Animé-tion: Post-Humanism, Art Mecho, Political Ecology, and Cultural Economy

Instructor: Ignacio Valero
OAK / PHCRT–300 / 15 sessions
Prerequisite: ENG2, CULTH 200, Jr standing or instructor permission
June 3–July 8 (no class July 4), Mon./Wed./Thurs., 6:45–9:45 p.m.

A long decade-plus ago one could see Mao Zedong in Mickey Mouse Ears, a Zapatista Slogan, and a panel of a scene from Otomo Katsuhiro’s Akira sharing common space on a crumbling wall. It was then war-torn Sarajevo, but it could now be an imagined Neo-Tokyo, New York, Cairo, Damascus, Kabul, Athens, Rome, London, Madrid, Paris, Buenos Aires, Chiapas, Rio or Shanghai –¬¬ “Glocal” places impacted by hybrid modernities, economy, polity, and aesthetics.

Could such icons and graffiti, and sundry other, be read as mere satire, adult rage, youthful angst or “just” pop culture? Or, seen as a cry for help, perhaps an aesthetic(s) of the common(s), an archaic postmodern? Could it be the projective screen of a passing order, hanging on desperately through the logos of a neoliberal techno-organic delirium, trying to confront the apocalyptic puzzles of the new millennium? Or, maybe, it is the traces of a vast post-human dis/order struggling to emerge?

This course explores aspects of this conundrum through the artful visual socio-ecologies of Animé, a Japanese animation art form that tries to break through the thick ramparts of the local via a series of emotions, moving images, figures and reflections that resonate across a varied global audience. Universal themes of love, wisdom, nature, gender, beauty, war and peace, eroticism, youth, old age, combine with questions of human origins, survival, power, cultural diversity, change, identity, magic, religion, science/ fiction, vampire, zombie and cyborg aesthetics and technology, or with flashes of pure entertainment – to make it an apt visual field for a contemporary local study of a political economy and political ecology of global cultural production: a post-human “Art Mecho,” and then some.

Due to its interdisciplinary nature, this course satisfies a Methods seminar, a Diversity Studies seminar, Social Sciences requirement, or H&S elective.