Founded In    1981
Published   annually
Language(s)   English
     

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History, Literature, Politics, Economics, Law, Art and Architecture, Cultural Studies, Media, etc.

     
ISSN   0288-3570
     
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For those who wish to submit a manuscript to the Japanese Journal of American Studies:
1. Contributors must be dues-paying members of the JAAS.
2. Contributors are expected to observe our time schedule. They must first submit the title and abstract (about 300 words) by mid-January. We are unable to accept the manuscript without this procedure.
3. The final manuscript (maximum 7000 words including notes) is due early May. The editorial committee will inform each contributor of the result of the selection process by the end of June. If accepted, the paper will be published in June the following year.
4. The fall issue of the JAAS Newsletter will carry a“call for papers announcement with exact deadlines and the special theme for the forthcoming issue.  Information is also available on our website http://wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp/jaas/
5. The JAAS will accept inquiries through email: office@jaas.gr.jp

     

Japanese Journal of American Studies

The Japanese Journal of American Studies, an English-language refereed journal, is published annually by the Japanese Association for American Studies. It aims to contribute to the increasing internationalization of American Studies by providing a forum for international American scholars whilst also fostering Japanese scholarship specializing in American Studies. On-line access is free.

 

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EJAS 13.1 2018 Special Issue Special Issue: Animals on American Television, 13.1

whether animals on display in a fictional program, for example, become stand-ins for humans or refer to actual animals in the “real” world depends on the way in which the individual viewer (influenced by the society surrounding her/him) actualizes their meaning potentials. This special issue of the European Journal of American Studies sets out to explore these paradoxes. What do these animal representations in television reveal about America, Western societies, and the human condition, in general? Is television solely interested in how we see animals or do some programs, at least in some way, provide audiences with insights into the actual lives of companion animals or free-living animals? How close can television—the medium that seeks to bring the world into our homes—get to a nonhuman point of view? In trying to answer these and other questions, this special issue takes seriously Brett Mills’ recent claim that “none of the things that existing studies of television do can be done unless animal representations are accounted for” (7).
The essays in this special issue thus broach different issues in connection with animal representations on American television; and they do so from various perspectives.
This special issue seeks to raise the question of the animal in the context of European American Studies. After all, if American Studies shares a concern about “issues of knowledge and power” (Hall 42), the field must take seriously the animal question. Acknowledging “the intersections of race, nation, class, [gender, sexuality,] and species” (Adams and Donovan 7) will be a first step toward achieving that goal.

Animals on American Television: Introduction to the Special Issue


Since its early days, American television has offered viewers a wide variety of animal characters.1 From main characters such as Lassie (Lassie, CBS, 1954-1973), Mister Ed (Mister Ed, CBS, 1961-1966), and BoJack Horseman (BoJack Horseman, Netflix, 2014-) to secondary and tertiary characters such as the cat Lucky in ALF (NBC, 1986-1990), Data's cat Spot in Star Trek: The Next Generation (syndicated, 1987-1994), and the chicken and the duck in Friends (NBC, 1994-2004), animals have been regulars on American television. Of course, these animals play various roles in these and other fictional programs -- agents driving the action forward, sidekicks to the human main characters, and little more than accessories or narrative backdrop. Most of the time, however -- irrespective of whether they are companion animals or "wild" animals, live-action or animated -- they seem to characterize and/or help viewers understand human characters.

All Teeth and Claws: Constructing Bears as Man-Eating Monsters in Television Documentaries


Since the mid-1980s televised wildlife documentaries have become increasingly spectacular. In particular, documentaries revolving around large predators have not just proliferated, but supported entire networks, as evidenced by Discovery's Shark Week, which has enjoyed a phenomenal success since its introduction in 1988. Shark Week, as Matthew Lerberg (2016) has shown, epitomizes the representational reductionism which operates across media -- sharks are nothing but fin and jaws. Drawing on audiovisual conventions established by Jaws, sharks tend to be depicted as monsters -- even in programs with didactic and/or conservationist goals. In this article, I explore representations of another large predator family, bears, in two Animal Planet documentaries. As I show, the monstrous bears embody human anxieties, but they also invite human sympathy, as human beings have turned them into monsters.

The Death and Resurrection of Brian Griffin


This essay explores the animated American sitcom Family Guy (Fox, 1999-) as a case study for thinking about the use of animals in narratives. It focuses on episodes in which the program's dog, Brian, is killed and subsequently resurrected. Brian is a useful subject for this examination in view of his hybrid dog/human status. My discussion of Brian's death and subsequent resurrection demonstrates how narratives exploit animals for anthropocentric purposes, enabling human cultures to engage with topics such as death. In doing so, my essay evidences how animals are little more than narrative resources, used by programs for decidedly human ends.

Wild Animation: From the Looney Tunes to Bojack Horseman in Cartoon Los Angeles


In this paper, I trace themes of the animetaphor. I interpret Akira Mizuta Lippit's term as a moving image of the re-membered animal that projects a collective anxiety of oblivion for all animals, including humans. I begin with an exploration of this theme with respect to early cinema and the philosophical and psychological movements that accompany it. I then investigate more contemporary examples of these models in three case studies -- Chuck Jones' characters in the Looney Tunes, the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and the Netflix series BoJack Horseman -- to explore the imagined city of Los Angeles as a cartography of animal ghosts, invented and reinvented as semiotic machines, which force us to look at animals as ourselves and at ourselves as animals. Mechanisms of mass cultural memory are at work in the cinematic history of Los Angeles, and animation is often a projection of those memories. The link between psychoanalysis, the emergence of cinema, and modernism during the early part of the twentieth century serves as the philosophical-aesthetic background for my approach to social and artistic themes that haunt cinematic and real space in Los Angeles through the movement of animated animals. I argue that the fascination with animal movement of early cinema and cartoon animation suggest a particular function of cinema, and even more so cartoon animation, to remind us of repressed sensations and images from our collective unconscious.

“Absolute Alterity”? The Alien Animal, the Human Alien, and the Limits of Posthumanism in Star Trek


As humanity defines itself through an animal other, one could likewise claim that the human in sf texts is demarcated by being non-alien. This viewpoint establishes an intimate connection between alien and animal, both representing the other, that which, in Jacques Derrida's definition of "absolute alterity," cannot return the human gaze. While one might expect that this absolute alterity harbors the posthuman potential for overcoming the species boundary through an alien-animal bond, the interactions between alien and animal alterns in Star Trek actually belie the franchise's utopian promise of multispecies community. Examining alien-pet relations in Star Trek: The Original Series, The Animated Series, and The Next Generation through a triangular structure of interconnected becomings, this paper argues that, while convergent and divergent becomings complicate established dualisms, the affective alien-pet interrelations in Star Trek ultimately effect a becoming-human for humanoid aliens while they mark the nonhuman animal as absolute other. Complementing Star Trek scholarship that calls the series' status as inclusive utopia into question, this article likewise unmasks Star Trek as a distinctly humanist utopia that eventually promotes an anthropocentric position in the representation of animals as much as in the representation of other alterns.

Horsing Around: Carnivalesque Humor and the Aesthetics of Dehierarchization in Mister Ed


This essay discusses the aesthetics of dehierachization in one of the pioneering sitcoms in American television -- the CBS-produced Mister Ed (1961-1966). Drawing on the concepts of "the animal subaltern" (Willett), "bestial ambivalence" (Wells), and "liminal animal denizenship" (Donaldson and Kymlicka), I argue that the show constructs its protagonist, a talking horse named Mister Ed, as a shapeshifting character who humorously challenges established assumptions regarding the human/animal dichotomy. Designed as a sitcom, Mister Ed employs a technique that I describe, following Bakhtin, as "carnivalesque humor." Within this aesthetic framework, the title character figures as an ambiguous and grotesque character who rejects social conventions and restrictions, oscillating between the position of a stand-in for humans and that of a liberated animal. Mister Ed playfully advocates a radical move toward alternative representations of body, identity, and species, even postulating an analogy between the African American Civil Rights Movement and the discourse of animal liberation. Following a long tradition in animal fiction, the show sets out to expose hierarchies and injustices in society by employing an animal as its chief focalizer. Conceived in this manner, Mister Ed challenges what Jacques Derrida has termed "the possibility of the impossible," namely the notion that animals can never be endowed with a sense of subjectivity. In the comedic, fictional realm of the show, the "impossible" becomes a subversive reality. Mister Ed assumes the position of a powerful subject which is endowed with "non-human agency" (Armstrong). In this sense, Mister Ed creates a scenario in which the "absolutely marginal" (Berger), indeed, returns the viewers' gaze, inviting them to share and valorize this outside perspective, if only for the duration of one twenty-five minute episode at a time.

Other Issues

The Pacific and America , Number 16