The Valve - A Literary Organ | Robots as Subalterns 2: New Type

<< Exploring Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies | Front Page | Of a Postcolonial Persuasion >>

Thursday, April 02, 2009

Robots as Subalterns 2: New Type

Posted by Bill Benzon on 04/02/09 at 04:13 PM

This is a brief coda to my earlier essay on Osamu Tezuka’s thematic use of robots in Astro Boy. As I argued then, those stories are grounded in Tezuka’s experiences of discrimination during the post-war American occupation. In effect, the robots are proxies for the Japanese while the humans are proxies for the occupying forces.

But why deal with those relationships in this displaced and distanced way? Why not tell stories directly about relationships between Japanese and Americans and, in particular, about Americans abusing their power and authority as victors and occupiers? Without bothering to consider various possibilities, let me suggest one: The displacement allowed Tezuka to tell his stories free of historical entanglements.

In Astro Boy’s world the robots have a subaltern status, not because they lost a war, but because humans created them to serve humans. The robots are thus in no way complicit in or responsible for their situation, but they have to live through it. If this is so, then one might be tempted to critique Tezuka and his audience for evading and suppressing the moral and ethical complexities of Japanese history. Such evasions, after all, are common among us. But then, so are critiques of them.

I’m interested in something else. Are such evasions a necessary imaginative vehicle for escaping the recriminating action-reaction bonds of historical conflict? What have the Japanese done with the themes and motifs Tezuka developed in his Astro Boy stories? What is the world doing with the many and various worlds the Japanese have created in anime and manga? Does imaginative fiction give us the means to escape the old patterns and create new ones?

That is what Takashi Murakami seems to be suggesting in “Earth in my Window,” his long essay in Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (p. 148):

Robots are refined to a level at which they compensate for the inadequacy of human communication, expand human capabilities, and even possess self-consciousness. With the aid of such robots, humans can evolve into superhuman New Types. People themselves become a black hole: life in death, transformation, repeated mutation. Thought stops and the child never grows up. Sucked in by kawaii, you lose initiative, or laugh at your own lethargy and take a robot for a real-world partner. And yet, amidst it all, people awaken and evolve toward a new humanity.

Name:
Email:
Location:
URL:

Valve Links

Current Authors

Past Authors

Most recent articles

Most recent comments

Search:

Archives

Syndication

Validation

Credits

Blogroll

Thursday, April 02, 2009

Robots as Subalterns 2: New Type

Comments

Add a comment: