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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.