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Rayna Denison, Jinying Li, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: Geek-Otaku-Zhai, Screen, Volume 66, Issue 1, Spring 2025, Pages 141–144, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjaf013
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Extract
Since the advent of audience and fan studies there has a growing divide between theorised, abstracted notions of the film viewer and the accounts of filmgoing experiences drawn directly from audiences. In Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: Geek-Otaku-Zhai, Jinying Li offers us a new take on this split. Li’s transmedial and transnational analysis attempts to bridge this divide to provide us with a welcome perspective on Chinese anime fandom, mostly organised around the figure of the zhai (a term itself transnationally lifted from the Japanese for fan, otaku). In approaching zhai as an abstracted, theorised vision of geekdom while immersing herself in Chinese fandom’s particularities, Li draws together threads from both sides of the audience studies split.
Anime fandom is not an unknown country within scholarship. Sandra Annett’s excellent book Anime’s Fan Communities,1 for example, delves deeply into the emergence and history of local and overseas fandom for Japanese animation. Moreover, some of the world’s top fan studies scholars, from Henry Jenkins and Matt Hills to Hye-kyung Lee, Sean Leonard and James Russell, have studied varying aspects of anime fandom’s global significance. Most of this work appears in Li’s analysis of global geekdom, albeit sometimes fleetingly, but her starting point is notably different. Li begins her study of geekdom in Silicon Valley in the USA. It is this computing centre that Li cites as the source for the rise of global geek culture, rather than looking to the grassroots and fandom’s growth in science fiction conventions in the mid 20th century. In making the case for an alternative starting point for fan studies, Li offers a shift towards fandom as a global, abstracted and encompassing way of understanding media consumption. This is the essence of what Li terms ‘knowledge culture’, a product of geekdom’s work culture, or ‘knowledge work’, undertaken both as careers and as fan praxis.
