Download or read book Fairies, Ghosts, and Santa Claus written by Neriko Musha Doerr and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-11-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigating the politics of seeing and its effects, this book draws on Slavoj Žižek’s notion of fetish and Walter Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious to offer newer concepts: “tinted glasses”, through which we see the world; “unit-thinking”, which renders the world as consisting of discrete units; and “coherants”, which help fragmented experiences cohere into something intelligible. Examining experiences at a Japanese heritage language school, a study-abroad trip to Sierra Leone, as well as in college classrooms, this book reveals the workings of unit-thinking and fetishism in diverse contexts and explores possibilities for social change.