Books,Not Comics: Publishing Fields,Globalization, and Japanese Manga in the United States |
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| Authors: | Casey E Brienza |
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| Institution: | (1) Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University, 239 Greene Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10003, USA |
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| Abstract: | The market for Japanese comics, called manga, in the United States grew rapidly at the beginning of the twenty first century
at a rate unprecedented in the publishing industry. Sales grew a remarkable 350% from $60 million in 2002 to $210 million
in 2007 and did not begin to decline until the beginning of the recent economic downturn beginning in late 2008. No published
research is yet able to account for this phenomenon in a manner that is both socially-situated and medium-specific. In this
paper, I provide such a sociological account of the rise of manga in the United States and its implications for the globalization
of culture. Adapting Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical formulation of the cultural field, I argue that manga migrated from the
comics field to the book field and that the ways in which industry practices, distribution networks, and target demographics
differ between the two fields are directly responsible for the medium’s newfound visibility. Furthermore, I argue that, despite
the now-common transparency of the Japanese origin of Japanese titles, the American publishing industry’s creation of manga
as a category of books distinct from other comics is an ineluctable naturalizing process that ultimately erases from American
consciousness the Japanese, the foreign, the other.
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| Keywords: | Manga Comics Graphic novels Globalization American publishing Field theory Japan |
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