Overview

Film has always been a key technology for producing and disseminating attachments to 'the social.' Making Audiences explores the century-old relationships between Japanese media and social subjects, analyzing the connections between cinema audiences and five significant discursive terms: minshu (the people), kokumin (the national populace), toa minzoku (the East Asian race), taishu (the masses), and shimin (citizens). Fujiki narrates the history of Japan's transmedia ecology, illuminating cinema's enmeshment with other forms of media, from vaudeville to the internet, so that cinema audiences emerge as simultaneously shaped by and shaping social history. His extensive empirical research and commitment to interdisciplinarity bring new perspective to the history of Japanese society and culture in its global context from the early twentieth century up to the beginning of the twenty-first century, setting his insights within the context of total wars, imperialism, gender, ethnicity, mass society and communication, the ethics of care, citizenship, globalization, neoliberalism, social movements, digital media, and public and intimate spheres. By reorganizing the study of film and its audiences as central players of the history and politics of the 20th century, Fujiki writes the history of Japan and East Asia anew.

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9780197615003

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Reviews

Making Audiences offers a profound reconsideration of the relation between cinema and subject formation. Stressing the historical contingency of competing sociopolitical discourses through which the subjects of Japanese cinema have emerged, Fujiki enriches our understanding of audiences and spectators, and delineates a counter-hegemonic method for understanding their discursive capture. -- Thomas Lamarre, University of Chicago Hideaki Fukiji's Making Audiences: A Social History of Japanese Cinema and Media marks a critical new moment in the field of film audience studies. In this brilliant study, Fujiki forges an intersection between the film audience and the protocols of citizenship, specifically in the case of Japan, national citizenship. This gesture transforms the faceless spectator-auditor into a highly surveilled figure that forces one to rethink the very stakes of audience studies. Making Audiences offers an intervention far beyond the contours of its subject: by drawing a line from audience to citizen, Fujiki reveals the very capacity of cinema to establish the conditions of citizenship and even of race. -- Akira Mizuta Lippit, University of Southern California

Making Audiences offers a profound reconsideration of the relation between cinema and subject formation. Stressing the historical contingency of competing sociopolitical discourses through which the subjects of Japanese cinema have emerged, Fujiki enriches our understanding of audiences and spectators, and delineates a counter-hegemonic method for understanding their discursive capture. * Thomas Lamarre, University of Chicago * Hideaki Fukiji's Making Audiences: A Social History of Japanese Cinema and Media marks a critical new moment in the field of film audience studies. In this brilliant study, Fujiki forges an intersection between the film audience and the protocols of citizenship, specifically in the case of Japan, national citizenship. This gesture transforms the faceless spectator-auditor into a highly surveilled figure that forces one to rethink the very stakes of audience studies. Making Audiences offers an intervention far beyond the contours of its subject: by drawing a line from audience to citizen, Fujiki reveals the very capacity of cinema to establish the conditions of citizenship and even of race. * Akira Mizuta Lippit, University of Southern California *

Author Information

Hideaki Fujiki is Professor of Screen Studies at the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University, Japan. His other publications include Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan (2013) and The Japanese Cinema Book, co-edited with Alastair Phillips (2020).

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