Graphic Fictions of Japanese Immigration to Brazil: “Pop Cosmopolitan” Mobility and the Disjunctive Temporalities of Migration

Abstract

The cultural celebrations of Japanese immigration to Brazil in 2008 were dominated by a discourse that connected this immigrant presence in the country to the increasingly global popu-larity of Japanese pop culture. A number of texts and exhibitions that set out to memorialize this immigrant history in Brazil both construct Japanese immigrant identity in terms of unchanging tradition and associate it with what Henry Jenkins describes as the “pop cosmopolitanism” of global anime and manga fan culture.1 In the “Tokyogaqui” exhibition held in Sao Paulo and the special edition of the comic book magazine Front discussed in the Introduction, Japanese culture in Brazil is presented as being at once sedentary, deeply connected to the land, and both the symbol and agent of untethered global mobility. The focus of the present chapter is the way in which a strong tendency in the centenary celebrations attempted to inscribe the history of Japanese immigration into a version of Brazilian identity suitable to an era of pop cosmopolitanism. The texts that I will explore are explicitly concerned with the connection between Japanese immigration and changing conceptions of Brazilian national identity. The paradoxical attempt to at once reproduce and capture discursively the movement and flux associated with Japanese postmodern culture is, I argue, part of a wider discursive strategy to forge a flexible national identity suitable to an age of neoliberal multiculturalism. The hesitation between imposing continuity on identities and accommodating flexibility is a central characteristic of the discourse of virtual orientalism that I am tracing right through this book.