Paper short abstract

This paper extends Sarah Anne-Gresham’s race-critical intervention into the animatic concept of mukokuseki by inserting African bodies into the discourse, leveraging the genre Afro-anime to examine how African participation in the production and consumption of anime and manga complicates the term.

Paper long abstract

Sarah Anne-Gresham’s article Black Bodies at Play: Race and Gender at the Edges of Subjectivity is doing an important work of contextualizing the oft-used animatic concept mukokuseki within the terrain of race studies. Their argument provokes thoughts about the undercurrent of the concept and how it paradoxically reifies white supremacist ideals emboldened by anime aesthetics. This paper aims to further push the boundaries of their rhetoric by inserting African bodies into the conversation. I argue that analyzing the overall participation of Africans in the production and consumption practices of ‘globalized’ anime and manga culture complicates the argument that Anne-Gresham puts forward about the consequential overtones of mukokuseki. In complicating Anne-Gresham’s deconstruction of mukokuseki, I will establish Afro-anime as a sub-genre that proves mukokuseki as a useful logic for understanding the rationale behind transnational interest in Japanese anime, as well as the ‘techno-orientalist’ paradoxes that come with the medium’s global appeal and plasticity. Afro-Anime as a sub-genre draws heavily from West African mythologies, East Asian comic aesthetics, and Western superhero sci-fi or fantasy tropes to create peculiar narratives that reflect the mythos of an Africa-in-becoming. And it is a term that describes not just the animatic interests of African Americans living in the U.S., it also depicts the growing relationship Africans have with Japanese manga and anime. One work of interest that will be analyzed in the course of engaging with Anne-Gresham’s work is Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire, created by South African animation studio TriggerFish. By examining the engagement of African creatives and consumers with Japanese culture and further complicating Anne-Gresham’s intervention in providing a nuanced perspective on mukokuseki, this study will contribute to the existing debate about the inclusion of African bodies in discourses about race in global black studies.

Paper short abstract

The project argues that mukokuseki anime aesthetics, often described as “race-neutral” or “stateless,” do not escape race but reorganize it in marketable form, functioning as a subtle technology of racial governance in the global cultural economy.

Paper long abstract

Thesis Statement

The project argues that mukokuseki anime aesthetics, often described as “race-neutral” or “stateless,” do not escape race but reorganize it in marketable form, functioning as a subtle technology of racial governance in the global cultural economy. By erasing explicit ethnic markers while privileging phenotypes and affective scripts that align with Eurocentric neutrality and Japanese soft nationalism, contemporary anime franchises produce “stateless” bodies that travel easily across borders yet stabilize racial hierarchies and geopolitical imaginaries. The chapter contends that this “non-racial universality” is not an absence of race but a coded mode of managing which bodies, worlds, and futures can be recognized, merchandised, and loved at scale.

Theoretical Lens

The analysis combines East Asian media studies on mukokuseki and cultural odor (e.g., Koichi Iwabuchi), critical race theory, and scholarship on soft power and platform capitalism. Mukokuseki is reframed not simply as stylistic abstraction but as an infrastructural logic that makes Japanese popular culture legible as globally “neutral” while quietly centering Whiteness as default and Japanese-ness as soft national brand. Sarah Anne-Gresham’s intervention on how “neutral-looking” anime characters reanimate historical paradigms of Whiteness as innocent and apolitical becomes a key anchor to read anime faces, bodies, and worlds as racial scripts rather than empty surfaces. The project also draws on theories of racial capitalism and media franchising to understand how export-friendly character design, genre, and world-building converge with licensing contracts, streaming platforms, and merchandising regimes to produce racial governance as an economic and aesthetic practice.

Methodological Context

Methodologically, the chapter adopts a multi-sited media industry and textual analysis. It triangulates:

1. Close readings of character design, narrative framing, and world-building in selected anime series and films.

2. Paratextual materials such as trailers, posters, toy packaging, fashion collaborations, and global streaming thumbnails.

3. Industrial documents and public discourse, including marketing copy, interviews with creators and producers, and trade press around overseas licensing.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Keiko Takemiya’s Poem of the Wind and Trees uses a romanticized European setting to shape early Boys Love aesthetics, positioning readers to identify with Western bishounen while exposing and critiquing racial otherness, racism, and power systems in BL’s formation.

Paper long abstract

Keiko Takemiya, with the creation of the manga series Poem of the Wind and Trees (1976-1884), revolutionized shoujo manga and helped create the genre of Boys Love. To better understand the visual and cultural histories of BL’s style, I analyze the Poem of the Wind and Trees’ construction of the Occident: the setting of the manga. I define the Occident as a fantasy world constructed by aestheticizing, romanticizing, and objectifying Western European objects, cultural values, and people as symbols of foreignness or difference instead of as things that come from specific cultural histories.

Utilizing Occidental ornamental visual elements, Takemiya encourages readers to identify and inhabit the subject position of these Occidental subjects. At the same time she critiques European culture’s racist constructions of otherness based on the binaries of ingroup/out-group, pure/impure, White/non-White. The readers of Poem of the Wind and Trees were meant to identify with European bishounen and therefore were complicit in creating a fantasy Occidental world. Simultaneously, these readers also embodied the illustrated subject position of a character like Serge (a young Roma boy) and the racist experiences he encountered in the manga’s 19th century upper-class French setting. These readers also embodied the illustrated subject position of a character like Serge and the experiences of racism, making legible and educating readers about the power systems of racial fantasy construction. How does this education work alongside contemporaneous women’s social justice movements? How does educating BL readers about power systems of racial fantasies relate to early undercurrents of mukokuseki, race, and the “going global” of BL?