Virtual Orientalism in Brazilian Culture

Virtual Orientalism in Brazilian Culture explores orientalist discourse in Brazil as an expression of anxieties about the re-structuring of time and space in the digital age. This book discusses representations of Japan in Brazilian culture, which emerge in relation both to the history of Japanese immigration to the country and to the increasingly global interest in manga and anime. These orientalist texts hesitate between contrasting notions of identity. They express both a nostalgia for the imagined stabilities of national modes of identification and a desire to challenge dominant conceptions of race and national belonging through an exploration of the virtualities of time and space opened up by information technologies. An analysis of this contradictory discourse through a range of cultural texts, from experimental haiku poetry and contemporary novels to graphic fiction published to mark the centenary of Japanese immigration, provides a crucial insight into changing conceptions of modernity in Brazil.