the Intensive Summer Course: HIROSHIMA and PEACE

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Anime and the Apocalyptic: Violence, Regeneration and Ideologies of Transcendence

Description: The lecture will draw from insights into how age-old narratives of the apocalyptic continue to inform revolutionary and genocidal thinking (and policy-making). Using selected movie clips and key readings I will suggest how anime, as a popular trans-national media artform and mass entertainment, continually returns to represent social catastrophe, spectacle and rebirth. Why does the apocalyptic continue to appeal in this new form and how does its ideology inform or underpin strategies of conflict and/or its reconciliation? Objective: To provoke and question the seemingly normative approaches to conflict and its narrative representation in popular culture. Students will be equipped with a new perspective on mass media and generic, cultural approaches to conflict resolution. Recommended Readings: Broderick, Mick. 2009. Making Things New: Regeneration and Transcendence in Anime. In John Walliss & Kenneth Newport. (Eds). The End All Around Us: Apocalyptic texts in Popular Culture. London: Equinox Publishing: 120-147. Susan Napier, 2005. Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Broderick, Mick. 2002. Anime's Apocalypse: Neon Genesis Evangelion as Millennarian Mecha, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, Issue 7, http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue7/broderick_review.html Name:Mick BRODERICK Present Post and Title: Associate Professor & Research Coordinator, School of Media, Communication & Culture, Murdoch University. Western Australia Final Education: University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. Ph.D. Specialized Field: Nuclearism, the Apocalyptic, Global Screen and Media Industries, Trauma and Representation Recent Publications: * Broderick, Mick and Antonio Traverso. Eds. (forthcoming). Intersections. Selected papers on gender and the Asia-Pacific from the 2008 international conference: Interrogating Trauma: Arts & Media Responses to Collective Suffering http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/trauma. * Broderick, Mick. (in press). Mediating Genocide: Producing Digital Survivor Testimony in Rwanda. In Janet Walker & Bhaskar Sarkar (Eds). Moving Testimonies: New Documentary Assemblages. American Film Institute Reader. Routledge: New York. Broderick, Mick. (2008). Waiting to Exhale: Somatic Responses to Place and the Genocidal Sublime. IM: Interactive Media, 4, (Summer), at wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/nass/issue4/pdf/IM4_broderick.pdf. I was born in Melbourne, Australia the same year that Hollywood came to town to film the end-of-the-world movie, On the Beach. As an undergraduate I studied media analysis and production, and was active in anti-nuclear politics and the environmental movement. Following some postgraduate study I published editions of the reference work Nuclear Movies (1988, 1991) and edited a collection of pan-Pacific writing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the atom bombings: Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film (1996, 1999). For ten years I worked as an arts bureaucrat with the Australian Film Commission, completing my PhD dissertation on post-structural critical theory and the Mad Max-style genre of post-holocaust films. My current research involves cold war entertainment and material culture. I am also involved in researching spatial, commemorative and mediated aspects of trauma culture in post-genocide Rwanda and elsewhere. I live with my two teenage children opposite a tranquil beach overlooking the Indian Ocean in Perth, Western Australia.

Hiroshima City University
Faculty of International Studies
Office of Intensive Summer Course