HIST 459 - Manga and Japanese History
“Manga and Japanese History” maps a cultural history of modern Japan through representative
works of manga (Japanese comics) and selected anime adaptations. Students will analyze
manga as primary sources that reflect the array of historical developments, cultural
transformations, and socio-political discourses that have played into the construction
of “Japan” from the early modern period through the new millennium. Assigned manga
represent prominent Japanese historical and artistic themes including the advent of
mass print culture; early modern urbanization; shifting moral paradigms; modernizing
cultures and counter-cultures in interwar Japan; Japanese imperial violence, national
trauma, and rehabilitation of WWII; evolving nuclear discourses from the Allied occupation
to the present; shifting gender and sexual paradigms in the postwar decades; the move
from the 1980s “miracle economy” to the recessionary 1990s; the rise of public violence
in the 1990s; contemporary youth subcultures; and the enduring theme of identity and
technology. In exploring these themes, students will consider also how the evolution
and expansion of manga across and into an ever-multiplying number of genres reflects
evolving paradigms of Japanese subjectivity and social participation, the diverse
experiences of individuals and communities inhabiting various axes of identity (e.g.,
race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class), and the desire among pop cultural consumers
to engage with the repressed of history and culture.
Course Materials
Syllabus
Assignment
Lesson Slides: Illustrating the Asia Pacific War: Propaganda Comics, Graphic Autobiography, and Demands for Accountability
Lesson Slides: Gender Debates and Shōjo Manga in the Postwar Decades
About the Course Designer
Raechel Dumas (Ph.D. in Japanese, University of Colorado at Boulder) is a specialist in modern Japan, with emphasis in the histories of literature and visual culture. She is especially interested in the gender and sexual politics of “dark” popular genres including horror, crime fiction, and science fiction. Her first book, The Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), explores constructions of female monstrosity in Japanese fiction, manga, film, and video games produced from the 1980s through the new millennium. Articles by Dr. Dumas have appeared in multiple academic journals. She is working on her second book, Serial Affects, which examines gendered experiences and expressions of trauma in English-language streaming television series.
Read Raechel's blog post about the course.