Corrected: Anime and identity, desire and monstrosity, and scarcity in Silesia
Hello, subscribers. Yesterday there was a wrong link under the Guernica story at the bottom. Here is an updated version of the newsletter with the correct link. My apologies for the error!
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FMA and Me: Reckoning With Anime as Japanese and American
by Nina Coomes (Art by Bones Studio/JNN)
“Sometimes I wonder if I would have watched as much anime as I did if I hadn’t grown up in the United States. If I’d lived my whole life in Japan, everything on television would have been Japanese: the news, dramas, baseball games, each noisy and colorful commercial. I wouldn’t have found myself lonely in front of the television set, relegated to only anime when I wanted to hear the language spoken."
In All the History of Wanting
by Lishani Ramanayake (art by Liz Asch)
"As a child, I wanted to erase the stillness that hung between my parents, the silent sadness that filled the house I grew up in. I wanted my family to be enough for my mother, and my want eclipsed hers. I wanted her to stop wanting for herself, and when she didn’t, I couldn’t forgive her for it."
Shock Therapy
by Ania Spyra (Photo by Jakub Pabis on Unsplash)
"Sometime later, the post-communist restructuring would also render my father jobless. But in the early 1990s, he was still employed in construction, as he had been his whole working career. As a procurement manager at a state-owned construction company, he knew that the few new houses going up in our town were too expensive for the average Pole. Meanwhile, the cheap workers’ hotels—and the institutions that ran them, the massive, outdated factories and agricultural collectives—were closing down, leaving over three million people unemployed and scores more unhoused (their numbers are less clear; they were purposefully uncounted). Even those lucky enough to hold on to their jobs, like my parents, were either not being paid, because the state that employed them was bankrupt, or saw their income and savings melt down to nothing with the inflation, which was racing at a speed that took everyone’s breath away. "
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