HUMA MPhil Thesis Presentation - Inside the Pirate Archive Community: Informal Circuits of Anime Consumption and Distribution in the Philippines

Abstract:

The growing role of the internet in relation to the distribution of cultural products like anime, coupled with lack of proper controls, has engendered a form of digital piracy culture in which a new generation of web users traverse the cyber terrain with very few written rules.

This thesis examines the instantiations of anime pirate archives with the engagement of fan communities in the Philippine cyberspace, folded within social media spaces such as Facebook and YouTube and archived on multiple free-tier cloud services. Japanese mecha, meisaku, and tokusatsu dubbed both in English and Tagalog, first broadcasted in the Philippine free TV structures in the 1970s, banned during the martial law and reintroduced back in 1990s until the early 2000s, have been brought back from obscurity by a legion of fans dedicated in media preservation through amateur cataloguing and curation.

Informed by Abigail De Kosnik’s work on rogue archives, this thesis rethinks the ontology of the archive as it renegotiates its meaning within a global technological diNusion that decentralizes control and fosters participatory culture. This thesis argues that early anime fan communities in the Philippines emerged out of necessity to circumvent martial law, with contemporary and non-compliant techno-practices like amateur pirate archiving reflecting this underground tradition. Engaging with Global South approaches on postcolonial theories and Third Cinema theories, this thesis aims to approach anime piracy outside a “copyright-centric critique” and investigates the implications of the pirate archive as a subversive form of exhibition and preservation, characterized by its informality, ephemerality, and precarity.