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This paper dealt with the representation of corporeity and the embodiment of mind as a condition in which the new subjectivity of the posthuman as a technology-mediated human being was manifested. Mamoru Oshii's ‘Ghost in the Shell’ (1995) was referred to showing countless possibilities and the destructive power of digital technology. This Japan-animation film showed how to think about corporeity as the basis for future humans to acquire new subjectivity and the problem of the identity of cybernetic beings as living things. In particular, this paper focused on two analyses. First, the language of reproduction was analyzed, how were portrayed Kusanagi as a cyborg and the Puppet master as the artificial intelligence program. It was critically examined how the language of humanism employs mechanical and technological living things as weapons by dualizing them into body and intelligence. Second, the process of the ‘convergence’ as a way of defying human commands and transcending their limitations was analyzed. This attempt shed light on the struggle of the two artificial creatures which freed themselves from Anthropocentrism and sought to obtain their uniqueness as an independent being. In this study, the meaning of convergence and the self-determination of artificial beings as hybrid beings that embrace others—concepts that have not been thoroughly explained—are explored.

Mexican novelist Carmen Boullosa's Cielos de la tierra (1997) and La novela perfecta (2006) reflect the ambivalence of human in the post-human era. The novels explore the positive value of the post-human as a complex, multifaceted, and fluid subject, highlighting the cyborg's hybridity while containing the risk that control might be given to the machine, the moment machine and human are physically merged. While the traditional human body symbolizes sexual polarization and gender dichotomy based on Eurocentrism, the hybridity of cyborg decolonizes the subject in the domination of dualism. This paper focuses on how the 'hybridity' of cyborg represents the transitional state of the human-machine union and discusses the balance between the technological others and human. Also, this paper examines how cyborgs blurred the boundary between material and immaterial and how the hybrid body changed the symbolic meaning of the biological body of humans. Lastly, this paper illustrates the distinction between human and machines through historical and creative writing to find the unique values ​​of human in the post-human era.

In this paper, the tourism village creation project was reviewed using historical resources that the Japanese government is actively promoting. This project aimed to solve Japan's aging and vacant house problems and revitalize the region as a whole. As a result of the project, old buildings in the region are used as accommodation facilities, restaurants, and experience centers, playing a major role in the influx of local populations, revitalizing the tourism industry, and creating jobs. In this paper, the nature of the project was first identified. Factors that allowed the project to succeed, and various cases were then analyzed to derive implications. Among the implications, it was important to make good use of the historical meaning and value of old buildings in the region. Additionally, it was important that the government agreed to promote the project in each region rather than doing so independently, and that close public-private cooperation was carried out. It is noteworthy that they focused on the goal of “Connecting financial and public support; Regulatory and institutional reform; Human resources; Local government linkage”. They implemented budget support and expert advice, and actively promoted to gain understanding and cooperation from local governments and residents.

Piero della Francesca's Flagellation of Christ (1445-78) is the most outstanding work among Renaissance paintings in which the various meanings and narrative functions of the second frame stand out. Piero della Francesca, who is regarded as a true perfectionist of perspective in painting, made painting into a space of complex and exciting sign action by using accurate perspective and clever second frame arrangement. The various second frames arranged in the picture primarily serve to further reinforce the sense of depth and space created by perspective, and function as a visual boundary and a formative frame at the same time. In particular, the ancient-style patterns and motifs added to and engraved on the second frame as a formative frame express the Renaissance spirit of the revival of the ancient Greek and Roman styles, and at the same time contribute to strengthening the ‘three-dimensionality’ of the painting. In addition, the second frame plays a role in attracting the audience's gaze and emphasizing the meaning of the elements inside. In this painting, Jesus Christ and Pontius Pilate were arranged in small sizes on the left rear side away from the center of the painting, but their existence and characteristics were emphasized as much as in other works thanks to the second frame that cleverly induces the viewer's gaze. Furthermore, in this figure, the second frame performs the mediating function, which is an essential function of the frame. The main entrance of the building, which is the largest second frame of the painting, plays a kind of spatial mediating role, and the inside and outside of the building are connected through the morphological similarity between the figures, and thus two heterogeneous events are placed in a close relationship. In addition, the second frame also performs a temporal mediating function together with the frame, because the gaze of the characters who are connected to each other inside and outside the second frame beyond the chronological difference goes outside the frame and leads to the gaze of the future audience looking at the picture.

This paper explored the restoration and transformation of the traditional oral literature in African contemporary literature, especially in the genre of novels. These narrative devices from the oral tradition stand out for their focus on storytelling rather than the subject matters or contents dealt with in traditional literature. With regard to the contrast between an oral tradition and the contemporary literature in storytelling, this paper focused on the status of the narrator and the narrative style in the way of analyzing Ahmadou Kourouma's novel Allah n'est pas obligé. First of all, the status of the difficult narrator worked as a narrative device that makes appeals directly to the audience (reader) and induces communication with the audience (reader) by setting up dialogic situations in various ways. On the other hand, the subjective voice of the narrator-hero was regarded as a narrative strategy to achieve the author's ideological purpose of revealing and reflecting the reality of African society. As for the narrative style, in this novel, three major methods - circularity, repetition, and orality - were prominent. This novel demonstrated how circular logic affects the work in a variety of ways by adopting a narrative structure where its beginning and concluding parts overlapped. In addition, the repetition of various forms - vocabulary, expressions, sentences, narrative sequences, narrative structures - can be said to be a typical oral narrative method from the oral tradition. The oral characteristics of the narrative act itself also appeared in various forms such as interrogative sentences, exclamations, parentheses, and proverbs. It was shown that Kourouma’s writing strategy in adopting the way of oral storytelling was effective in conveying the messages he wanted to the reader.

This article analyzed the ways in which the representation of death due to the operation of trains changes in response to three periods that marked large fluctuations in immigration flows from Mexico and Central America. It aims to reveal that the violence of the train that causes immediate or consequential death of the migrants can also be approached from the perspective of mobility, identicality, and speed. In this study, the contradictory experiences with trains that go against their nature and purpose are transformed into the violence of the train, which recurs throughout many historical periods. The three works studied in this article, such as Norte by Edmundo Paz Soldán and Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, and the movie ‘Alambrista’ by Robert Young, reveal how trains as a space along with the rail tracks demonstrate the biological power of the state and the capitalistic logic of accumulation through exploit, repression, mobility, and speed. Each work revealed how the free mobility was ironically cooperative with the violence of forced migration and how a slow mode of freight train, rather than a fast vehicle, was paradoxically beneficial in an economy of exploitation. Ultimately, this study examined how the voices of the authors deepened the madness, imprisonment, vulnerability, and insecurity, expanding them to a more existential level, making the train journeys resemble a modern odyssey to death.

The paper presents an examination of the characteristics and correspondence between the Korean morphological causative expressions and the Chinese unmarked causative expressions. The [animateness] of the causers and causes of Korean causative expressions are the main topics of an analysis of the characteristics of Korean morphological causative sentences. However, in Chinese unmarked causative sentences, there is a lot of freedom in how the maker and made subject are distributed. Based on this, a controlled linguistic view is used to compare and elaborate the correspondence between Korean and Chinese causative sentences. Through comparative analysis, it was found that Korean morphological causative sentences can be divided into direct causatives and indirect causatives according to the lexical meaning of causative verbs. But the Chinese unmarked causative sentences are all direct actuation. To investigate the two languages of the causers and causes of the [animateness] and direct and indirect causative or not, the active word was an adjective or intransitive verb or not, require to be familiar with its lexical meaning and grammar knowledge.

This paper analyzes the distorted representation in American popular culture against Asian and Asian American women, and the historical context and significance of Asian American artists' resistance in their artistic activities. Asian descents in the USA have been treated as invisible or heterogeneous in the dichotomous racial structure of American society based on black-and-white opposition, and it has been repeated in the most popular media such as TV and movies in a way that represents Asian women as peripheral or excessively sexual exotic beings. Sexual objectification, represented as a sexy but dangerous ‘Dragon Lady’ or a sexually obedient ‘Lotus Baby’, is a stereotype of prostitution transplanted for labor exploitation of Asian men in the 19th century or due to the United States' involvement in the 20th century Asian Wars. It has been reproduced for a long time without reflecting the reality of Asian women as mostly laborers who played an indispensible role in the U.S. industrial development at that time. Asian American artists, playwrights, and filmmakers have all made attempts to address inaccurate depictions of Asians, but until Asian female creators actively intervened, preconceptions of Asian women remained unabated. The increase of verified characters of Asian women was related to the emergence of video streaming services which had the strategy of specifying minority issues, the spread of social networking, and the interest in female stories triggered by Hollywood's ‘Me Too’ movement in the mid-2010s. Above all, female creators who have begun to see the light in such technical and social changes played a significant role regaining normality in the representation of Asian women. Through their participation, Asian women are now being represented as they go through various characters and life journeys rather than one-dimensional sexual objects, reflecting the reality of Asian women little by little.

This essay explores how Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves deals with the issue of justice concerning the colonial history of the Ojibwes and what its significance is. This study argues that the novel provides ‘reparative justice’ as a leitmotif at an historical level as well as at a judicial level. First, this study explores how Anishinaabe tribal justice is carried out in Ojibwe judge Coutts’ peacemaking court, using the Anishinaabe traditional concept of mino-bimaadiziwin (the Good Life) as its foundation. Second, this study elucidates how the novel highlights the importance of remembering in order to disclose long-misconceived historical truth and to accuse whites of “mob violence” against Native Americans. The novel’s multifaceted and intricate approach to reparative justice anticipates the Native Americans regaining their own sovereignty, healing, and persistent survival.

This study applying Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) analyzed the discourse practices in which the “China Threat” raised by the United States. and NATO in the face of the Ukraine-Russia War has been transferred to the “NATO Threat” by the Global Times editorials. The five editorials of the Global Times related to “China Threat” and “NATO’s Asia-Pacific Expansion” addressed by United States and NATO were selected as sources for target analysis. First, this study described and interpreted the ways in which the editorials publicly named and shamed the United States and NATO countries during the war. Second, the features and aspects for which the editorials blamed the U.S. and NATO were analyzed, not because Russia invaded Ukraine but because the United States and NATO started the war. Third, the Chinese strategy that aims to divide and conquer NATO and related countries separately through the editorials against NATO's Asia-Pacific Expansion were explained. The results revealed the processes in which China has constructed counter-ideology, “Inviting the Wolf into the Room” against NATO’s Asia-Pacific Expansion. The social and cultural practices that have constructed the orders of discourse in the editorials display the patterns that the United States vs. China conflict has expanded through the Ukraine-Russia war to the U.S.-NATO vs. China-Russia conflict.