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The Cool-Kawaii - Afro-Japanese Aesthetics and New World Modernity (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,719
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The Cool-Kawaii - Afro-Japanese Aesthetics and New World Modernity (Hardcover)
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At the turn of the millennium, international youth culture is
dominated by mainly two types of aesthetics: the African American
cool, which, propelled by Hip-Hop music, has become the world's
favorite youth culture; and the Japanese aesthetics of kawaii or
cute, that is distributed internationally by Japan's powerful anime
industry. The USA and Japan are cultural superpowers and global
trendsetters because they make use of two particular concepts that
hide complex structures under their simple surfaces and are
difficult to define, but continue to fascinate the world: cool and
kawaii. The Cool-Kawaii: Afro-Japanese Aesthetics and New World
Modernity, by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, analyzes these attitudes and
explains the intrinsic powers that are leading to a fusion of both
aesthetics. Cool and kawaii are expressions set against the
oppressive homogenizations that occur within official modern
cultures, but they are also catalysts of modernity. Cool and kawaii
do not refer us back to a pre-modern ethnic past. Just like the
cool African American man has almost no relationship with
traditional African ideas about masculinity, the kawaii shojo is
not the personification of the traditional Japanese ideal of the
feminine, but signifies an ideological institution of women based
on Japanese modernity in the Meiji period, that is, a feminine
image based on westernization. At the same time, cool and kawaii do
not transport us into a futuristic, impersonal world of
hypermodernity based on assumptions of constant modernization. Cool
and kawaii stand for another type of modernity, which is not
technocratic, but rather "Dandyist" and closely related to the
search for human dignity and liberation."
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