The purpose of this special edition is to collect and publish scholarly articles on issues relating to the potential of manga to shape the portrayal of Japanese history. We are looking for contributions from a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to literary studies, politics, history, cultural studies, linguistics, narratology, and semiotics. The special edition will focus on the graphical representation of Japanese history.

Nowadays the academia increasingly pays attention to the softpower potential of manga in popular cultural representation. Tessa Morris-Suzuki has argued in The Past Within Us that ‘historical truthfulness’ encompasses a shared social responsibility, which is increasingly jeopardised by the power of media to mould people’s ‘unconscious sense of the structure and meaning of world history.’ The representation of history via manga in Japan has a long and controversial historiographical dimension. Manga and by extension graphic art in Japanese culture has become one of the world’s most powerful modes of expressing historical verisimilitude.

In particular, the Japanese tradition of the story-manga and its Western equivalent of the graphic novel, manifest the best and worst aspects of this global media, which has the potential to display history in previously unimagined ways. Boundaries of space and time in manga become as permeable as societies and cultures across the world. This special journal edition will investigate the authorship of history by looking at various different attempts to render pre-modern/modern history through the popular cultural media of the story-manga. As Carol Gluck, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Susan Napier and others have shown, it has never been easy to encapsulate the complex narrative of emperor-based Japanese historical periods. How do manga and by extension graphic art rewrite, reinvent and re-imagine the historicity and dialectic of bygone epochs in postwar/contemporary Japan?

We are seeking contributions from academics and experts interested in the representation of history.

The deadline for proposals is: 31 December 2009.

Please email a 300 word abstract (for a paper length of 6000-8000 words) and a short biography as an attached word document to Roman Rosenbaum at: r.rosenbaum@records.usyd.edu.au