[1] Claire Boucher, Grimes: “Genesis,” interview by Carrie Battan, Pitchfork (online), August 27, 2012, “Why did you decide to add...”

[2] Boucher, “ It looks just like the snake...”

[3] Boucher, “There’s a lot going on here.”

[4] Robert Albritton, Dialectics and Deconstruction in Political Economy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 156.

[5] Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide by Yve-Alain Bois (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 118.

[6] Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (London: Faber & Faber, 2012), xiii–xiv.

[7] Sharon Kinsella, “Japanization of European Youth,” Nightwave97, 1997, para. 4.

[8] Riot Grrrl is a genre of punk and indie-rock music and subculture associated with third-wave feminism that emerged in the United States in the early 1990s. According to AllMusic, “Many (but not all) riot grrrl lyrics addressed gender-related issues -- rape, domestic abuse, sexuality (including lesbianism), male dominance of the social hierarchy, female empowerment -- from a radical, militant point of view… To most riot grrrl bands, the simple act of picking up a guitar and bashing out a screeching racket was not only fun, but an act of liberation” (“Riot Grrrl Music Genre Overview,” AllMusic, accessed August 28, 2018). Bikini Kill is most well-known Riot Grrrl band.  

[9] Kinsella, “Japanization of European Youth,” “Cute in European and American Youth Culture,” para. 1.

[10] Christopher Schmidt, The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 4–5.

[11] Christine R. Yano, “Flipping Kitty: Transnational Transgressions of Japanese Cute,” in Medi@sia: Global Media/Tion in and Out of Context, ed. T. J. M. Holden and Timothy J. Scrase (London: Routledge, 2006), 207.

[12] Ben Smith, “The Tomorrow That Never Was: Japanese Iconography in Vaporwave,” Neon Music (blog), October 15, 2017, para. 4.

[13] “Mukokuseki,” TV Tropes, accessed November 15, 2017; Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2002), 28.

[14] Simon Chandler, “Escaping Reality: The Iconography of Vaporwave,” Bandcamp Daily (blog), September 16, 2016.

[15] Chelsea Campbell, “Princess Nokia Is Really out Here as the Multidimensional Queen of NYC,” KultureHub, September 8, 2017, para. 4.

[16] “Princess Nokia: ‘Cybiko,’” (The) Absolute (blog), 2014, para. 1.

[17] Yano, “Flipping Kitty: Transnational Transgressions of Japanese Cute,” 217.

[18] Fernando Alfonso, “Introducing Josip on Deck, the Anime-Obsessed Rapper Who Rules 4chan,” The Daily Dot (blog), September 9, 2013, para. 3-6.

[19] Josip On Deck, Josip On Deck - Mai Waifu (Music Video), YouTube video, 2012.

[20] Marco Pellitteri, The Dragon and the Dazzle: Models, Strategies, and Identities of Japanese Imagination: A European Perspective (John Libbey Publishing, 2011), 80.

[21] Josip On Deck, Josip On Deck - I’m Japanese (Music Video), YouTube video, 2014.

[22] “Zef,” in Wikipedia, April 10, 2017, “Origin of the term,” para. 1.

[23] GARAGEMCA, Transculturation, Cultural Inter-Nationalism and beyond. A Lecture by Koichi Iwabuchi at Garage, YouTube video (Moscow: Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018).

[24] Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable is a solo exhibition by British artist Damien Hirst, presented from April 4 to December 3, 2017, at the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, in Venice. According to the press release, “Damien Hirst’s most ambitious and complex project to date, ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’ has been almost ten years in the making. Exceptional in scale and scope, the exhibition tells the story of the ancient wreck of a vast ship, the ‘Unbelievable’ (Apistos in the original Koine Greek), and presents what was discovered of its precious cargo: the impressive collection of Aulus Calidius Amotan—a freed slave better known as Cif Amotan II—which was destined for a temple dedicated to the sun” (“Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable,” Palazzo Grassi, accessed August 28, 2018). The exhibition received mixed reviews, hailed as Hirst’s comeback by some (Jonathan Jones, “Damien Hirst: Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable Review – a Titanic Return,” The Guardian, sec. Art and design, accessed May 21, 2017) and a flop by others (Tiernan Morgan, “Damien Hirst’s Shipwreck Fantasy Sinks in Venice,” Hyperallergic, August 10, 2017). 

[25] Caroline Ryder, “Yo-Landi Visser: Dark Star,” Dazed, February 26, 2015, para. 2.

[26] DieAntwoordVEVO, Die Antwoord - Enter The Ninja (Explicit Version), 2010.

[27] First released in 1998, Dance Dance Revolution is a Japanese videogame series by Konami that pioneered the genre of rhythm and dance videogames. In Dance Dance Revolution, “players stand on a ‘dance platform"’or stage and hit colored arrows laid out in a cross with their feet to musical and visual cues” (“Dance Dance Revolution,” in Wikipedia, July 11, 2018).

[28] Ryder, “Dark Star,” para. 14.

[29] Die Antwoord, DIE ANTWOORD Ft. The Black Goat ‘ALIEN’ (Official Video), accessed August 28, 2018.

[30] Tomiko Yoda, “A Roadmap to Millenial Japan,” in Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present, ed. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006), 46.

[31] The expression “transracial identity” emerged in the context of interracial adoption, i.e. “the act of placing a child of one racial or ethnic group with adoptive parents of another racial or ethnic group” (“Interracial Adoption,” in Wikipedia, August 15, 2018). More recently, it has been used to describe cases in which one’s racial or ethnic expression differs from one’s assigned race or ethnicity, akin to the logic of transgender identity. The most well-known case is that of Rachel Dolezal, a former civil rights activist who claimed to be a black woman despite her white ethnic descent, applying skin bronzers and wearing dreadlocks and weaves to create an African American look (“Rachel Dolezal,” in Wikipedia, August 15, 2018). In 2017, the feminist journal Hypatia was involved in controversy for publishing the scholarly article, "In Defense of Transracialism," by Rebecca Tuvel. Critics claimed the article was racist and transphobic, leading to the online shaming of Tuvel and several Hypatia editors to resign from the journal (“Hypatia Transracialism Controversy,” in Wikipedia, July 29, 2018). 

[32] Josip On Deck, Josip On Deck - I’m Japanese (Music Video).

[33] Adam Haupt, “Part IV: Is Die Antwoord Blackface?,” Safundi 13, no. 3–4 (July 1, 2012): 417–23; Anton Krueger, “Part II: Zef/Poor White Kitsch Chique: Die Antwoord’s Comedy of Degradation,” Safundi 13, no. 3–4 (July 1, 2012): 399–408; Bryan Schmidt, “Fatty Boom Boom and the Transnationality of Blackface in Die Antwoord’s Racial Project,” TDR/The Drama Review 58, no. 2 (May 12, 2014): 132–48.

[34] Kristen Sharp, “Superflatworlds : A Topography of Takashi Murakami and the Cultures of Superflat Art,” 2006, 98.

[35] Koichi Iwabuchi, “‘Soft’ Nationalism and Narcissism: Japanese Popular Culture Goes Global,” Asian Studies Review 26, no. 4 (December 1, 2002): 450–51.

[36] Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 61.

[37] Craig Brownlie, “Manga Invasion,” City Newspaper, December 28, 2005; Roland Kelts, Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007); Brenda Velasquez, “The ‘Japanese Invasion’: Anime’s Explosive Popularity in the U.S.,” Asian Avenue Magazine (blog), September 15, 2013; Juan Scassa, “Japan Strikes Back: From the American Invasion to Gaijin Magaka,” GAIJIN GEKIGA 外人劇画 (blog), July 24, 2017; Jennie Wood, “Manga and Anime: The Japanese Invasion,” InfoPlease, accessed August 28, 2018; “The Japanese Invasion / Useful Notes,” TV Tropes, accessed August 28, 2018.

[38] Iwabuchi, “‘Soft’ Nationalism and Narcissism,” 465.

Grimes and her girl gang ride in an Escalade through the desert, wielding swords and morning stars, looking impossibly cool. They dance, showing off their sick moves like “Beyoncé meets Dune or something.”[1] Brooke Candy walks the streets in a skimpy Final Fantasy-style silver armor with high platform shoes, white contact lenses and black lipstick. Her shocking-pink hair falls in knee-length extensions around her body, like a braided curtain, as she sucks on a lollipop with bravado. On the back of a limousine, Grimes parties with friends in an oversized Japanese sailor school uniform (seifuku) jacket, holding an albino python on her shoulders in homage to Britney Spears’s iconic VMA performance.[2] Her hair is tied in long, dreamy, blonde twin tails. Later, she poses in the woods with a group of ennuied hipsters. [Figure 1] Plays with fireworks. Holds a flaming sword like a divine messenger. [Figure 2] This is “Genesis”—the lead single from Visions (2012), the third studio album by Canadian musician and visual artist Grimes (Claire Boucher, b. 1988). [Video 1]

A hypnagogic anthem with feathery vocals and nostalgic electropop riffs, “Genesis” went viral on Tumblr with its self-directed video, shot in Los Angeles under the influence of trippy Boschian imagery[3] and girly pastel grunge aesthetics. Cuteness spiked with the fighting power of Lolitas in armor, armed with snakes and maces and platforms raising them to the sky. The posthuman vibe of Japanese animation and video games permeates “Genesis,” as well as more recent videos like “Flesh Without Blood,” “Kill V. Maim,” or “Venus Fly” from Grimes’s 2015 album Art Angels. Like her previous albums, Grimes made the cover and art for Art Angels, only this time, the influence of Japanese pop culture intensified. [Figure 3] The cover features a digital drawing of a blue alien head floating in space, with pointy hears, a queue hairstyle, and three big, bloodshot anime eyes. On the right, there is a side panel with a pink-haired anime elf. Inside, various illustrations accompany the record, filled with references to kawaii culture, high fantasy, Internet memes, and graffiti. Like a witch, Grimes stirs her magic potions in the massive cauldron of the cultural memory, where “high art” meets “low” mass culture, and the past and the future become intertwined, flattened, and indistinguishable.

Cuteness is recurring if largely overlooked visual trope in hauntological aesthetics, even if the Derridean concept of hauntology itself, coined in The Specters of Marx (1993), has been called “a cute and amusing play on ontology.”[4] Hauntological music in the 2000s pioneered, and to some extent engendered, many Internet-bred microgenres that shaped the sonic landscape of the 2010s: witch house, vaporwave, certain types of alternative hip-hop. While the “genealogical throwbacks”[5] that characterize hauntological music are nothing new, Simon Reynolds argues that the amount of time separating the present from the quoted is shrinking.  “Earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity, of course, from the Renaissance’s veneration of Roman and Greek classicism to the Gothic movement’s invocations of the medieval,” Reynolds explains. “But there has never been a society in human history so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past. That is what distinguishes retro from antiquarianism of history: the fascination for fashions, fads, sounds, and stars that occurred within living memory.”[6] Such temporal proximity has paved the way for Japanese pop culture to be hauntologized by those in the West who have it in their living memory. Namely, the millennials (roughly, born between 1981 and 1996) who entered adulthood in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Series like Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, Evangelion, Pokémon, and many others that became imprinted in the aesthetic orientation of millennials across the globe, now proliferate online on websites like Instagram and Tumblr.

As Sharon Kinsella argues, “Western youth have become extremely receptive to ideas and images which first flourished in Japan.” And adds: “In the 1990s, weakness, dependence, passivity, and childlikeness, have been key themes in Western youth culture and fashion. They are new themes in Western youth culture which have a strong connection and similarity to the themes of Japanese youth culture from the mid-1970s.”[7] In the 1990s, feminist bands associated with the Riot Grrrl[8] movement and kinderwhore aesthetics embraced and twisted the cute and the pretty[9] to confront “ideologies that phobically associate mass culture—and its ‘tainting’ or corruption of high modernist values—with female and queer bodies.”[10] Their stance echoed a broader disenchantment towards Western modernity and individualism, brought about by the disastrous impact of late-capitalism or neoliberalism on the global social-ecological fabric. In this context, the “Japan” of anime, manga, and the kawaii, with its “transnational transgressions,”[11] has become associated in the twenty-first century with this “tainting” of Western modernism.

Vaporwave, for instance, exploits the association of East Asian imagery (particularly, Japanese) with “futurepast” consumer culture and techno-orientalism, in an ambiguous critique or appreciation of cybercapitalist displacement. As Ben Smith explains, “In the case of vaporwave, a genre preoccupied with escapism, memory, and nostalgia, modern Japan perfectly embodies that tension between strangeness and familiarity, old and new, reality and artificiality that vaporwave artists strive to create.”[12] The quintessential vaporwave album, Floral Shoppe (2011), by American electronic musician Vektroid (Ramona Xavier, under the alias Macintosh Plus), is technically named フローラルの専門店 (Furōraru no Senmon-ten) and its songs are all titled in Japanese. [Figure 4] There is also an entire faction of hypnagogic pop in online audio distribution platforms, like SoundCloud and Bandcamp, whose songs and visuals are directly inspired by anime and manga. The Hong Kong-based record label Neoncity Records is an excellent example of this trend, hosting musical artists as Sailorwave, cmky!, マクロスMACROSS 82-99, Night Tempo, 忍, ImCoPav, datfootdive, or Desired. [Figure 5] More than Japan as a country in and of itself, then, it is the concept of Japaneseness, in all its mukokuseki (“stateless”) or “culturally odorless” splendor,[13] that seems to fascinate vaporwave artists. Japaneseness, as such, becomes a crucial building block in vaporwave’s aesthetics of virtual utopia and consumer leisure, brought about by the deliberately heavy-handed use of postmodern remixes and parodies from history and mass-mediatic culture. As noted by several commentators, Japanese animanga characters and letters are often deployed alongside other icons of corporate anonymity and escapist nostalgia, such as malls, video games, obsolete technology, or 90s television.[14]

For these millennial artists, the process of Japanization seems to have become a form of strategic negation or transgression of the dominating hierarchies of taste and originality enforced by the Western high modernist canon. Take the case of Nuyorican rapper Princess Nokia, the alter ego of Destiny Frasqueri (b. 1992). Princess Nokia often explores postcolonial and feminist themes in her songs, reflecting on her experience growing up in the Bronx, Spanish Harlem, and Lower East Side of New York.[15] A simple Google search returns various promotional photographs where Frasqueri appears as comfortable in the shoes of a Harlem tomboy as in front of a window filled Hello Kitty merchandise. In one picture, Frasqueri holds a stuffed Totoro toy, while in another she stares longingly at the camera wearing a cat ear headband. [Figure 6] Grinning, she smokes a cigar in a Pokémon shirt. The music video “Dragons,” a song inspired by Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen, starts with a shot of animated Shenron, the magical dragon from the animanga series Dragon Ball. [Video 2] The video shows Frasqueri and her boyfriend in an amusement arcade, playing classic Japanese video games like Street Fighter (the camera lingers on Chun‑Li in a pink uniform), mixed with sequences from anime and cartoons ranging from Dragon Ball and Pokémon to X-men and Winx. In the video, Frasqueri’s bedroom is filled with posters and drawings of retro twentieth-century pop cultural icons—Star Wars, Bruce Lee, American comics, video games like Grand Theft Auto. [Figure 7] At one point, Frasqueri and her boyfriend watch a VHS tape on an old television, curled up next to each other, in the intimate confines of nostalgia where today’s technology seemingly has no place.

The cover of Princess Nokia’s debut album, Metallic Butterfly (2014), also features an illustration of Japanese virtual idol Hatsune Miku. [Figure 8] Set against an endless urban nightscape, Miku perfectly incarnates the aesthetics of “high‑tech fairy music”[16] that, according to Frasqueri, underlies the album (“The net is vast and infinite,” she seems to tell us, like Major Kusanagi reborn in Ghost In The Shell). “Cybiko” and other singles from Metallic Butterfly are filled with references to Japanized cultural commodities made in the United States or Europe under the influence of Japanese popular culture—films and animations like The Matrix or Æon Flux, video games such as Mortal Combat, or bubbly cyber-orientalist Y2K aesthetics from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Somehow, in the global cultural economy, Japanese cuteness and animanga still seem to retain a phenomeno-poetics of (cultural) cross-border “pollution.” In her studies on “pink globalization,” Christine Yano points out that even Hello “Kitty’s global spread has engendered a legion of vociferous detractors”[17] concerned with the perpetuation of harmful race and gender stereotypes (e.g., submissive Asian girl).

American rappers like Hentai Dude or Josip On Deck (Josip Opara-nadi, b. 1993) overtly engage with the poetics of Japanese pop culture, particularly anime and manga, as bad and dirty matter. Josip, who rose to Internet fame with songs like “Anime Pu$$y” and “Mai Waifu,” is a self-proclaimed “otaku god” who raps about anime and gaming while cuddling with his favorite dakimakura. [Figure 9, Video 3] Despite being a black man, Josip is an avid frequenter of 4chan since he was a young boy,[18] a community known to be a hub of virulent racism. Josip’s songs celebrate and parody otaku and weeaboo culture, drawing from 4chan’s political incorrectness to wallow with candor in their most ridicule—and deeply problematic—features. Josip sings outrageous lyrics like,

Such lyrics that pose the “dehumanized and superhumanized, abstract and inanimate”[20] 2D animanga waifu (i.e., the merchandisable kyara) in opposition to embodied 3D females, with their biological and organic functions, overlap the misogyny in rap music with otaku misogyny. Along with filling his songs with Internet slang and gratuitous Japanese expressions (kawaii, sugoi…), Josip’s abject transculturality “pollutes” the integrity of hip-hop music as a genuine expression of black culture. Or, as he puts it in another song titled “I’m Japanese,” a hair-raising ode to the weeaboo (trash) condition, “When I look in a mirror/ I see a Japanese nigga.”[21] [Video 4]

This “pollutive” Japanization also manifests in the work of the South African group Die Antwoord, formed by Watkin Jones (b. 1974) and Anri du Toit (b. 1984) under their stage names Ninja and Yolandi Visser. Die Antwoord identify as Zef, a South African counterculture akin to “white trash” that “roughly translates as ‘common,’ with connotations of ‘uncool,’ ‘disgusting,’ ‘gross’ and/or ‘trashy’ in Afrikaans.”[22] [Figure 10] In many points, Die Antwoord’s Zef resembles Murakami Takashi’s concept of Superflat; they both self-exoticize their “foreignness,” exposing how cultural uniqueness has become a marketable commodity in a globalized market—what sociologist Kōichi Iwabuchi calls the rise of “inter-nationalism”[23] through glocalization and nation branding. For instance, Die Antwoord’s music video Fatty Boom Boom, filled with racial and sexual horror, begins with a bus sightseeing tour in which a guide welcomes a white celebrity (caricaturing Lady Gaga) to South Africa’s “concrete jungle,” commenting how foreigners love that they call the traffic lights “robots” there. Yolandi, in particular, has become nothing short of a twenty-first-century cultural icon, even appearing as a salvaged ancient Roman sculpture in Damien Hirst’s exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (2017).[24] [Figure 11]

 Yolandi is known for her infantile look, short and slender, with a mullet and bleached eyebrows, combining cuteness with uncanny and trashy aesthetics. Her singing is a mixture of “Lolita songbird vocals and tugged-out raps delivered in a blend of English and Afrikaans.”[25] In the music video for Die Antwoord’s single “Enter The Ninja” (2010), Yolandi appears in a schoolgirl uniform singing “I am your butterfly/ I need your protection/ Be my samurai”[26] in a sweet, high‑pitched voice over a sample of “Butterfly”—an orientalist Eurodance song by Smile.dk that became popular on Dance Dance Revolution.[27] [Video 5, Figure 12] In Baby’s On Fire (2012), Yolandi’s bedroom is decorated with cute stickers, plushies, and nostalgic memorabilia, much like Princess Nokia’s room in Dragons. [Video 6] She smokes and makes out with her boyfriend, wearing a skimpy crop top with the word “ZEF” inside a heart and Pikachu sleepers. Later in the video, her boyfriend offers her a Nenuco doll styled like a miniature Yolandi, highlighting her resemblance to a cute doll. In “I Fink U Freeky” (2012), Yolandi embraces the aesthetics of guro-kawaii (“creepy cute”) and kimo‑kawaii (“gross cute”), wearing black scleral contact lenses like an alien and sprawling on the floor surrounded by rats. [Figure 13] “Her image flipped the Lolita archetype on its head, with body language that screamed, “Look, but don’t fucking touch’,” writes Caroline Ryder. “She may have been dressed like a schoolgirl, but unlike Britney and her entreaties to ‘hit me baby one more time,’ Visser’s attire was more a method of visual torture, double-daring the viewer to underestimate her strength.”[28] In the music video for “ALIEN” (2018), Die Antwoord took the kimo-kawaii one step further. Effacing Yolandi almost entirely under the mask of an insectoid alien who dances and eats a space bug, she sings a sad lullaby about being a misfit at school: “I am a alien/ No matter how hard I try I don't fit in/ Always all on my own, sad and lonely/ All I want is for someone to play with me.”[29] [Video 7]

For all these artists—Grimes, Princess Nokia, Vektroid, Die Antwoord, Josip On Deck—the visuals that accompany their music are not ornamental but inseparable from their music and general aesthetics. Another common trait is that Japanese popular culture, through the influence of animanga, videogames, and cute culture, works as a marker of their filiation into a millennial J-subculture, filtered by the various lens of gender, class, race, and others. As Yoda puts it, the consumers of Japanese popular culture have become a cultural group in and of itself: “Rather than assuming that Japanese popular culture today ultimately refers to some form of a larger national frame, we may understand the prefix J- as inscribing the subculturation of the national,” she explains. “Rather than inscribing a sociocultural boundary between the inside and the outside (that takes the national interiority as the ultimate horizon), the local in the global postmodern operates on a more fluid, affective distinction of familiar and exotic or a visceral sense of proximity and distance that need not presuppose a fixed historical or social point of reference.”[30]

This J-subculturation in contemporary art and music functions as a form of “transnational transgression” to the extent that, like the alien in Die Antwoord’s music video, it indexes a sense of exclusion from the sphere (however mythical) of purity, both etno-racial and artistic (“high art” and “good taste”). Often, this aesthetic of “impurity” or “pollution” extends to the artists themselves, whose queerness runs counter the tenets of normative and essentialist views on gender, sex, and race. For instance, Princess Nokia is militant about her bisexuality and mixed-raceness. Vektroid is a trans-woman. Grimes and Yolandi both cultivate an image of posthuman androgyny. As mentioned above, Josip on Deck engages with the highly controversial concept of transracial identity[31] through provocative humor, calling himself a “Japanese nigga” and going as far as to sing that “I only fuck with girls of my own race (and that's far Eastern).”[32] Die Antwoord’s “queering” is even more outrageous—as various authors have pointed out, Jone’s alter ego Ninja is a carnivalesque compound of “colored” and working-class signifiers, while Jones himself is a privately-educated English-speaking white man[33]—and they often deploy controversial forms like blackface and primitivist imaginaries, along with gendered, sexual, class grotesquerie, for shock and excess values.

According to Iwabuchi, the perceived “ability to be transportable and translatable [which] is considered to be a marker of Japaneseness”[34] has been fueled by both Western Orientalism and Japanese “soft nationalism.”[35] Often, in these discourses, the “West” and “Japan” are reinforced as entities whose essence remains stable despite their hybridization, prompting Iwabuchi to question “whether this kind of analysis of Japanese domestication of the West actually lends itself to keeping Japanese ‘Japanese.’”[36] While in the mass mediatic imagination, the worldwide success of anime and manga is so frequently referred to in terms of a Japanese “invasion” or “revenge”[37] against the West’s cultural hegemony, in the works of these artists, “Japan” is a specter haunting the fictions of “purity” in Western modernity’s aesthetic (and racial) identity. This hazy, unfixed image that changes according to the artists’ agenda highlights how “transnational cultural flows [are] much more de-centered, non-isomorphic and complex than can be understood in terms of a center-periphery paradigm.”[38] Much like high fantasy and old computer and Internet aesthetics, Japanese pop culture has become a figment of millennial phantasmagoria, in which the “distortions” arising from the global circulation of cultural commodities are to be enjoyed, transfigured, and played with in queered—sometimes, problematic, and not necessarily emancipatory—ways. 

See in CUTENCYCLOPEDIA – Hiro Universe & Gaijin Mangaka.

See in PORTFOLIO – Japanoise I & II & “魔法 少女 MGCL GRL.

REFERENCES in Grimes, Nokia, Yolandi

CONTENT NOTICE

This entry is potentially disturbing or unsuited for some readers.

Mentions of racial slurs.