Project MUSE®: Mechademia - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/461
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Mechademia.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2006) through current issueLatest Articles: MechademiaTWOProject MUSE®Mechademia2152-66481934-2489Latest articles in Mechademia. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976610
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In times as treacherous, fast-paced, and delirious as the present, stories about endings abound. Once it was continuity into a progressively better future that, the earmark of modernity, whetted personal and national dreams. But today, movement toward a not-yet tomorrow gets mired in a present where the demands of livelihood strain the individual as well as community/collective bonds. Whether due to a shortage of housing or jobs, extreme climate disaster and global warming, the politics of polarization and surveillance, the precarity of migration and citizenship, or the scarcity of care and human connectedness—all phenomena that are globally, if unequally, shared—everydayness can be as all-consuming as it is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/461/image/coversmallIntroduction2025-12-11text/htmlen-USIntroduction2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®282642026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Going Berserk: Negations of Death and Embodying the Already Dead
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976611
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Set against a pseudo-medieval backdrop rich in dark fantasy influences, Berserk (1989, Beruseruku) follows the adventures of Guts through friendship, love, despair, and vengeance. While the seeming absence of hope might at first glance suggest a lesser engagement with utopia, I suggest that Berserk's utopian qualities are made much stronger precisely because despair and dystopia—the polar opposites of hope and utopia—constitute the foundations of the narrative. Because such dystopian qualities drive the narrative, Berserk stays with the struggle of negation. In doing so, I argue that Berserk's commitment to the process of negation is defined by the embodiment of the already dead in narrative and in form.Few would
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/461/image/coversmallGoing Berserk: Negations of Death and Embodying the Already Dead2025-12-11text/htmlen-USGoing Berserk: Negations of Death and Embodying the Already Dead2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®672972026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Stranding Our Fractured Society: Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding (2019) and Building Bridges in Times of Political Despair
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976612
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The extinction isn't just an ending. It's an opportunity.The winter of 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, was when I bore witness to three kinds of death.The first was everywhere, plastered across the news in chilling images of overcrowded hospital rooms, mortuaries filled beyond capacity, and bodies stored in refrigerated trucks along the roadside. Each photo was a blaring warning that the world was unraveling in an unprecedented catastrophe. From a hastily rented room in Singapore, I scrolled through these scenes while attending 3:00 a.m. classes hosted by my Chicago-based institution, struggling to process the sight of so much death. My tiny sanctuary was a makeshift space partitioned from a larger
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/461/image/coversmallStranding Our Fractured Society: Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding (2019) and Building Bridges in Times of Political Despair2025-12-11text/htmlen-USStranding Our Fractured Society: Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding (2019) and Building Bridges in Times of Political Despair2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®898462026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11The Enemy Is Us: Twenty-First-Century Anxieties and the Imperial Past in Asano Inio's Dead Dead Demons
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976613
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Manga artist Asano Inio is known for offbeat and experimental expression. For example, his most famous manga, Goodnight Punpun (2007, Oyasumi Punpun) features a protagonist drawn as a sort of hastily scribbled duck in a world that is otherwise rendered in great detail, and sometimes features photos and other kinds of collage. In this essay I examine his more recent series Deddo Deddo Dēmonzu De De De De Desutorakushon (Dead dead demons de de de de destruction, published in English as Dead Dead Demon's Dededede Destruction; cited hereafter a Dead Dead Demons), serialized in Big Comic Spirits from 2014 to 2022. It was also developed into a two-part animated feature film in 2024. In the manga, Asano moves to a more
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/461/image/coversmallThe Enemy Is Us: Twenty-First-Century Anxieties and the Imperial Past in Asano Inio's Dead Dead Demons2025-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Enemy Is Us: Twenty-First-Century Anxieties and the Imperial Past in Asano Inio's Dead Dead Demons2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®806232026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Spectral Spectators: Interactive Screening and Haunting Bodies in The First Slam Dunk
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976614
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They told me he died over the phone. And I once thought break-up texts were bad.I never expected the death of a loved one to be such a heavily mediated affair. A body wrapped in bandages, locked away in a coffin. A big photo in the funeral hall suddenly meant to represent him. The warmth of the urn as it was taken from me and locked behind a glass panel. Suddenly he was no longer a body but an image, a multiplicity of mediatized images that claimed to represent him piecemeal.Death, during his funeral, became a transformation of a body into an image.Through this loss I came to understand death as a progressive state of disembodiment. Death is a state of being without a body now and forever. In this sense, the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/461/image/coversmallSpectral Spectators: Interactive Screening and Haunting Bodies in The First Slam Dunk2025-12-11text/htmlen-USSpectral Spectators: Interactive Screening and Haunting Bodies in The First Slam Dunk2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®824512026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11The Spectral Bond, or, Phandom: Rethinking Minjung and Fandom Through Holograms
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976615
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On March 14, 2024, on the eve of its closing after 33 years, musicians and actors gathered at the Hakchŏn Blue Theater (hereafter referred to as Hakchŏn) for a concert in honor of the theater's contributions to Korean society. In the finale, as the performers sang "Morning Dew" (Ach'im isŭl), an anthem about the fight for justice in South Korea composed by Kim Min-gi, the audience immediately began to sing along.1 As the chief director of the theater since its opening in 1991, Kim had curated the majority of its performances, which is extremely unusual in the Korean theater industry, in which most theaters profit by renting out their spaces to other franchises. However, Hakchŏn itself never foregrounded specific
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/461/image/coversmallThe Spectral Bond, or, Phandom: Rethinking Minjung and Fandom Through Holograms2025-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Spectral Bond, or, Phandom: Rethinking Minjung and Fandom Through Holograms2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®749792026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11A Virtual Funeral in the Hands of the Family
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976616
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Opening Zoom on her iPad, she began the remote call with her little sister in Tokyo. Right away she pointed the camera at the face of the deceased, allowing a "face-to-face meeting." The two sisters conversed while looking at the expression of their grandmother, who had died of old age peacefully in her sleep.Grandma looks pretty, doesn't she? So smooth! Her skin. … Her skin is so pretty!!It really is smooth!I hope I turn out like that too. … It really is incredible. Did Grandma not have wrinkles?It looks that way, doesn't it? Really, she's super pretty!This scene is from the "virtual (remote) funeral" conducted by the grandchildren of a woman who passed away near the end of 2023, at the age of ninety-six. The
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/461/image/coversmallA Virtual Funeral in the Hands of the Family2025-12-11text/htmlen-USA Virtual Funeral in the Hands of the Family2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®882092026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Writing (and Reading) One's Own Death: Etō Jun and Yamada Hanako in 1990s Japan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976617
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Nothing more remains to be said. Or I would have to begin again with the situation "before the leap." And everything would repeat, without an end, like a canon, a song that no one completely sings to the end.In this passage, the German writer, Holocaust and suicide survivor Jean Améry gestures to the end—both the end of his story and the end of his life. These words appear in his fourth and final installment of a radio address, On Suicide, that he delivered to the German public after his first suicide attempt, and two years prior to his eventual death by suicide in October 1978. Yet, as Améry suggests, this ending is also a beginning. Like a canon, a cyclical song or "round," it repeats over and over, the end only
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/461/image/coversmallWriting (and Reading) One's Own Death: Etō Jun and Yamada Hanako in 1990s Japan2025-12-11text/htmlen-USWriting (and Reading) One's Own Death: Etō Jun and Yamada Hanako in 1990s Japan2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®683442026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11