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Kweku ‘Li’ Diaw is a jack of all trades pursuing his graduate degree in Visual Communication at Ohio University. The creative writer is a seasoned professional in Digital marketing & Advertising and moonlights under the pseudonym, Li, in the artistic world where rap, spoken word poetry, and music meet.
His passion for augmenting and enhancing the storytelling experience using visual media in tandem with writing spurred him on and gave him the ambition to embark on this creative project. As an avid anime fan, he researched and realized the need for visual documentation using photography and video to capture anime's mainstream status and impact.
With what he had learned in his grad program combined with his love for anime, he is pursuing this idea with hopes of creating a narrative that touches on inclusivity, diversity, and representation while showcasing the passion black people have for anime and their way of honoring it by engaging in cosplay culture.
In recent years, anime, a genre in Japanese media, has gained mainstream recognition for its potential to create powerful messages and address social issues. Its universal appeal is due to the recent successes of various anime franchises such as Attack on Titan, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Demon Slayer. Throughout its history, anime has faced criticism over stereotypical depictions of black characters and limited diversity. Black characters only started debuting on screen in the 2000s but were misrepresented. Because of its mainstream status, anime creators have worked to represent a more diverse range of characters, including those of different ethnicities, backgrounds, and body types.
This project explores the growing enthusiasm for Japanese anime within the African diaspora, focusing on cosplay culture. Through a photographic approach, the project will visually capture black individuals embodying anime personas, accompanied by interviews revealing their narratives. The research delves into the intersection of identity, representation, and cultural appreciation by examining the significance of diverse characters and the role of cosplay as a means of self-expression.