000003411 001__ 3411 000003411 005__ 20251007025150.0 000003411 0247_ $$2doi$$a10.6082/uchicago.3411 000003411 037__ $$aTHESIS$$bDissertation 000003411 041__ $$aeng 000003411 245__ $$aSpeculative Communities: Discourse and the World of Cold War Japanese Science Fiction 000003411 260__ $$bUniversity of Chicago 000003411 269__ $$a2021-08 000003411 300__ $$a180 000003411 336__ $$aDissertation 000003411 502__ $$bPh.D. 000003411 520__ $$aThis 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. 000003411 540__ $$a© 2021 Brian White 000003411 650__ $$aAsian studies 000003411 653__ $$a1960s 000003411 653__ $$aDiscourse 000003411 653__ $$aGenre 000003411 653__ $$aJapan 000003411 653__ $$aMedia Studies 000003411 653__ $$aScience Fiction 000003411 690__ $$aArts & Humanities Division 000003411 691__ $$aEast Asian Languages and Civilizations 000003411 7001_ $$aWhite, Brian$$uUniversity of Chicago 000003411 72012 $$aMichael Bourdaghs 000003411 72014 $$aHoyt Long 000003411 72014 $$aKyeong-Hee Choi 000003411 8564_ $$94496de07-a975-4ad8-b463-579566554abd$$s3863921$$uhttps://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3411/files/White_uchicago_0330D_16025.pdf$$ePublic 000003411 909CO $$ooai:uchicago.tind.io:3411$$pDissertations$$pGLOBAL_SET 000003411 983__ $$aDissertation