Cosplay deals with a community of Danish fans of Japanese popular culture whose fandom makes them distinctly identifiable as productive fans; namely fans who appropriate characters, story worlds and design from manga, anime and video games and who produce cosplay. It is argued that the Danish cosplayers constitute a confident, vibrant community, which sees itself in the midst of actualizing manga and Japanese media worlds against the backdrop of childhood and early youth literacies and intimacies.
Cosplay is the first publication in the four volume series East Asian popular culture in a transnational perspective: A National Museum of Denmark Collection.
What happens when anime, manga, video games & photo booths from Japan and South Korean pop music & comics flow into Denmark? This series explores issues pertaining to East Asian popular culture in a Danish context and asks what it can contribute to our understanding of cultural flows in an East/West perspective.
Martin Petersen is a senior researcher and curator of the East Asian collections at the National Museum of Denmark. His research focuses on East Asian popular culture and ethnographic museums. Recently, he has published on North Korean comics, Danish ethnographic expeditions and the Korean collection in the National Museum of Denmark. As a museum curator he works on exhibitions, events, podcasts, collection catalogues and more. He is also a comic book writer.
