Circulating Fear

Circulating Fear: Japanese Horror, Fractured Realities, and New Media explores the changing role of screens, new media objects, and social media in Japanese horror films from the 2010s to present day. Lindsay Nelson places these films and their paratexts in the context of changes in the new media landscape that have occurred since J-horror's peak in the early 2000s; in particular, the rise of social media and the ease of user remediation through platforms like YouTube and Niconico. This book demonstrates how Japanese horror film narratives have shifted their focus from old media—video cassettes, TV, and cell phones—to new media—social media, online video sharing, and smart phones. In these films, media devices and new media objects exist both inside and outside the frame: they are central to the films’ narratives, but they are also the means through which the films are consumed and disseminated. Across a multitude of screens, platforms, devices, and perspectives, Nelson argues, contemporary Japanese horror films are circulated as an ever-shifting series of images and fragments, creating a sense of “fractured reality” in the films’ narratives and the media landscape that surrounds them. Scholars of film studies, horror studies, media studies, and Japanese studies will find this book particularly useful.

In this vivid ethnography, Jessaca B. Leinaweaver explores “child circulation,” informal arrangements in which indigenous Andean children are sent by their parents to live in other households. At first glance, child circulation appears tantamount to child abandonment. When seen in that light, the practice is a violation of international norms regarding children’s rights, guidelines that the Peruvian state relies on in regulating legal adoptions. Leinaweaver demonstrates that such an understanding of the practice is simplistic and misleading. Her in-depth ethnographic analysis reveals child circulation to be a meaningful, pragmatic social practice for poor and indigenous Peruvians, a flexible system of kinship that has likely been part of Andean lives for centuries. Child circulation may be initiated because parents cannot care for their children, because a childless elder wants company, or because it gives a young person the opportunity to gain needed skills. Leinaweaver provides insight into the emotional and material factors that bring together and separate indigenous Andean families in the highland city of Ayacucho. She describes how child circulation is intimately linked to survival in the city, which has had to withstand colonialism, economic isolation, and the devastating civil war unleashed by the Shining Path. Leinaweaver examines the practice from the perspective of parents who send their children to live in other households, the adults who receive them, and the children themselves. She relates child circulation to international laws and norms regarding children’s rights, adoptions, and orphans, and to Peru’s history of racial conflict and violence. Given that history, Leinaweaver maintains that it is not surprising that child circulation, a practice associated with Peru’s impoverished indigenous community, is alternately ignored, tolerated, or condemned by the state.

Circulating Cultures is an edited book about the transformation of cultural materials through the Australian landscape. The book explores cultural circulation, exchange and transit, through events such as the geographical movement of song series across the Kimberley and Arnhem Land; the transformation of Australian Aboriginal dance in the hands of an American choreographer; and the indigenisation of symbolic meanings in heavy metal music. Circulating Cultures crosses disciplinary boundaries, with contributions from historians, musicologists, linguists and dance historians, to depict shifts of cultural materials through time, place and interventions from people. It looks at the way Indigenous and non-Indigenous performing arts have changed through intercultural influence and collaboration.

Transmitting and Circulating the Late Antique and Byzantine Worlds seeks to be a crucial contribution to the history of medieval connectedness.