Postwar Asian Management and Its Mediated Form–cfp

CFP: Postwar Asian Management and its Mediated Forms, seminar for the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) annual meeting (Taipei, June 15–18, 2022)
Organized by Hannah Airriess and Lawrence Zi-Qiao Yang
Submit an abstract: https://www.acla.org/postwar-asian-management-and-its-mediated-forms
Deadline: October 31, 2021

This seminar is interested in postwar media forms in the context of the period’s management theory as it became implemented as corporate practice in East Asia, during an era often said to be defined first by Japanese postwar reconstruction and then by Asian Tiger developmentalism. We wish to explore literary and visual narratives across media that take up questions regarding management in Asia since the end of World War II, with a particular eye toward understanding the way in which managerial organizational logics become manifest as aesthetic practices. To this end, we aim for an examination of both the textual articulation of managerial logics in aesthetic practices and forms as well as the organizational structures of systems and institutions that produce such media. In some cases, these practices revolve around emergent genre forms, as in white collar cinematic narratives produced during Japan’s high-growth era. In other cases, we are more interested in the material cultures that surround cultural products, like the propagandistic newsreels that were produced in Taiwan during the booming 1970s that would be played in theaters before feature films.

In general, the seminar is concerned with the relationship between large scale regional economic transformations, management theory and corporate practices designed to maximize efficiency during a period of opportunity, and the media aesthetics that emerges from this milieu. Most accounts of Asian developmentalism fall short of addressing the complexity of management/organization as a nexus of cultural forms that have been articulated across different spaces, times, and scales. We intend to use this seminar to investigate narratives and images that mediate management in its specific organizational, social, and material contexts. Among the issues we hope to consider is the role of genre in structuring affects specific to forms of organization, the relationship between texts and audiences as working subjects, and managerial logics in and of media such as studio cinema, popular literature, comics, and virtual or “new” media, amongst other forms. How do texts and systems of production mediate critiques and fantasies about a range of material conditions in addition to abstract economic forces, such as the expansion of colonial capital, the consolidation of Cold War economic systems, and contemporary global finance?

Possible topics may include:

  • Generic or aesthetic conventions attached to specific systems of management (Fordism, Taylorism, Toyotization, Human Relations)
  • Centrality of affect and emotion to discourses on economy and labor
  • Managerial, entrepreneurial, and self-help literature
  • Management of surplus populations
  • Discourses of productivity, leisure, work-life balance
  • Film/media studio systems as organizational practices
  • Logistics and supply chain aesthetics
  • Unemployment and the generation(s) of despair

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact:

Hannah Airriess: hairries@iu.edu; Lawrence Z. Yang: knulpyang@nycu.edu.tw

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