Anne Allison
Associate Professor & Chair of Cultural Anthropology
7pm
Gwen Stefani & the Harajuku Girls.
Manga in CosmoGIRL. Cultural Fusion--or New Orientalism? Come
learn more and share your thoughts at this informal discussion.
Light meal will be served. Please RSVP by Monday, September 26
with Christina Chia (cmc7@duke.edu).
Anne Allison researches the ways in which desire seeps into,
reconfirms, or reimagines socio-economic relations in various
contexts in postwar Japan. Her first book,
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. Her current research
is on the recent popularization of Japanese children’s goods on the
global marketplace and how its trends in cuteness, character
merchandise, and high-tech play pals are remaking Japan’s place in
today’s world of millennial capitalism.