By Cassandra Guan
In Anime’s Knowledge Cultures, Jinying Li makes a compelling intervention into the fields of anime studies, digital media studies, and East Asian cultural studies. The book explores the rise of a transnational “knowledge class,” whose ethos appears in the more or less interchangeable figures of the geek, the otaku, and the zhai, through the lens of global anime cultures and fandom. In its pages, anime comes alive not merely as a style of limited animation from Japan or a subcultural form with a worldwide fanbase, but as a deterritorialized media environment that translates the operating logics of information capitalism into habitual cultural practice. When bilingual anime geeks, for example, form online subtitling clubs to facilitate the global distribution of new anime titles, Li argues that they engage in a kind of knowledgeable reproduction of digital culture that she calls “communication labor” (p. 36). These cosmopolitan consumers-turned-promoters of anime provide a yeoman’s service, as it were, to the formation of information capital. Conversely, the normalization of cybernetic processes of human-machine integration in such anime tropes as the mecha-child tames the threat of subjugation in an expanding techno-culture, sustaining contemporary knowledge work with a distributed field of cybernetic affect.
In the crowded field of academic anime studies, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures stakes out a new position by performing a “double decentering” in its methodology: firstly, by shifting focus from the “computer boys” of Silicon Valley to the transnational anime fandoms of East Asia; secondly, by de-ontologizing anime from its presumed “Japanese-ness” to bring into view the global circulation of anime aesthetics as a fan-based knowledge culture. After comparing the organizational practices of anime fandom across different contexts and closely examining the fan-based techniques of reading, Li disabuses us of the stereotype of anime reception as Japanese animation consumed primarily by white American fanboys — instead, she invites us to reconsider anime as a global environment of techno-aesthetic mediation that has, among other effects, played an outsized role in China’s 21st-century transformation into a digital behemoth. The central argument of her book is that the geek, otaku, and zhai fans of anime are exemplary workers in a globalized knowledge economy. Their restless activities deserve our attention, Li argues, because the labor of fandom effectively synchronizes “the collective psyche of knowledge workers” with networked systems of computational capital (p. 24). Instead of salvaging great artists or notable artworks to demonstrate the medium’s artistic potential, Li goes all in on anime as popular geek culture.
The first half of her book provides a geocultural history of geekdom, with a particular focus on the emergence of the zhai generation in China. Li contextualizes this development within China’s transition from an industrial “world factory” to a burgeoning postindustrial economy dominated by internet giants like Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. Chapter 1 provides a concise history of anime geekdom, tracing the emergence of zhai culture from the widespread reception of Astro Boy in the 1980s to the online anime fandom that helped shape the techno-culture of a new generation of knowledge workers—the computer geeks. Chapter 2 examines the practice of fansubbing—the amateur translation and subtitling of anime videos by self-organized groups of highly dedicated fans. Li argues that fansubbing constitutes communication labor, an immaterial form of work that is simultaneously a “language game” (p. 84-6) and a site of “pirate cosmopolitanism” (p. 83). This labor organizes a deterritorialized community that oscillates between the speed of the global market and a radical autonomy that resists corporate regulation. Chapter 3 examines the danmaku interface prevalent on East Asian platforms for animation fan culture, where viewers’ comments appear in real time across the video image. Li argues that danmaku functions as a volatile “contact zone” (p. 131-6) where conflicting modes of media—such as cinematic narrative and cybernetic platform feedback loops—clash. Unlike the harmonious “media mix” often invoked in Japanese anime studies, the danmaku interface exposes incoherences between liveness and spectrality, between fan-based knowledge production and elitist gatekeeping, and between visuality and discourse.
The second half of the book theorizes anime as a techno-aesthetic milieu that normalizes the conditions of information systems. Chapter 4 analyzes the cybernetic integration of humans and machines through the popular anime figure of the “mecha-child”—a childlike character that is part machine. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theory of mimetic innervation, Li argues that the motif of the mecha-child cultivates a field of “techno-intimacy” (p. 181), which frames the norms of the information economy as objects of desire. This aesthetic intervention explains why anime is often “cute” rather than “noir,” effectively domesticating machine integration as a therapeutic necessity rather than a dystopian threat. Chapter 5 explores the networked structure of the anime “media mix” through “cybernetic play.” Focusing on the Steins;Gate franchise, Li analyzes how players use feedback loops to seek a singular “true end” amidst proliferating “worldlines” (p. 206). This process represents a shift from “database consumption” to “cybernetic consumption,” in which the pleasure lies in the procedural act of steering informational chaos toward control. Chapter 6 addresses the “superflat” aesthetic of anime, interpreting it as an aesthetic of hypermediacy that mimics the stacked windows of a computer screen. This visual field mobilizes the viewer’s gaze but ultimately frames and entraps the subject within an algorithmic commodity matrix, exemplified by the “Facebook Wall” — an interface designed to articulate personal identity on social media.
For scholars of animation in Sinophone contexts, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures is a must-read for several reasons. First, it pushes forward the ongoing reconceptualization of animation as a key term of media theory. Following the interventions of Thomas Lamarre in The Anime Machine (2009) and Anime Ecology (2018), Li moves beyond the fixation on narrative analysis in anime studies to interrogate the technicity of animation—sliding layers, dynamic immobility, and flat compositing—as the actual foundation of our digital viewing habits. The chapters on danmaku and the “superflat” interface aesthetics are especially indebted to Lamarre in their theorization of anime phenomena by expanding on the concepts of “platformativity” and the “superplanar/distributed field,” respectively. In addition to its insightful readings of anime’s techno-aesthetic forms, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures also provides a novel theoretical framework for understanding the sociality of online anime fandom beyond simplistic notions of “user participation,” framing it instead as complex instances of communicative labor, mimetic innervation, cognitive mapping, and other, more elusive signifying practices. To this end, Li mobilizes an imposing canon of Frankfurt School, post-structuralist, postcolonial, and post-Fordist theory to make sense of the actual practices of interpretation, translation, dissemination, and feedback that constitute anime’s knowledge cultures. At certain moments in the book, the balance between theory and observation feels skewed toward the former—especially because Li likes to frontload the theoretical argument before presenting her case studies. This observation aside, the case studies consistently reward persistent reading, and readers primarily interested in the subject of anime culture and fandom may wish to occasionally skip the theoretical apparatus or work backward. Finally, the double decentering of anime as global geek culture from its presumed industrial and ethnic centers opens an avenue of exploration for scholars of Sinophone culture who have grown impatient with the disciplinary boundaries of area studies. In keeping with a key insight of postcolonial theory, Li’s commendable endeavor to reassess an ethnically bound and industrially regulated cultural form through its global fan-powered circulation demonstrates how the periphery produces the center—both by subverting official channels of distribution and through collective acts of piracy.
One area that invites further discussion in this otherwise impressive study is the reliance on a periodizing scheme that divides history into Fordist industrialization and post-Fordist knowledge work. While this framework provides a clear rhetorical structure for the book’s central claims, it sits in tension with the specificities of the social formation underpinning the case studies, particularly in the context of China. Given China’s current status as a global industrial powerhouse, the transition to a “post-industrial” economy remains, to say the least, a complex and ongoing process. Framing the zhai engagement with anime culture primarily through a generational lens is a rhetorically compelling move, yet it leaves room to further consider how these generational narratives and identities intersect with class formations and what Marxist geographer David Harvey calls the phenomenon of “uneven geographic development” – both within the framework of the nation-state and internationally. It is worth remembering the many critiques of post-Fordism by the likes of the anthropologist David Graeber, who scathingly observed that the notion of a globally synchronized break from Fordist industrialism was invented by those who naively believed industrial economies to exactly resemble what Marx describes in Capital, Volume I and who, after looking around, decided that the contemporary world has definitely moved beyond it. By bringing Li’s cybernetic readings of anime fandom more directly into conversation with Marxist historiography, we might gain even deeper insight into the specific class dynamics of the knowledge economy that she describes. Interrogating these periodizations more closely would only serve to further ground the distinctive cultural practices Li so skillfully develops in her analysis.
Even with this limitation, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the “structure of geek feelings” in the opening decades of the 21st century and the ways in which anime entangles its fanbase in the digital interfaces, the networked platforms, and the large-scale computation systems that increasingly organize experience and interaction, as well as labor and consumption, in the uneven development of global capitalism. When Li gets going on a particular case study, her analysis is absolutely gripping. I have only space to mention one example: Li’s brilliant reading of the stylistic practices of fansubbing, which overlay the enclosed diegetic world of the anime video through a ludic engagement with its contact zone. Li complicates the positive model of communication and community-building common in fan culture discourse. By analyzing the playful practices of “abusive subtitling”—which forever alludes to the unavoidable gap between subtitle translation and the meaning of a scene without resolving it—she reveals the “non-identity of geekdom,” or the organization of community around a dissensus. In these moments, the book demonstrates—this is no small achievement—how abstract theory and close reading of media forms can be creatively bridged. Such a courageous endeavor in an overly cautious milieu of academic writing and publishing, should be recognized and rewarded.
Bio:
Cassandra Xin Guan (关昕) is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and an affiliated faculty member at the Center for East Asian Studies. She has a PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and was the recipient of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at MIT’s Center for Art, Science, and Technology. Guan is currently completing a book manuscript, called Maladaptive Media: Plasticity in Animation, that investigates how early twentieth-century scientific and cultural debates about developmental plasticity fundamentally shaped the history, theory, and aesthetics of animation. She has published research articles in academic journals such as October, Screen, Film Philosophy, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Camera Obscura.
