Keynote Talk delivered by Dr. Marc Steinberg, at the Waseda Anime Symposium, “Theorizing Anime: Invention of Concepts and Conditions of Their Possibility”
This keynote address takes up the invitation of the conference to think critically and reflexively about the contributions of anime studies, its dead ends, its transnational exchanges (and especially transpacific travels, interchanges, and disconnects), and its potentials moving forward. It does so by attending to a passage from Thomas Lamarre’s The Anime Machine, where he notes the purpose for the book is to track “what animation is, how it works, how it thinks—how it brings value into the world.” Instead of asking how anime brings value into the world, this talk will offer 16 propositions about how anime studies brings value into the world – and into the worlds of its cognate and non-cognate disciplines – as well as how it hinders this production of value. Given that value is by definition perspectival – value to whom, and why, and in what way – this talk will also include personal reflections on the emergence of anime studies as I have lived through it, as a graduate student then scholar based largely in North America. This will be part intellectual history, part personal account, and part provocation for anime studies’ futures – in the service of a map for some consequential intellectual adventures into the future, and for a better anime studies to come.