Thomas Lamarre
University of Chicago
 

 

About the Keynote

In recent years, studies of cinema and media in East Asia have increasingly proposed a break with national frameworks in favor of inquiry into transnational flows and global reception. Yet at the same time, questions about sovereignty, especially national sovereignty, have increasingly come to the fore. This paper proposes to engage these issues by focusing on how media infrastructures affect sovereignty.  Because the study of infrastructures forces us to deal not only with the production and circulation of objects but also with the production of distribution as such, it invites a series of new questions and a shift in analytic emphasis.  How do we talk about the experience of infrastructure?  How do we articulate a non-normative theory of sovereignty that does not presume what it needs to call into question?  This paper will delve these issues with reference to the emergence of regional and global forms of anime — such as Chinese, Filipino, Korean, or Taiwanese anime.  I aim to show how such regional and global effects are not simply a matter of the circulation of products but involve an experience of infrastructures that remains torn between two “Asian” image-economies and imaginaries.

 

Thomas Lamarre teaches at the University of Chicago in Cinema and Media Studies, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization. His current projects forge new connections between media studies and environmental humanities.  A forthcoming collection coedited with Jody Berland, Digital Animalities: The Mediation of Animal Life in Ecopolitical Times, explores the digital mediation of animal life in context of climate breakdown. Green Heresies: Critical Ecology and Plant Studies is a research initiative that engages with ecological approaches to intelligence emerging across AI research and plant sciences. Half Life: Radiation and Animation centers on the physics of animation to rethink the agency of radioactivity in the era of ongoing global nuclear disasters.