Dear List May I draw your attention to a book on intercultural aesthetics:
THE COOL-KAWAII: AFRO-JAPANESE AESTHETICS AND NEW WORLD MODERNITY (Lanham: Lexington, 2011) Cool and kawaii are expressions set against the oppressive homogenizations that occur within official modern cultures but are also catalysts of modernity. Cool and kawaii do not refer us back to a pre-modern ethnic past. Just like the cool African American man has almost no relationship with traditional African ideas about masculinity, the kawaii shojo is not the personification of the traditional Japanese ideal of the feminine, but signifies an ideological institution of women based on Japanese modernity in the Meiji period... More: http://botzbornstein.webs.com/books.htm Thank you very much Thorsten Botz-Bornstein Gulf University, Kuwait
