be made, for instance, when writing fan fiction - because names are translated differently - or when just discussing the source text: it is considered traditional in our fandom to stick with one or the other translation and defend it against the opponents when the time comes. Nowadays there is a growing number of people who prefer reading the original and are able to do that, but some of them, too, fall into temptation and either side with one project or start their own.

Most of those translation projects exist online and do not overstep the boundaries of fandom. To date, there are only two exceptions from this general rule: a translation of Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince, made by the Snitch project, which was stolen from the translators, printed in Latvia and sold in Belarus a couple of months before the official Russian release; and a fan-made Russian version of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, printed, bound and distributed in Israel. The appearance of the latter is especially curious if one takes into account the fact that neither of Rowling's Comic Relief books has been translated officially: the only two existing versions available to Russian-language readers come from the People's Translation project and that unknown Israeli source. The pictures below show the comparison of the spread and cover of the fake (top) and real (bottom) editions of Half-blood Prince.

On Cities and Comics: Report from Berlin

I am writing these notes at the end of a three day conference in Berlin centering on the relationship between comics and the city. I am not certain that I can do justice to what has been a diverse and yet programmatic conference, one thatlooked closely at the place of the urban imagination in comics from Japan, the United States, and Europe. For one thing, I have spent a good chunk of time the past few days in a kind of narcoleptic stupor - a consequence of fatigue from the end of the term, jet lag, and sweltering heat. (I suspect that the temperatures in Germany might have been one of the factors that convinced George W. Bush about the realities of global warming while he was here for the G8 summit). The only thing keeping me from simply melting into the floorboards has been a steady flow of iced Chai from the Starbucks around the corner. So, what follows will be a lose set of impressions rather than anything resembling live blogging or detailed notes.

The first thing I will note is the high level of sophistication about comics and comic culture running throughout the event - not simply the speakers who are some of the leading German (and American) thinkers about the medium but also the audience, which was full of bright and articulate young men and women who have developed a knack for thinking and talking about comics in all of their many manifestations. My friend, Greg Smith from Georgia State University, referenced the eagerness many of us have to find a comics homeland - a place where traditions are known and respected and innovative work is taken seriously. Might this be Brussells with its comics museums and festivals or Tokyo with its six story tall comic shops or San Diego, host of the Comicon to end all Comicons, or even the fictional Hicksville (where the library has all of those comics imagined and never actually produced by the grand masters of the medium)? Berlin might also be a worthy candidate if the conversations here were any indication.

At the same time, those of us who were here from the United States and speaking about American comics felt a kind of cultural divide. While it was clear this audience was passionate about various European comics traditions, especially Francophone comics, and about Manga, few of them knew much or cared much about the American comics tradition. Of course, the opposite is also true: I made a conscious decision some time ago that I could know American comics inside and out or I could try to sample comics from around the world. It's really been only in the past year or so that I have started to explore a broader range of national tradition, hence the writing I've shared here about Polish or Mexican comics. For me, a pleasure of the conference was learning more about writers like Tardi, Enki Bilal, or Marc-Antoine Mathieu, or to get an introduction to recent developments in Belgian comics by one of the country's leading comics scholars.

The conference made a very strong case for the centrality of the urban imagination to comics, across national traditions, and the centrality of comics as a medium for understanding how we have made sense of the experience of cities in the 20th and 21st century. The conference organizers Jorn Ahrens and Arno Meteling, lay out the basic claims in their prospectus for the conference:

There is undoubtedly a link between the medium comics and the big city as a modern living space. This emphasizes the need to investigate on the one hand a) how specifically urban topoi, self-portrayals, forms of cultural memorizing and variant readings of the city (strolling, advertising, architecture, detective stories, mass phenomena, street life) are being incorporated in comics, and on the other hand b) if comics have special competences for capturing urban space and city life and representing it aesthetically because of their hybrid nature consisting of words, pictures and sequences. Does the spatial inertia of the sequences in contrast to film, video or television result in a retardation in order to ease the saturation that has been attributed to the big city since 1900 (Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin)? This theory is backed up by numerous contemporary comic books and by the fact that the screen adaptations of comic books are limited to urban scenarios. Moreover, the history and the origins of comics support this theory.

From an historical point of view and against the backdrop of the modern age, comics are inseparably tied to the city: the history of comics begins - not taking into consideration the long history of combining pictures and words since the Ancient World and the tradition of illustration, caricature and picture stories in the 18th and 19th century - with the emergence of comic strips in American newspapers around 1900....

Parallel to expanding the comic strips successively to whole pages the space reserved for the city becomes bigger. Winsor McCay for instance uses the whole page as basis for his comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland (1906-1914) in order to create fantastic worlds and real cities. Eventually, comics outgrow the newspaper world: when the new format of the comic book is established as an independent publication, new characters fill the cities with life. Will Eisner's Spirit, which started out as a comic strip in newspapers, lives in a nameless city, Superman inhabits the futuristic Metropolis (1938), and Batman fights crime first in Manhattan/New York (1939) and from 1941 on in Gotham City. Thus, various distinctive comic book series at the end of the 1930s explore the city and its function as living space and origin of modern myths. In particular, the characters of the superhero comics (Superman, Batman) and the detective comics (The Spirit, Dick Tracy) delve deeper into the aesthetic, atmospheric and scenaristic possibilities of the city. From then on, the city acts even more as the foremost setting for comics of all genres and stylistic variants. The city becomes an important plot element, even an atmospheric and symbolic protagonist, and suddenly the focus of attention in a whole lot of genres.

From this point of view, comics have a certain self-reflexivity, whenever they act as a genuine medium of the urban modern age and adopt the cultural prerequisites of this modern age in the big city. This self-reflexive nature of the medium in terms of its history, mediality, cultural environment and origin can be found particularly in comics that treat, narrate and continue symbolic manifestations of the urban modern age. By now, every modern metropolis in the world has been made the subject of comics: Berlin, Paris, London, Tokyo, and time and again New York. At the same time, many fictional cities from comics have found their way into the global cultural memory: Superman's Metropolis, Batman's Gotham City, the New York of Spider-Man, the Avengers and the Fantastic Four as devised by Marvel, Tokyo and the post-nuclear Neo-Tokyo of manga or the Duckburg of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

The authors and artists of the influential science-fiction comics from France and Belgium as well have incorporated urban space time and again into their narratives (Caza, Moebius, Bilal, Druillet, Adamov, Mézières). In doing so, they referred to patterns from other media and the whole repository of cultural history and iconography, which is occasionally exceeded and expanded: for instance, completely new narrative techniques are applied in Moebius' Le garage hermétique, or architectural universes are developed, e.g. by Moebius, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, François Schuiten/Benoît Peeters (Les citées obscures), also by Warren Ellis/Darick Robertson (Transmetropolitan), Dean Motter/Michael Lark (Mr. X, Terminal City, Electropolis), Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira, Domo), and Enki Bilal (Nikopol), which exert their influence not only on cinematic settings (Blade Runner, Batman, Batman Returns, The Fifth Element, The Matrix), but also on postmodern architectural designs. The city as setting is also important because it acts as historical, significantly dense background (Tardi, Moore, Miller, Ware). In particular, the Franco-Belgian École Marcinelle, which is not limited to realistic series, has opened up the urban space for the so-called semifunnies (Franquin, Tillieux). Therefore, the subject of urbanity should obviously be explored in terms of connecting narrative strategies and visuality (horizontality, verticality, panoramic view), and certain urban qualities should be used in order to start an agenda for comics studies.</blockqoute>

This rationale statement offers a pretty good summary of the interconnections that emerged between the various papers presented at this event.

Jorn and Arno played an incredibly constructive role in planning this conference, asking the speakers to address urban themes through the lens of specific artists, while leaving each of us free to bring our own methodological and theoretical perspectives to the table. As a result, the conference covered a broad range of figures, including Will Eisner, Dean Motter, Alan Moore, and Outcault, as well as the European masters referenced earlier. This push towards a focus on specific artists, rather than broad theoretical claims, resulted in papers which combined close formal and thematic analysis of specific comics with broader conceptual frameworks about comics as a medium and about the various ways by which we understand and represent the experience of living within cities. And the conference was organized to offer contrasting perspectives on a range of different cities - including a rich paper on the ways the the Duckburg of Carl Bark's Donald Duck comics was translated into the very German Entenhausen for the German editions of his books and extending across imaginary cities like Gotham City and Terminal City as well as the very real New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, and Brussels. Surprisingly, there was no focus here on Berlin, the city which engulfed us, even as we were speaking.

The papers offered some glimpse of the ways that comics intercepted a range of other media forms, including discussions of comics in relation to architecture, painting, sculpture, theater, video games, the web, cinema, and literary storytelling. And the city was approached as a site of self-performance, as the focus of moral panic and social anxiety, as embodying our hopes for a more utopian future, as the site of estrangement and alienation, as a symbolic and mythic landscape whose monuments help to embody the lessons of the past, as a constantly changing and disorienting landscape, as part of a new globalized culture, as the space by which modern bureaucracies seek to rationalize human experience, and so much more.

From a formal perspective, we learned about the complexities of framing and gestures in the comics of Will Eisner (which Greg Smith traces back to both 19th century melodrama and vaudeville), about the complex roles which text plays in Outcault's early 20th century comics, about the mirroring structure of images in Alan Moore, about the bold play of color and narrational perspective in Bilal's Nikopol trilogy, and about the experiments in self-reflexivity which run through Mathieu's works.

Throughout, we saw how particular architectural features of urban environment leant themselves again and again to the borders and panels that help organize the space of the comics page, suggesting that the fit between comics and the city have as much to do with aesthetic as ideological reasons.

The issue of memory was another recurring theme that cut across the papers - from Scott Bukkatman's rift on the role that autobiographical perspectives have played in comics criticism through my own focus on the relationship of retrofuturism to the ways that the web has shifted our relationship to residual traces of older media forms and cultural practices, from the ways that Moore's work connects to the history of "memory palaces" to the ways that comics move back and forth across major transitional points in the culture, helping both French and Japanese readers understand the events of the Second World War as a lasting influence upon their culture.

The conference organizers are pushing to find a publisher for an anthology based on the conference. Normally, I am not convinced that most conferences cohere easily into a book but because of the strong editorial role which Aherns and Meteling brought to the organization of this event, I am convinced that this material would easily cohere into what could be a very important anthology on this topic.

I promised some of the European comics scholars that I met at the conference that I would help spread the word about what looks to be a fascinating new journal, Signs (Studies in Graphic Narratives), which centers primarily on the history of early comics and sequential art, from an international perspective. The first issue cuts across a range of national traditions, including a full color reproduction of an 18th century set of comic prints from Florence, a discussion of the prehistory of Manga in Japan (by Jacqueline Berndt), a consideration of Ally Sloper as a comic type by Roger Sabin, and some consideration of Imagerie Artistique, a series of prints produced for children in 19th Century France. I have not yet had a chance to do much more than skim through the articles but I see each as a valuable contribution to the growing body of research on the early history of graphic storytelling. The journal is lushly illustrated, reproducing scores of rare and hard to find images. As the issue's introduction explains, these articles each seem to offer "new pieces for the completion of the dispersed sort of puzzle that constitutes comics history." The editors are looking for possible contributors to their forthcoming issues as well as hoping that some American libraries will subscribe to the journal and make it available to their patrons. Interested parties can contact them at info@graphic-narratives.org.

From here, I am moving onto Helsinki to talk about media convergence and to Gothenburg, Sweden to speak about educational games at a conference which will also be attended by T.L. Taylor, James Paul Gee, and Helen Kennedy, among many others.

I will try to post at least a sample of my paper on Dean Motter and retrofuturism sometime early next week. So far, it exists only as a power point presentation and lives in my head. I hope to use the blog to nudge me into putting more of it down in writing.

What Makes Japan So Cool?: An Interview with Ian Condry

From time to time, I have shared with my readers some of the podcasts being generated by the Cool Japan Project, a joint research effort at MIT and Harvard, focused on understanding more fully Japanese popular culture -- especially anime and manga but also the culture around popular music and toys/collectibles. The project is sponsored by the MIT Japan Program, Harvard's Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, the Harvard Asia Center, MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures, and MIT Comparative Media Studies. Today, I thought I would introduce you to the man behind the Cool Japan Project -- one of the coolest guys I know at MIT, my colleague Ian Condry. I had the good fortune to go on a tour of the Japanese media industry a few years ago along with Condry and it certainly opened my eyes to the richness and complexity of what's going on in that part of the world. Now a junior faculty member in the MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures program who is affiliated with CMS, Condry was trained as an anthropologist and so his research into Japanese popular culture is shaped by extensive field work at sites of both production and consumption. His first major book, Hip Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization came out earlier this year and is highly recommended to anyone who wants to better understand contemporary hip hop music, the globalization process, or the links between Japanese and American popular culture. He is now hard at work on a second book project, Global Anime: The Making of Japan's Transnational Culture, which has taken him behind the scenes into some of the key studios producing contemporary anime and has brought key players in that space to MIT to speak as part of the Cool Japan program. In this interview, he talks both about Japanese hip hop and about the process which has brought anime and manga to the attention of American consumers.

If American youth are drawn to Japanese popular culture, your book explores the opposite phenomenon -- hip hop culture in Japan. Why were the Japanese drawn initially to this form of American popular culture?

Hip-hop music and breakdance were mind-blowing to youth audiences worldwide when both appeared overseas in the early eighties. The sound was so different (where's the band? why isn't he singing?) that it drew many people who had grown tired of rock and roll. So too with breakdance which had a competitive energy that was impossible to miss. Both offered the promise of liberation into an uncharted realm. The dynamics have changed, now that hip-hop is bona-fide pop music, but the transformative impact was unmistakable. Interestingly, the first audiences in Japan didn't understand what was going one, but they saw it was something different, and that sparked curiosity that kept growing. The early days of transformative early cultures are a mysterious and wonderful thing.

In your book Hip-Hop Japan, you suggest that the Japanese use this musical form to explore their own themes. What kinds of topics does hip hop address in the Japanese context?

Some of the most interesting recent rap songs in Japan are addressing America's misguided "war on terror," and the complicity of the Japanese media and the national government. The group King Giddra, for example, has a song called "911," which uses images of Hiroshima's ground zero after the bombing as a way of rethinking ground zero New York. The group Rhymester raps about America's hypocrisy in always telling Japan to "follow the path of peace" but then starts bombing Baghdad. By the same token, they see the Japanese government as little more than "yellow Uncle Sam."

Many rap artists are addressing other aspects of Japan's changing society, from women trying to find a place in a patriarchal society, to rappers questioning the failure of the economy, to criticism of the pornography industry, youth violence, and drug abuse. There is plenty of Japanese rap that tends to light and poppy, or even pseudo-gangsta and tough, but there are also some of the most striking alternative voices in Japan appearing in Japanese hip-hop music.

Can you describe something of the research process that went into this book? How

were you able to get such access to the Japanese hip hop world?

Fieldwork is an amazing thing. Going to the nightclubs week after week, month after month, over a year and a half (1995-97), formed the basis of my research. There I met the musicians, record company reps, magazine writers, organizers, and all manner of fans, from the deep b-boys and b-girls, with their hair and clothes just so, to the "first-time checking out a club" kids. It was clearly the interaction among these groups that built the hip-hop scene, from the largely underground scene it was then, to the expanding underground and mainstream elements that have developed today.

Hip-hop clubs in Japan are active from midnight to 5 a.m., with the live show happening around 2am, well after the trains have stopped running for the night. That means everyone is stuck at the club to the first trains around dawn. This turned out to be a boon for fieldwork. By 3am, most of the people had told all the jokes and stories and gossip they had to tell to their friends already, and many people were willing to come up and find out what this gaijin (foreigner) with a notepad was doing there.

Access to the hip-hop in Japan kept developing over the years following during periodic trips to Tokyo once or twice a year. Over time, I got to know some of the artists more personally. Watching their careers change and develop over almost the 10 year span of the book's research meant that I could see the struggles of artists coping with a quixotic pop world, where youthfulness is highly valued.

Something curious must be going on with race as an African-American music form gets taken up in an Asian culture where there are relatively few black people. What do you see as the racial politics of Japanese hip hop?

Race is very important for understanding hip-hop in Japan. Young Japanese (and many white Americans, too, I would add) are drawn to the "blackness" of hip-hop, most visibly in the clothing styles, hair styles, but also in a widening sensibility towards a particular musical style, born of verbal dexterity and polyrhythmic nuance, as well as the creativity involved in sampling and remixing.

The images of African-Americans in Japan tend to reinforce stereotypes, and hip-hop can be viewed as one of vehicles for these stereotypes. But at the same time, the fans who get more deeply into the music and culture are forced to deal with questions of race, questions of where Japanese fit into the matrix of white and black, questions of how Japanese racial nationalism still influences the ways resident Koreans, Ainu, and Okinawans have been treated historically, and how they are treated today. In these ways, the impact of hip-hop on racial attitudes has been complex, at times contradictory, but, I believe, generally among hip-hop fans, moving in some right directions.

Your next project has you examining anime and manga more directly. What can you tell us about this new project?

My new book project is called Global Anime: The Making of Japan's Transnational Popular Culture. I'm interested in "the making of" anime culture as an entire global circuit of media production. I spent the summer of 2006 in several Tokyo animation studios, primarily Gonzo and Aniplex, but also with visits to Ghibli, Sunrise, Aniplex, Studio 4 Degrees C. and others. I observed the collaborative creativity that goes into anime production, how they divide the process - characters, premise, worldview - and how the ideas about creativity become enacted, actually made real, through the daily practices of making anime, frame-by-frame.

To me, Japanese anime provides an important, non-Western case study of the ways media goes global, both by speaking across cultural boundaries while retaining a kind of cultural difference (have you ever seen so many giant robots or transforming schoolgirls?). Anime's connection to the world of Japanese comic books, woodblock prints and ancient picture scrolls is often deemed sufficient to prove a kind of cultural particularity, but at the same time, the development of Japan's anime industry was closely linked to American comics, Disney and other pioneering cartoon creators.

I also explore the ways anime fans, first in Japan and then overseas, have been integral to the expansion of anime culture. Too often we are told to "follow the money" when we analyze media production, but what I see is that the money follows the creativity of artists who are able to capture audiences, and, at the same time, audiences can rescue lost gems in ways that many entertainment companies seem not yet to recognize. By looking at the case of Japanese anime, I believe we can come to a deeper understanding of national differences and global synergies, the evolving worlds of media, digital technology, and the ways artists, fans, and businesses interact.

How has this growing interest in "Japan Cool" impacted the study of Japanese

language and culture in the United States?

The idea of "cool Japan" really took off with the publication of journalist Douglas McGray's 2002 article "Japan's Gross National Cool" in Foreign Policy magazine. He argued that Japan had become a "cultural superpower," despite a decade-long recession that began in the early nineties. It has also changed the attitudes of American's interested in Japan

In the eighties, when I began studying Japanese language in college, my classmates tended to be Economics majors who planned to make a killing in international trade. They wanted to know how to bow and hand over business cards, but seldom seemed interested in Japanese history or culture Today, the majority, though not all, students of Japanese language and culture are drawn to Japan because of their experience with anime and manga. They are more interested in the culture, history, religion, and educational system of Japan. To me, it's a much more interesting group, more broad-minded, socially aware, and intellectually curious.

Some Japanese policy makers view the overseas interest in manga and anime as a vehicle for "soft power," political scientist Joseph Nye's term for political power that follows from the attractiveness of a nation's culture and ideals. I think the effect is in fact different. Manga doesn't convey "power" so much as it provides an entryway to a larger world, but one that is clearly conflicted and contradictory. The real power of popular culture is make stereotypes seems less compelling, and to force us to ask more complex questions about cultural differences.

Why do you think anime and manga have succeeded here while Jpop has largely

failed to generate the same level of interest?

I give American anime fans a lot of credit for driving the interest in anime through devoted, unpaid efforts to make the media available. In the eighties, they used VCRs, and today it's fansubs online through sites like www.animesuki.com.

Manga in Japan are such a powerful media because of the intense competition among manga artists. The largest weekly magazines carry about 15 serialized stories. Each week the publishers received about 3000 postcards, which list three most interesting and three dullest stories. A few weeks' of poor grades, and dull stories get cut. The manga stories that have survived for years are the ones that have maintained their edge. The fact that it is easy to read manga for free in convenience stores or borrowed from friends also means that fans are exposed to a lot of different manga and thereby become more sophisticated judges as well.

I think record companies in Japan haven't made much effort to break into the US market in part because US prices are about half that of Japan's, so they feel they won't make money. From the American perspective, Japanese CDs are simply too expensive, running about double the price of US albums. Both sides of the equation limit the flow.

Liwen's Digital Journey Into the Computer World

Last week, I shared Debora Lui's essay about her relationship with the Netflix Queue as an example of the work I've received on an assignment I set my students in the graduate prosem I teach on media theory and methods. They were asked to write an essay which drew on personal experiences as the basis for theoretical observations about media and popular culture. Today, I wanted to share another example of the work generated in response to this assignment. This one comes from Liwen Jin, a CMS first year master's student, who comes to us from the People's Republic of China. So much has been written in the west about China's embrace of digital technology that I thought you might appreciate reading her perspective on the changes new media has wrought in her country and about the process by which she became digitally literate. Liwen's Digital Journey into the Computer World

Liwen Jin

My first time to touch a computer was in May 1995, when I was about to graduate from a primary school. My parents sent me to a professional institute to let me get some basic training in wielding the computer. However, when I arrived at that summer school, I was totally surprised and even scared by the fact that all of the students there were twenty or thirty something except me, only a 12 year old girl in that big class. During that time, very few Chinese people knew how to operate a computer. Computer education was limited to MS-DOS and keyboarding. In that class, though I was the smallest one, I got the highest grade in the final test, which made me pretty confident in utilizing the latest technologies, and it fascinated me with that small magic"box" at that young age.

After that, I had no more experience with the computer until entering high school in 1998. Every high school student in China was supposed to get some elementary computer education. However, the fact was far from the requirements set by the country's National Education Ministry. High school students usually sat in the computer room, busy doing their own homework. Driven by the intense pressure of College Entrance Examinations, high school students usually devoted all of their time to their studies. They did not have weekends, nor extra time to watch TV or play the computer. They were usually regarded as one of the most "miserable" social groups in China. Besides, the Internet was not popular at all at that time. Getting access to the Internet was very expensive and the speed was quite slow. Without the Internet, a computer is just a dead body without its soul. To me, the computer at that time was an alternative to the typewriter, which had no connections to my daily life or studies at all.

The late 20th and early 21th century was a period when China was fervently riding the wave of the "information economy". The bubble of the dot-com economy in the West brought this fever to China too. The business of computers and dot-com rose to prosperity overnight.

In late 2001, my parents bought me a $2,000 personal computer because I was admitted to one of the most famous universities in China. However, it was still rare for college students to carry a personal computer around on campus in that year. I became the first one in my department who owned a personal computer. Fully enjoying the "luxurious" convenience of the computer and the richness of information, I nonetheless slipped into one extreme. I became really immersed in the virtual world. I spent less and less time communicating with my classmates, but more and more time chatting with strangers on the Internet. In different chatting rooms, I disguised myself by different "identities": college student, female artist, singer etc. I enjoyed discussing art, Chinese literature, films, and entertainment news with different people using different identities. Just as Sherry Turkle says in her book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, the existence of the Internet has become a place where people are able to forge "cyber-identities" and even get more comfortable being who they are. The Internet possesses the magic to "decentralize" the social identities of users in the virtual world--it strips users of their identities, wealth, social status and social relations in the real world, which makes it possible for online individuals to freely express their opinions and communicate with each other. It "shatters" the "bodies" of people, making their online identities so fragmented and multiple that it becomes really difficult to unify them. Besides, I felt that the separation of online identities from offline identities also resulted in the irresponsibility of netizens to their online speeches.

Indeed, my immersion in cyber space gradually separated me from "true" communication with my friends in real life for a while. Some of my friends even thought I got the symptoms of autism. In fact, during that time, except going to school, I usually confined myself to my room and surfed on the Internet.

But gradually, many of my friends got the same symptoms as mine. From 2003 to 2004, most of my classmates got their own computers and began to replicate my experience with their own. Generally speaking, girls liked to indulge in chatting on the Internet, while boys preferred to play computer games. It became a common phenomenon that dorm-mates chatted on OICQ or MSN instant message instead of talking face to face even though they were living next door to each other. Furthermore, it became very true that some students who behave timidly in real life may speak arrogantly in cyberspace. I actually was also along with them. My friend once told me, "you look very gentle and quiet in real life, but so funny and naughty on MSN. It's really hard to unify those two of 'you'!" That's what I defined as "cyber schizophrenia." People could have two or even more personalities with the infiltration of "virtual life" into real life. I still remember that one boy who looked extremely shy in real life unexpectedly sent me a series of love letters via email or MSN instant messages at that time. But after I turned him down, he looked so natural and unembarrassed when encountering me on campus. It seemed that the guy on the Internet was not "him" at all. Indeed, the Internet, in this sense, greatly challenged the Chinese tradition of Confucianism which urged people to abide by the principle of moderation and to avoid verbal aggressiveness in any case.

One of the most interesting cyber events during that period was cyber love. It became a fashion especially among college students, since young students had more time surfing on the Internet and they could usually pick up new technologies much more quickly than other social groups. Besides, people do tend to be more frank and audacious in cyberspace. There was a popular love story entitled "First Intimate Touch" written by a Taiwanese writer on the Internet during that period. It described a tragic cyber love story which got widely spread among college students. In fact, the "First Intimate Touch" also ushered in the prosperity of cyber literature in China. The Internet opened a new door to aspiring writers and connected them closely with the audience. In the past, writing had long been considered as a lonely profession, but when prose and poems got put on the Internet, the instant feedback made writing not so lonely any more. That phenomenon could be regarded as the early stage of the convergence of media producers and consumers.

In 2003, another kind of online community began to fascinate me. That was the online Bulletin Board System (BBS). My university's BBS was one of the most popular college BBSes. It was usually deemed the virtual home to all NJU (Nanjing University) students, just like Mecca to the Islamic. Even though I have been graduated for nearly two years, I still cannot get rid of the habit of logging into NJU BBS every day to see the latest news and join students' discussions of hot social issues. I thought BBS could be a virtual form of the Habermasian public sphere for the cause of China's democratization. However, I gradually found that online communities like BBS only validated the theory about the principles of the popular mind of large gatherings of people on the Internet. This theory was first proposed by French social theorist Gustave Le Bon in his book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind:

The masses live by, and are ruled by, subconscious and emotional thought process. The crowd has never thirsted for the truth. It turns aside from evidence that is not to its taste, preferring to glorify and to follow error, if the way of error appears attractive enough, and seduces them. Whoever can supply the crowd with attractive emotional illusions may easily become their master; and whoever attempts to destroy such firmly entrenched illusions of the crowd is almost sure to be rejected.

On Chinese BBSes, there was one recurrent issue that never failed to attract the attention of "the crowd", that is, the anti-Japan nationalism. Last year, MIT's Visualizing Culture issue was just a case of this point. MIT's Visualizing Culture course, which used a 19th century wood-print image of Japanese soldiers beheading Chinese prisoners, was spotlighted on MIT's home page. Unexpectedly, these images swiftly sparked complaints from the MIT Chinese community. Some Chinese students re-posted the images to several famous college BBSes in China, which stimulated a vehement fever of anti-Japan hatred on China's BBSes. Those "angry young people"began to throw "bricks" on the Internet. Someone even exposed the email address of Professor Shigeru Miyagawa, and instigated people to condemn him via email. Vociferous comments flew around the BBS sphere. Most of them were rude, while truly rational and objective voices were only submerged under the abuse. Obviously, the masses in the blogosphere could easily lose their rationality and follow the "emotional thought process."

In 2004, the term "blog" became a key word of that year in China. I also joined the crowd to chase that trend. I established my first blog on the Internet and kept writing essays and poems on it. It was really a wonderful place for me to write my meditation on various social, political or cultural issues, and then share with my friends. Compared to BBS, the advantage of the blogosphere lies in its greater rationality than the BBS sphere. On BBS, with their true identities veiled and agitated by mass netizens, people tend to express extreme ideas and they are free of any responsibility for the consequences of their speaking and contents. In the blogosphere, one blog is a separate and independent unit, which is immune to the chaos of the crowd. Besides, after the advent of blogs I saw a trend of the unification of online identities with offline identities in China. Some bloggers have begun to view their blogs as a virtual spiritual home and uncover their real identities on blogs. In this way, netizens will be more responsible for their online speeches. Thus, blogs were supposed to become a powerful driver to accelerate the democratization process in China. However, it dismayed me again. The swift development of celebrity blogs in 2005 finally brought a rigid hierarchy in China's blogosphere. The popularity of a blog became positively related to the fame of the blogger in real life. Celebrity blogs greatly overshadowed common people's voices, the result of which discouraged ordinary people from participating in the democratization in China. Besides, the features of the"eyeball economy" dictated that rationality and abstractness were usually far from the foci of our society. The people in cyber space were rarely willing to bother themselves to explore the profundity behind the text. The entry which gets the most clicks on my blog is actually the one to which I post my own photos.

Today, I have been used to the life with the computer and Internet, though my mom still thinks that is addiction. But MIT is always a place full of computer/Internet "addicts." I cannot even imagine a day without computers and Internet! However, I have to admit that working on the computer is quite inefficient. With the Internet open, the computer becomes a kaleidoscopic world which seduces you to do everything else except your work. The affluence of information on the Internet is thus a virtue as well vice to us. To me, I will continue my journey in this colorful digital world. And I will continue exploiting every chance brought about by new media to promote the democratization in China. I believe that should be regarded as one of the most important missions for overseas Chinese students, to develop and advance our own country along the way of democracy.

Jin Liwen hails from China, where she received her undergraduate degree in media and communications from Nanjing University followed up by studies in American politics and history and international relations at the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies. She interned in the news commentary division at China's largest media organization, China Central Television (CCTV), and worked as a journalist at News Probe, an investigative documentary series that addressed the problems of marginal populations such as homosexuals and AIDS patients. This experience encouraged Liwen to turn her academic work towards a critical investigation of the relationship between various media forms (traditional media, blogs and online bulletin board systems) and the development of a democratic culture and public sphere. At CMS, she is eager to continue her research into the role of media in facilitating political democratization and international cultural understanding.

Millenial Monsters: An Interview with Anne Allison (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of an interview with Duke professor Anne Allison talking about her recent book, Millenial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Today, I continue that interview. I mentioned last time that I spoke on a panel with Allison at Duke and thought I'd share a few more aspects of my interest in this area.

For one thing, the New Media Literacies project is currently working on a documentary about the cosplay community: our team went to Ohayocon this January to do interviews with anime fans and the costuming community. I wasn't able to share that footage at Duke but I was able to share some footage that a recent CMS alum, Vanessa Bertozzi, had produced of a young woman named Chloe who described the ways that cosplay and her fascination with JPop and anime motivated her to learn more about the Japanese culture and language:

"I have been really interested in Japanese culture since I was in sixth grade. When I was in the seventh grade, I started studying Japanese on my own. When I got into high school, I started taking Japanese courses at Smith College. I got into costuming through anime which is actually how I got interested in Japanese. And I taught myself how to sew. ...I'm a stage hog. I like to get attention and recognition. I love acting and theater. The biggest payoff of cosplay is to go to the conventions where there are other people who know who you are dressed as and can appreciate your effort. At the first convention I ever went to, I must have had fifty people take my picture and at least ten of them came up and hugged me. It's almost like whoever you dress up as, you become that person for a day....People put the pictures up on their websites after the con. So after a con, you can search for pictures of yourself and if you are lucky, you will find five or ten. "

Chloe is representative of what I have called "pop cosmopolitanism." I have mentioned this concept in the blog before and wrote about it extensively in an essay that is found in Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers. She has attached herself to Japanese popular culture as a way to escape the paroachialism of contemporary American culture -- to find a world outside or beyond the American borders. And in doing so, she has moved from a fantasy version of Japanese culture towards closer engagement with Japanese fans via the internet and with Japanese language and culture through her courses at Smith College.

I also shared with the group some sense of the ways that the American comics industry has started to absorb influences from manga in the hopes of combatting a trend which finds Japanese comics outselling American comics by as much as four to one in the U.S. market, perhaps the only internationally produced media content that outsells its domestic counterpart in this country. I showed how companies like Marvel and DC had sought to absorb elements of the themes and style of Manga while attaching them to their flagship superhero characters with the greatest emphasis occuring in works that target female consumers. See for example the romance comic, Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, for a comic that deals with classic Marvel superhero themes in a manga style. Indeed, this turn towards manga style in both mainstream and indie comics is starting to open up a space for female writers and artists as well. A curiosity in this case is the link between manga and female readers/writers given that the Japanese comics being imitated here are not always or even primarily those aimed at female readers in Japan. Lots more here to reflect upon in the future, that's for sure.

I also suggested that this was an international phenomenon, citing as an example The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga , a British anthology that I picked up in Singapore. The editors struggled in their introduction to justify the use of "manga" to characterize a collection of works by a global set of contributors, including some very interesting work Asia Alfasi (Libyan by birth, Scottish by residence), who uses a manga style to tell the story of a hijab-wearing Arab Muslim girl living in the United Kingdom. The book represents one of a number of recent efforts to strip the term, "manga," of its specific reference to Japan and argue that "manga" refers to a specific set of styles and genres in comics that travel freely across national borders in an increasingly global marketplace of ideas and influences. On the one hand, this book suggests the world-wide influence of Japanese media and at the same time, it suggest ways that media producers in other countries are learning to attach themselves to this phenomenon to open up the western market to their own cultural products. A core question at the present time is whether "Cool Japan" is an unique phenomenon or whether we will see more and more national cultures attract their own passionate groups of young fans in the west.

Now, back to the interview...

In the book, you draw on the concept of de-odorization to talk about the ways cultural materials are stripped of their local specificity as they enter the local markets. Yet at this point, Japanese culture carries enough cache that it's styles and themes are actively being imitated by American companies. Do you see this as a shift in the strategies by which Japanese cultural goods are being marketed?

Yes, and it represents a change coming from both Japan and the US. Until about the early 1990s, cultural products from Japan that bore the trace of their cultural roots too strongly simply didn't sell very well abroad. Given this, companies like Sony purposely tried to make "global" versus "Japanese" products (Sony itself was a name chosen for its global-cachet and its electronics were colored gray with an aesthetic style meant to be modern and international rather than Japanese per se). For the past decade or even a bit longer, however, there has been a global fad for Japanese products that has now come to value, even fetishize, their "Japaneseness." A Saban executive told me that when Power Rangers came out in 1993, the show had to be Americanized and its Japanese roots heavily censored. However, by 2002 (when I was talking with him), showing Japanese script, riceballs, or temples in a Japanese cartoon was an added attraction and not only was it not airbrushed out, such signs of Asianness were now being actively solicited.

In your book, you write, "the quest is not so much for the authentic Japan but for what 'made-in-Japan' authenticates -- a leading brand name of coolness these days." Explain. What qualities do you think American young people associate with Japan? What fantasies are served by their quest of Japanese cultural goods?

What I think Japan authenticates in the minds, fantasies, and tastes of US fans of J-cool is not so much Japan as a real place as mush as a particular aesthetic. I characterize this aesthetic in my book by the qualities of polymorphous perversity ( a continual moving of borders,constant transformation, repetitive change and accretion of powers, body-parts, and mecha) and techno-animism ( a world that gets animated by technology and human bodies that, in this animation, also become cyborgs). Godzilla embodied these two qualities and arose in Japan at a moment of historical disrupture and postwar reconstruction. My argument is that--in part because of Japan's wartime and postwar history--it bred a fantasy culture more dependent on polymorphous perversity and techno-animism than was American pop culture at the time. Now, the US is less stable, complacent, and economically secure than it was in the 1950s and itself is experiencing some of the social and political tensions Japan was in the 1950s. Also this is a moment of heightened flux, migration, change, and mobility around the world; these social conditions breed and embrace the cultural tropes so rampant in J-cool and this is what the "Japan" of J-cool represents for American fans, I argue.

What developments in Japanese media content have occurred since you finished writing the book that you wish you had been able to touch upon?

Technology has developed ever further on cell-phones and in the kinds of story-telling and digital communication being conducted on various e-waves. There is also new trends in youth culture and in the kind of virtual companionship I dealt with in my chapter on tamagotchi. What is happening to the way "human" is getting constructed and "sociality" getting negotiated are questions I'd like to expand upon further in the future.

How important are the digital dimensions of the franchises you discuss? Chris Kohler has argued in an interview in my blog a while back that it was games which opened western markets for Japanese cultural goods. Do you agree or disagree with this claim?

I think games were a big factor in opening up western markets to Japanese goods but I think cartoons, manga, action toys (like transformers), morphing fantasies like Power Rangers, and media-mix complexes like Pokemon were as important.

Thinking of Power Rangers, for example; this was a live action show that incorporated morphing at the heart of the fantasy. This was hardly a brand-new idea in American popular culture, of course, but what made it so popular was, in part, the lines of action figures that accompanied it (and helped spread the fantasy) and also the fact that it was targeted to young kids who grew up socialized into what we could call a Japanese aesthetic. Consumers and fans of genre like anime and manga often point to how young they were when they became interested in this fare and how what drew them in was the very distinct aesthetic, explicitly different from what they understood to be an American aesthetic. In the wake of the popularity of Power Rangers (broadcast on Fox Network started in 1993 and is still going on today, 14 years later), a host of Japanese cartoons, live action shows and other youth-targeted cultural products flooded the US market (not all acquiring success, however--Masked Rider, another live-action morphing show, was a bust, for example). While some of these programs/products were not overtly identified as Japanese, consumer kids picked up on and acquired a taste for their aesthetics and, by now, at a later age, are more than happy to accept anime, manga, and video games that come from Japan (and are explicitly packaged as such).

I do agree with Chris Kohler, however, that what constitutes what he calls a "nationally specific" element versus a "transnational" element in a product like a video game or manga is constantly changing. Today, there are many "manga" produced outside of Japan and by non-Japanese. So is the aesthetic at work here "Japanese" or not? Difficult questions and tricky operations of national/transnational.

Millennial Monsters: An Interview with Anne Allison (Part One)

In January, as part of my three week lecture tour, I stopped off in Durham, North Carolina where Duke University was hosting a special event designed to discuss the issues being raised by Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination, which was written by one of their faculty members, Anne Allison. I was one of several outside researchers who shared their insights into the issues the book raised. I had a great time interacting with the students and faculty there both through this event and a seminar session the following day. I have long been an admirer of Anne Allison's work which touches in complex ways on issues of globalization, cultural identity, fan cultures, sexuality, and popular culture. For me, one of the real values of her work is that she has read deeply into what Japanese cultural critics have had to say about some of the materials that have made their way over to this country. Given how little of this writing has been translated into English, this is an especially valuable service to those of us interested in this topic. The book offers a richly detailed series of case studies of the interplay of Japanese and American popular culture, going back to the tin toys produced during the American occupation, Godzilla and Astro Boy, and other early texts which made it into the western marketplace. The core of the book describes the emergence of an ethos of "coolness" around Japanese cultural imports -- moving from a time when the industry sought to erase markers of cultural difference to the present moment when many western consumers are embracing these products (toys, anime, manga, games) because of their Japaneseness.

Today and tomorrow, I will be sharing with you an interview with Anne Allison about her latest project. Here's her official biography which will provide some background about who she is and how this project fits into the larger trajectory of her career:

Anne Allison is a cultural anthropologist currently working on the globalization of Japanese pop culture in entertainment goods like Pokemon. Her recent book, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (University of California Press, 2006) looks at the global marketplace, capitalist logic, and fantasy construction of Japanese toys through the lens of Japan-US relations. Allison has published two previous books. The first, Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (University of Chicago Press 1994) is a study of the Japanese corporate practice of entertaining white collar, male workers in the sexualized atmosphere of hostess clubs. Her second book, Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (Westview-HarperCollins 1996, re-released by University of California Press 2000) examines the intersection of motherhood, productivity, and mass-produced fantasies in contemporary Japan through essays on lunch-boxes, comics, censorship, and stories of mother-son incest. Anne Allison is Chair and Robert O. Keohane Professor of the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.

Let's start where your book ends. You write, "Finally, of course, there is the significance and signification of Japan in the creation of a global imagination no longer dominated (or at least not so completely) by the United States. The attractive power at work here may be less for a real place than for the sense of displacement enjoined by the postindustrial condition of travel, nomadicism, and flux generated and signified here by somewhere "not-the-United-states" but within the orbit of the globally familiar. Still, American hegemony is being challenged in the symbolic virtual medium of fantasy making. And in this a see a positive contribution to the cultural politics of global imaginings in millennial monsters and Japanese toys." Explain. In what sense is it more important that this is not American popular culture than that it is culture from Japan? Or conversely, why does it matter that American youth are consuming culture produced elsewhere? What do you see as the political, cultural, and economic implications of this shift?

It's always struck me that Americans are very insular; we tend to see America as the center of the world, American culture as the global standard and norm, and the American lifestyle as the best in the world. Much of this is unconscious and comes from, among other things, a popular culture so dominated by US-produced fare. So, to disturb this sense of American-centeredness and to open up Americans to understanding and recognizing cultural difference is good, I'd say. Of course the question then is: does the popularization of J-cool amongst American youth really signal an opening up of consciousness and sensitivity to cultures and a cultural way of life that is different? I would say - to a degree, yes. But what matters here is not that fans of J-cool necessarily understand the complexity of "Japan" as the origins of this different popular culture. Rather, what is important here is more the disruption of the dominance of American culture. This is the cultural implication of a shift in pop culture in the US.

But you also ask about the political and economic implications and this is a harder question to answer. Economically, Japan is as much a postindustrial, neoliberal economy as the US so I'm not sure there is a radical shift here in the wave of J-cool spreading across the US. Politically, we could say there is more possible significance: the acceptance of soft power from somewhere else implies a challenge (well, a "soft" challenge)to the unilateralism of the US empire and the way the US nation-state is imposing its will and policies on the global stage (invasion of Iraq) without consulting or cooperating with others.

What led you to write this book? How does it emerge from the earlier books you have done on Japan?

All my earlier work has examined the relationship between fantasy and what I call material relations (of work, school, and home) in various spheres: hostess clubs, home life, pornographic comic books, and the lunch-boxes mothers make for their children. Here too I look at the relationship between fantasy and the material production of youth goods in Japan though extend this into the global sphere of fan traffic and consumption. What triggered my original interest in this was my younger son's fascination with transformer superheroes which he watched with avid interest the year we spent there when he was 2. Not only would he watch these shows, but he also became a consumer of all the action figures and paraphernalia to wear and adorn his own body with (helmets, swords, blaster guns). My son was always a gentle child: sweet, calm, and non-violent. So I was intrigued by his own transformation into this fantasy world and became interested in studying the phenomenon further.

You begin the book with a discussion of the relations between American and Japanese popular culture following the end of World War II. How would you characterize the core shift that has occurred since that time? What factors led to this shift? Do you see this as occurring because of a push by Japanese companies into western markets or because of a pull by American fans demanding more access to Japanese cultural goods?

Great questions and the relationship between US and Japanese popular culture is complex. The two countries and, more importantly, the popular cultures of these two countries have long pollinated one another though the influences Japanese pop culture has had on

American are rarely recognized or acknowledged. It is said that Tezuka Osamu, the creator

of Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy)and other popular manga and anime was heavily influenced by Disney as he started up in the late 40s and 50s. But he, in turn, influenced Disney; Kimba the Lion is said to have been the inspiration for The Lion King. But Japanese influence and imprint on the American imaginary has vastly increased in recent years and the first reason why this is so is due to marketing and entrepreneurship on both sides. Haim Saban, the CEO of Saban Entertainment in the US, was the one who tried for 8 years to get US television networks to air what eventually came out as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. He did this for strictly economic reasons; the footage was relatively cheap and he thought it would be a big hit (and would therefore make him money). And, once this hit in 1993, it opened the floodgates for more Japanese programming to come into the US, peddled by both Japanese and American marketers. Once enough of a market was established though, I think the demand of fans became significant in that they kept pushing for more and more J-cool products to enter the States (and also, as Henry Jenkins and Ian Condry have shown in their own work, the fact that these fans were adept at dubbing and translating helped push the market as well).

The Japanese were once reluctant to imagine many of these goods as being of interest outside of Japan. What changed their minds?

I don't think it was so much that Japanese changed their minds on this as much as Americans changed their minds. Once Americans started approaching Japanese and soliciting deals to broker their products, relations opened up more. This is not to say, however, that the business relations between Americans and Japanese are always smooth in negotiating the sale and transmission of Japanese products to the US.

As I understand it, these deals are often difficult, full of cross-cultural misunderstandings. What US marketers have said is that, if Japanese are going to do global sales, they need to understand how the logic of this market operates--i.e. not cling on to products or storylines that won't sell. What Japanese marketers have told me is that it's all business on the US side but, for them, they care about these products/characters/games as if they were their own children and they're not always willing to change or abandon something simply on economic grounds. There is also the interest of American fans who, because they understand and appreciate Japanese-fare and are also willing to add translations and dubbings, the market for i.e. anime has grown in the U.S. Japanese marketers would not have predicted this and figured, for a long time, that a Japanese aesthetic was simply something few non-Japanese would ever get or even take to. This was true in the case of Pokemon which, designed for a Japanese audience, was never intended or imagined to go global. It had an "odor" and "taste" thought to be appealing only to Japanese or perhaps other Asians. When it hit in places like the US, its Japanese marketers and designers were astounded. With such successes, however, they also became attuned to producing for this wider audience: not making their products "global" per se but designing them with a Japaneseness that could travel.

When Piracy Becomes Promotion Revisted...

Last fall, Reason magazine reprinted the "When Piracy Becomes Promotion" section from Convergence Culture, foregrounding the ways that the arguably illegal practices of fan subbing have helped to build the American market for anime. More recently, I received a tip from reader David Mankins about the ways that the commercial marketing for the anime series, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, sought to explicitly tap into the fansubbing circuit. Haruhi had been a huge success in Japan and had generated growing interest in the American Otaku community through its circulation in fansubbed versions. Wikipedia offers this history of the international reception of the series:

DVD sales in Japan have been strong with 70,000 and 90,000 units sold of the first two DVDs respectively as of August 2006. A 2006 online poll of Japan's top 100 favourite animated television series of all time, conducted by TV Asahi, placed the series in fourth place. The series has also become somewhat of an internet phenomenon in both Japan and English-speaking countries thanks to the distribution of English language fansubs, and over 2000 clips of the series and user-created parodies and homages were posted to video sharing websites such as YouTube. The popularity of these clips (and those of other popular Japanese series) lead the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) to request that YouTube remove clips protected under copyright.

Rather than ignore this history, the company releasing the anime series officially in the United States openly courted anime fans, urging those who have loved the fan sub version to support the commercial releases.

Here's an account of the campaign published last December on The Anime Almanac:

Buzz was generating through out all off last week as a mysterious website popped onto the internets with promises of the popular anime series, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, being licensed in the US. The website only claimed that "The World as we know it will end" that Friday. But for those looking around, one could find hidden messages to decrypt written in the website's source code. The popular website AnimeOnDVD.com also played along with the highlight of the letters SOS written on their news posts. The hype was big, and many started to speculate who was behind the mystery....

Bandai's idea behind the ASOS Brigade is to reach out to everyone who has already become fans of the series through watching the fansubs. They have created their own amateur-style home movies and are posting them on the internet. They have also created a Myspace page and encourage fans.

The movie is done "for fans by fans" style, and they really know their target audience. The movie interlaces Japanese and English dialog with a Korean-Americain, former Pink Ranger Patricia Ja Lee, playing the lead role, and two Japanese actresses playing her sidekicks. Lee even admits in the film that the Japanese actresses are only meant to appeal to the otaku fanboys. This is a very suitable attitude for the character she portrays, and is even more entertaining when we, the otaku-fanboy audience, realize how true it is.

But the video also dives into other aspects of the online anime community that we weren't expecting from a company like Bandai. Internet catch-phrases like "O Rly?" and "No Wai!" are used through out the video, which are only used by visitors of such otaku-influenced websites like 4chan.org and ytmnd.com. Also, after fans complained over Lee's choice to translate a word to "psychic" over the word "esper", a new subtitled version of the video included the fan-prefered word written under the original recording...

Many people feel that Haruhi will never sell well in the US because most of the fans have already seen the show through illegal methods. This campaign is an attempt to target the fansub community into actually supporting the series financially when the opportunity is available to them. The movie ends with special thanks to "All fansubs lovers who buy the official DVDs and who help support more creative works," and specifically gives no thanks to "downloaders/bootlegers who never buy the official DVDs." This is a very bold statement, but I completely understand where they are coming from.

This case suggest just how central the fan network is to the release strategies of anime publishers. Rather than trying to shut down the fans, the company is recognizing the ways that fans have appreciated the value of the series, helping to familiarize at least American otaku to the content, and encouraging them to put their money behind a cultural product that they have already enjoyed in an underground form. I will be curious to see how this turns out and would welcome any insights from readers of this blog who are more involved in anime than I am.

For anime and manga fans in the Boston area, I wanted to share details of the forthcoming Cool Japan conference being hosted by Ian Condry, a faculty member in the Foreign Languages and Literature section at MIT and an active contributor to the Comparative Media Studies Program. Here are some of the highlights of the event (taken from the press release). Events will be split between MIT and Harvard, reflecting the joint affiliation of the "Cool Japan" Project:

Wednesday, February 28

Anime Screening & Director's Talk: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

7pm, MIT Room 32-123 (enter at 32 Vassar St.)

Anime director Mamoru Hosoda will screen and discuss his feature film The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (Toki o kakeru shôjo, 2006, Kadokawa/ Madhouse), which was awarded Best Animation by the Media Arts Festival 2007.

Thursday, March 1

Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization Book Launch and Dialogue with Author Ian Condry. 4-5:30pm, MIT Room 4-237 (enter at 77 Massachusetts Ave.)

MIT Associate Professor Ian Condry will discuss his recently published book with comments from local hip-hop scholars Thomas DeFrantz (MIT Associate Professor) and Murray Forman (Northeastern) and dialogue with audience.

Miss Monday in Concert. Tokyo hip-hop artist and local hip-hop sensations Akrobatik and Danielle Scott. Tickets: $8 Adv./$10 Door (18+). 9pm (doors open at 8:30pm), The Middle East, Upstairs (472 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge).

Friday, March 2

Scholars Panel Discussions. "Love and War in Japanese Pop Culture." Harvard CGIS (South, Room 020 Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge).

"Visual" with Susan Napier (Tufts/ U Texas), author of Anime: From Akira to Howl's Moving Castle; Roland Kelts (U Tokyo), author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Invaded the US; and Adam Kern (Harvard), author of Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and Kibyoshi in Edo Japan. 1pm.

"Design" with Marcos Novac (University of California, Santa Barbara), artist, transarchitect, and designer; Kostas Terzidis (Harvard), author of Algorhithmic Architecture; and Larry Kubota (GLOCOM), filmmaker, Black Current Productions. 3pm.

Afro Samurai Screening and Discussion with Manga Artist Takashi Okazaki. Screening of one 25-minute episode from the new five-part animated series produced in Japan and starring Samuel L. Jackson. Discussion follows with Afro Samurai manga artist Takashi Okazaki, who drew the original cult comic that launched the project. 7pm, Gund

Hall Piper Auditorium (Harvard, 48 Quincy St., Cambridge). WARNING:

Mature content, not suitable for children.

Saturday, March 3

Scholars Panel Discussions. "Love and War in Japanese Pop Culture." MIT Stata Center Room 32-124 (32 Vassar St.).

"Culture" with Laura Miller (Loyola), author of Beauty Up: Exploring Japanese Beauty Aesthetics; Christine Yano (U Hawaii), author of Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and Nation in Japanese Popular Song; Ian Condry (MIT/Harvard), author of Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and Paths of Cultural Globalization. 1pm.

"Politics" with David Leheny (U Wisconsin), author of Think Global Fear Local: Sex, Violence, Anxiety in Contemporary Japan; Theodore J. Gilman (Harvard), author of No Miracles Here: Fighting Urban Decline in Japan and US; and Ueno Toshiya (Wako U), author of Urban Tribal Studies: A Sociology of Club and Party Cultures. 3pm.

For those of you who are not in the neighborhood, you may have to make due with Anime Pulse's extensive coverage of the previous Cool Japan conference. Here's hoping they provide a similar record of this event.

Are You Hep to That Jive?: The Fan Culture Surrounding Swing Music

When Sue Turnbull (a scholar who has written very interesting work on murder mysteries, their female readers and writers) asked me to be the outside reader on a PhD dissertation being written by one of her students at LaTrobe University (in Melbourne, Australia), on contemporary swing dance, I was resistant at first, insisting that I knew little or nothing about the scholarly literature around dance. Sue pushed me harder, suggesting that this project had much more to do with my own work than I might imagine, and being a trusting sort, I agreed to read the work, satisfied in having made my own lack of credentials clear, intrigued by why she was pushing so hard, and a bit pleased to be reading something on swing since I am a closset enthusiast of the new Swing revival (though I certainly can't do the Lindy Hop to save my life.) Thus, Sam(antha) Carroll entered my life. Carroll's dissertation did indeed fascinate me -- it is frankly some of the best work by a graduate student in cultural studies I have read in some time. She draws not just on the literature in performance studies on popular dance traditions in America but it also shows a deep familiarity with cultural studies work on fan appropriations and transformations on media content as well as work in digital studies on virtual and online communities. She captures the world of swing dance culture -- from the inside out -- and traces it across multiple media channels, showing how their lives online are connecting to their physical encounters in geographic space, and especially exploring how they trade video clips of obscure dance performances which become core resources in the development of their own performance repertoires. And, hey, the dissertation came with its own dvd of amazing clips -- and you could dance to it!

I felt that some of her work would be of great interest to readers of this blog given our ongoing discussions of various fan cultures, of the ways digital media is transforming traditional cultural practices, and of the poetics and politics of remixing media content. (And to add to my pleasure, she writes about Hellzapoppin', a much beloved film in my household, and one which I regularly assign to graduate students in our program.) Even if, like me, you think this may be outside your field of interest, think again and give it a closer look.

The following entry was written specifically for this blog by Sam Carroll. I asked her to give us some more biographical data and here's what she wrote:

Sam Carroll has just completed her Phd at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia. In that doctoral thesis she discussed contemporary swing dancers and their use of digital media in embodied practice - or, in other words, what dancers do with computers. In addition to writing about dancing (and computers), Sam also likes dancing very much. And watching footage of dancing on her computer. She began learning lindy hop in 1999 in Brisbane, but found the swing dancing community an excellent complement to academic life when she moved to Melbourne in 2001 to pursue a postgraduate degree - less writing, more dancing. Sam is now trying to learn as many authentic jazz routines from the 1930s and 40s as possible. Her progress is more a performance of fandom than an embodiment of elite fan knowledge.

THE FOLLOWING WAS WRITTEN BY SAM CARROLL

This is a clip of the Whitey's Lindy Hoppers dancing a Big Apple routine (choreographed by Frankie Manning) in the 1939 film Keep Punchin'. In the last section of this clip they dance lindy hop on a 'social dance floor'.

And here's footage of dancers in the US dancing the same routine in 2006.

If you follow this link you can listen to the Solomon Douglas Swinged playing the same song on their recent album.

Both dancers and musicians have painstakingly transcribed what they see and hear in that original 1939 clip.

Lindy hop - the partner dance most popular today in swing dance communities - developed in Harlem in the late 1920s and early 30s by African American dancers. Over the following years it moved to mainstream American youth culture, carried by dance teachers and performers in films like Keep Punchin' and in stage shows, and then moved out into the international community, again in film and stage plays, but also with American soldiers stationed overseas. Though it was massively popular in its day, by the 1950s changes in popular music, where jazz was replaced by rock n roll or became increasingly difficult to dance to with the rise of bebop, saw lindy slipping from the public eye.

In the 1980s, dancers in Europe and the US began researching lindy, using archival footage like Keep Punchin' but also including films like Hellzapoppin' and Day at the Races - popular musical films of the 1930s and 40s. The aim of these dancers was to revive lindy hop, to recreate the steps they saw on screen. Learning to dance by watching films, particularly films that were only available at cinemas or in archival collections, was unsurprisingly, quite difficult, and these revivalists began seeking out surviving dancers from the period. Among these original lindy hoppers were Frankie Manning, Norma Miller, Al Minns, Sugar Sullivan and Dean Collins.

Twenty years after these revivalists began learning lindy, there are thriving swing dance communities throughout Europe, the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan and Korea. They come together in their local communities for classes and social dancing, and also travel extensively for camps and lindy exchanges. My research has focussed on the ways these contemporary swing dancers utilise a range of digital media in their embodied practices. This has involved discussing the way DJs in the swing community use digital music technology; the way swing dancers use discussion boards (Swing Talk, SwingDJs), websites (Dance History), instant messaging and email to keep in contact with dancers in their own community and overseas and to plan their own trips to other local scenes; and the ways in which swing dancers have use a range of audio visual technology. These uses of audio visual technology include the sorts of revivalist activities first practiced in the 1980s, but continuing now in lounge rooms and church halls in every local scene, but also to record their own dancing and local communities and also performances (on the social or competitive floor) by 'celebrity' lindy hoppers.

The Big Apple contest from Keep Punchin' is a useful example of the ways swing dancers make use of digital media in their embodied practices. But it's also the focus of my own dancing obsessions at the moment. I've been dancing lindy for at least eight years, and dance a few times a week in my local, Melbourne scene. I've travelled extensively within Australia to attend dance events, I've run events in my own city and I've travelled overseas for large dance events (such as the Herräng dance camp). This year, having just finished my Phd, I've decided I finally have time to work on my own dancing, in the sweaty, embodied sense, rather than the academic or abstract.

Writers in fan studies like Henry Jenkins and Matt Hills and Camille Bacon-Smith have discussed being a scholar-fan (to use Matt Hill's term), where you're a member of the community of fans you're researching. This approach is fairly standard in much of the dance studies literature - it is notoriously difficult to write about dance and dancing with any degree of convincingness if you don't dance - it's a little like dancing about architecture. I've also found that combining my academic work with my everyday, making my everyday experiences my work, has been a satisfying way to extend my fanatical obsession with dance into every corner of my life (a little like Henry's writing about Supernatural, a program I also love, here on this blog).

So when I decided I needed to get back to some level of dance fitness, to end the thesis-imposed hiatus from hardcore dance training, I chose this Big Apple and a number of other 'vintage' or 'authentic' jazz dance routines as my focus. I've learnt the Big Apple and Tranky Doo (another venerable jazz dance routine choreographed by Frankie Manning) before, but this was to be my first solo mission, using clips garnered almost entirely from the internet, though also making use of sections of an instructional DVD produced by a famous teaching couple.

Dancing alone is an essential part of lindy hop. The dance itself revolutionised the European partner dancing structure with its use of the 'break away', (which you can see danced by the last couple in the film After Seben), where partners literally broke away from each other to dance in 'open' position. In open, partners are free to improvise, and the most common improvisation in that historical moment and today, is to include jazz steps from the vast repertoire of steps developed by African American vernacular dance culture over centuries in America. Learning to dance alone not only offers dancers the opportunity to work on body awareness, fitness, coordination, individual styling and expanding their own repertoire (a point upon which I was relying), but also encourages a creative, improvised approach to music which they can then bring to their lindy hop for those 5 or 6 beats of the 8 count swing out - the foundational step of lindy hop.

I've written a great deal about the gender dynamics at work in lindy hop, a dance which prioritise the heterocentric pairing of a man and a woman, beginning with my own discomfort with a dance where the man leads, the woman follows, and traditional gender roles prevail. But I've also written a great deal about the liberatory potential of lindy. The open position and the emphasis on improvisation are an important part of this - in those moments both partners are expected to 'bring it' - to contribute to the creative exchange within the partnership. Lindy, as it was danced by African American dancers in that original creative moment, also embodies a history of resistance and transgression, as a dance with its roots in slavery and created during a period of institutionalised racism and oppression. One of my own research interests has been the extent to which the resistant themes of lindy hop, of African American vernacular dance, have been realised by contemporary swing dancers. The fact that most of these contemporary dancers are white, middle class urban heterosexual youth goes some way to discouraging my reading of contemporary swing dance culture as a hot bed of radical politics and revisions of dominant ideology and culture. Yet I have also found that lindy hop and African American vernacular jazz dances like the Big Apple structure and the Tranky Doo offer opportunities for the expression of self and resistance of dominant gender roles.

As a woman, and as a feminist, I've found that archival footage such as that Keep Punchin' clip offer opportunities for reworking the way I dance and participate in the public dance discourse. When we watch that Big Apple clip, while we can clearly see that each dancer is performing synchronised, choreographed steps, they are also clearly styling each step to suit their own aesthetic, athletic and social needs and interests. We see the personality of each dancer as they execute a set piece of choreography. The very concept of a Big Apple contest involves dancers performing specific steps as they are called, and being judged not only for their ability to dance the correct step in time and with alacrity, but more importantly (in a setting where dance competency, as Katrina Hazzard-Gordon has written, is demanded by the social setting - everyone can dance), for their individual interpretation of the step. This is a performance of improvisation within a socially, collaboratively created structure. The representation of individual identity within a consensual public discourse. This is the sort of thing that jazz musicians do - improvise within a given structure.

And man, is that some serious fun.

For contemporary swing dancers, the idea of taking particular formal structures and then reworking them to suit their own discursive needs extends from the dance floor to the mediated world. Online, swing dancers upload digital footage of themselves dancing, edited to best display their abilities. Or they edit whole narrative films like Hellzapoppin' and Day at the Races and edit out the sequences they're most interested in - the dancing. And dancers like myself are still watching these edited clips, recreating entire routines, and then, even more interestingly, editing out particular steps and integrating them into their lindy on the social dance floor, or into their own choreographed routines.

The notion of step stealing is not new in African American vernacular dance - it reaches back to Africa. And Frankie Manning himself is often quoted as saying 'dance it once and it's yours, dance it twice and it's mine'. For me, as a dancer, this is exciting stuff. If I put in the time and effort, I can learn these steps (well, some of them - watch that Hellzapoppin' clip and you'll see what I mean). And if I practice, time it properly and really bring it, I can pull that out on the social dance floor. Perhaps. Contemporary dancers enact that philosophy on the dance floor every day -stealing steps that catch their attention on the social dance floor, or 'ripping off' moves they see performed in footage of dancers in competitions or performances or in social dance settings all over the world. Or from seventy years ago.

For me, swing dancers' tactical use of digital media in their embodied use of archival footage is not only a source of academic fascination, but also a very practical skill to develop. I have had to learn how to watch footage of dancing in a way that lets me apply my knowledge of dance to separate out distinct steps, then figure out how they work, practically. Learning to poach dance steps from archival footage is a useful skill for lindy hoppers. But the testing of my skills is not online or in my ability to write and talk about these things. The real challenge to my creative and critical faculties comes on the dance floor, when I have to bring it - to bring the right step at the right time, but with my own unique, creative twist.

Bacon-Smith, Camille. (1992). Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

---. (2000). Science Fiction Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Clein, John, dir. (1939). Keep Punchin'. Film. Chor. Frank Manning. Perf. Frank Manning and Hot Chocolates. USA.

Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina. (1990). Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Hills, Matt. (2002). Fan Cultures. London and New York: Routledge.

Jenkins, Henry. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York and London: Routledge.

Kaufman, S. J. (1929). After Seben. Short film. Perf. "Shorty" George Snowden. USA.

Potter, H. C., dir. (1941). Hellzapoppin'. Film. Chor. Frank Manning. Perf. Whitey's Lindy Hoppers and Frank Manning. USA.

Solomon Douglas Swingtet. (2006). Swingmatism. USA.

Wood, Sam. (1939). A Day at the Races. Perf. Whitey's Lindy Hoppers. USA.

Asian Cinema and the Slash Subtext

When I opened up the arts section of the Straits Times last Saturday I was surprised to read a story there about Hong Kong Actor Ti Lung and his latest film --which has a strong slashy subtext. Here's what the paper reported:

In all of his showbiz career of over 30 years, Hong Kong actor Ti Lung is known for his alpha-male, authoritative roles. Fans will remember fondly his swordsman characters in 1970s martial arts movies like Duel of Fists and The New One-Armed Swordsman or his Golden Horse-winning role as a gangster leader in A Better Tomorrow.

But Ti, 60, as a gay cop?

In his first Singapore movie One Last Dance, directed by Brazilian director Max Makowski, the actor plays a roguish police captain who has a special relationship with an assassin named T., played by Francis Ng.

While there are no intimate scenes in the unconventional mafia tale to indicate homosexuality, Ti felt his character had to be irrationally in love with NG's philosophical killer or he would have arrested T for his crimes....

"Mind you, when we filmed this, Brokeback Mountain was not even out yet. I asked the director, but he didnt give a definite yes. If he had, I would have added more hints in my acting."

What slash does is make explicit the feelings that such films leave implicit? It is, as I suggest in Textual Poachers, about crossing the divide between the homosocial and the homoerotic.

As I read this story about Ti Lung, I was reminded of another story about the rise of Bhaisexuals in Hindi cinema from the Indian Express, which my former student, Parmesh Shahani, sent to me a while back. Here's part of what the story said:

Hindi cinema celebrated the metrosexuals (the smoothies of Dil Chahta Hai). It has paid homage to the retrosexuals (Abhishek Bachchan, with his rugged, awkward macho-ness in everything from Bunty aur Babli to Sarkar). Now, it is seeing the rise and rise of a new breed. Call them the Bhai- sexuals. Unlike the Gucci-sporting, new-age DCH boys, the Bhai-sexuals are macho, retro and raw. And though, like the retrosexuals, they'd rather be sporting the newest gun rather than the latest designerwear, there's one crucial difference that sets them apart.

The Bhai-sexual shares a chemistry with his best pal that often even overshadows his chemistry with his lady love.

Again, these sounds like the kinds of tough but sensitive males who have often been the center piece of slash fan fiction in the west. And indeed, as the story continues, it starts to spell out the kinds of hurt/comfort contexts that lead to some of the most angsty of fan fiction.

If you recall, arguably the highpoint of Lage Raho Munnabhai was not the gently budding Vidya Balan-Sanjay Dutt romance, but the emotional scene where a contrite Munna approaches Circuit to apologise to him for losing his temper. Heart-wrenching drama follows when Munna reveals that the loyal Circuit, who has resorted to kidnapping chefs in the middle of the night to source hakka noodles, had also nursed Munna back to health, cradling him on his lap so that he does not miss his mother.

Then there's Rang De Basanti, which can claim to a more than a few of its own bhai-sexual moments -- not only do Aamir Khan and his friends hang out shirtless in rough fields that set off their own rough and tough physiques, they also pick up the gun for each other and sacrifice their lives. Not since Jai and Veeru, who -- riding their scooter, singing Yeh dosti... -- immortalised male friendship in Hindi cinema forever has Bollywood taken up male bonding with as much fervour.

These celluloid pals do not shy away from being emotionally intimate. It's a trend that's described as "bromance", that is, friendship between brothers, or two heterosexual males or as a "male-ationship". The metrosexuals typically bonded over hair gels and conduct their relationships with both their men pals and their women pals with equal new-age ease. On the

other hand, there's nothing easy about the retrosexual... angst, fury and raging testosterone defines not just all his actions, but also his relationships.

Like the

Straits Times

writer, this report raises but then denies the possibility that this structure of male friendship may have emerged from a western source -- i.e. Brokeback Mountain . These writers use Brokeback to stand in for a more explicitly homoerotic relationship in films and instead pull towards the homosocial. Of course, it may be no accident that Brokeback Mountain had an Asian director, Ang Lee.

Our heroes are straight heterosexual males and Brokeback Mountain is not an inspiration for anybody yet. "Male bonding in our movies has to be taken at face value. There cannot be any homoerotic tinge to it. No Bollywood hero will ever risk his reputation by acting as a homosexual. Actors are very concerned about their reputation. The life span of an actor is too short for such risks," points out Gadhvi.

Instead, the reporter shows the continuities between the Bhai-sexual friendship and more classic representations of male-bonding in Indian cinema.

In many ways, the Bhai-sexual has always existed in Hindi films. While Sholay is a show-piece for the early Bhai-sexual, Yarana, Dostana and Amar Akbar Anthony are examples of films where full-bloodied heterosexuals who wouldn't know a metrosexual from a train station, matching steps with one another, and thinking nothing of falling into hard embraces in moments of high drama.

However, social observers do point to one difference. Whether is it Sangam, Yaarana, Dostana, Qurbani and, of course, Sholay, sacrifice has been the ultimate test and enduring hallmark of the male friendship in Bollywood. According to anthropologist Shiv Vishwanathan: "In the films of the '70s and '80s, the friends were condemned to sacrifice. It was almost a duty relationship. You either had to die for each other or give up your love for your best friend."

Not so, the new age friendship. The 21st century celluloid buddies know how to have a good time. They simply hang out and talk to each other, like the Dil Chahta Hai gang. "You can live for the new age friendship, you don't have to die for it. The punitive aspect of friendship is gone from Hindi cinema. It is now celebratory and light-hearted without being over intense or sacrificial in nature," adds Vishwanathan.

"A lot of the films that we've loved and watched have had male friendship as the eternal theme. There's something universally appealing about male bonding, one can connect with it very strongly," says director Rohan Sippy, son of Ramesh Sippy who created Bollywood's most famous friends, Jai and Veeru. "Everybody wants buddies like Jai and Veeru. Their relationship is playful, emotional, loyal and they're ready to give up everything for each other," adds Rohan. Both his movies Bluffmaster and Taxi 9-2-11 explore the friendships between Abhishek Bachchan and Riteish Deshmukh and Nana Patekar and John Abraham, respectively. For Rohan, the archetype of the friendship is classic, but the setting is modern. "The friendship is as unconditional as it was in the movies of the '70s, but it is packaged for a modern audience," he says.

So, slash may represent an important half-way point as countries around the world edge up to the sexual explicitness they associate with Brokeback Mountain. Implicitly or explicitly, they may be drawn towards the rough and tumble style of male friendship which inspires slash but leave it up to their viewers to connect the dots for themselves.

There's a whole world out there waiting for you to slash, my friends, and thanks to the (legal and illegal) global circulation of content, sooner or later these movies will be accessible to you. We've already seen the influence of anime and manga on American slash fan. What will happen when Bollywood and Singaporean films enter the mix?

Given the international readership this blog attracts, I'd be curious if readers have spotted other slashy films in your countries.