@article{Communities::3411,
      recid = {3411},
      author = {White, Brian},
      title = {Speculative Communities: Discourse and the World of Cold  War Japanese Science Fiction},
      publisher = {The University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2021-08},
      pages = {180},
      abstract = {This dissertation tracks the social construction of  science fiction (SF) in Japan during the genre’s formative  period of the 1960s.  Looking primarily at science fiction  magazines of the period, I track three separate but  interconnected discourses of science fiction – text,  community, and media – and examine how the genre comes into  view at the overlap of these three discursive fields.  In  magazine columns, fan activities, and the texts themselves,  a variety of agents contested the meaning and significance  of science fiction within Japan as the genre came into  being.  In a Cold War context of elevated international  consciousness, SF’s proponents saw it as both well-suited  to describe the new material conditions of everyday life  and also as a lingua franca by which Japan might  participate in the high-tech “First World” international  order. By examining discourses of science fiction across  literary and visual media and across professional-amateur  divides, I explore this example of the ways Japanese  subcultural production was understood to interact with  national and transnational negotiations of power.  Through  this analysis, I construct a theory of genre as a social  force, functioning as a way to hold divergent discourses  together in relation to one-another and thereby allow a  variety of formations of subjectivity to crystallize.  The  specific definitions of SF shift depending on the  discursive contexts in which the term in invoked, but in  each case, SF is as much a model for contemporary identity  as a taxonomic category for texts.  The genre and the texts  it encompasses become the language by which this identity  was articulated, communicated, and reinscribed.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3411},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.3411},
}