Mechademia 3: Limits of the Human is the third in the series edited by Frenchy Lunning and published by the University of Minnesota Press whose contributors to this volume are William L. Benzon, Lawrence Bird, Christopher Bolton, Steven T. Brown, Joshua Paul Dale, Otsuka Eiji, Michael Dylan Foster, Crispin Freeman, Natsume Fusanosuke, Marc Hairston, Yomota Inuhiko, Paul Jackson, Thomas LaMarre, Antonia Levi, Margherita Long, Laura Miller, Hajime Nakatani, Susan Napier, Sharalyn Orbaugh, Adèle-Elise Prévost, Teri Silvio, Takayuki Tatsumi, Mark C. Taylor, Theresa Winge, Cary Wolfe, Wendy Siuyi Wong, and the editor. As such, it makes a timely and thought-provoking addition to the new posthumanities. As Lunning notes in the Preface, Mechademia 3 is “a map of the terrain of the new humanities, using the cast of characters created for anime and manga as guides” (p. xi). Ably blending high theory and popular culture, the volume's contributors provide a greater understanding of Japanese animation and fan arts and question the boundaries between the human and the Other, be it machine, animal or somewhat else, in a fashion that will engage both academics and the casual reader.

Where Mechademia 3 excels, however, is in presenting extra-textual material not often presented in other journals, even those dealing with fan cultures and fan-created cultural products. Theresa Winge's “Undressing and Dressing Loli: A Search for the Identity of the Japanese Lolita” (pp. 47–63), for example, examines fashion as an expression of personal identity, as well as how that constructed identity accounts for what “Lolita” means to Western culture from an Eastern perspective. The term itself refers to Vladimir Nabokov's novel of a middle-aged man's affair with his pre-teen stepdaughter, though Winge proposes that the Japanese Lolitas, or “Lolis,” are speaking less to an overtly sexualized appearance than they are to historical anachronism. The Lolita subculture effectively mashes up both Victorian children's fashion details such as bows, ruffles, high necklines and multiple petticoats or crinolines with Japan's own Hello Kitty and the kawaii culture of cuteness to “present themselves anachronistically in order to escape the trappings of adult life and with it the culture's dominant ideologies” (Winge p. 48). Winge's overview of the history of this subcultural movement acknowledges its broader cultural implications for both East and West.

In a similar vein, Teri Silvio's “Pop Culture Icons: Religious Inflections of the Character Toy in Taiwan” (pp. 200–220) investigates the intersections of religious iconography, capitalism, globalism, and participatory fan cultures. Indeed, the term “pop culture icon” takes on an entirely new significance in Silvio's essay, which outlines the merging of religious iconography and mass production. She contends that religious traditions “provide an important lens through which people interpret the transformations of capitalism, even (or especially) in places where those traditions are already objects of nostalgia” (p. 203). Silvio's ethnographic analysis, in the context of a society with a long history of iconographic integration into religious practices provides a unique perspective on the re-appropriation of manga and anime product tie-ins by their Taiwanese fans. She proposes to not only examine the politics of the wide availability of these icons, but also to compare how Taiwanese “worshippers” (p. 203) interact with the icons (and other collectors), and the global implications of the Taiwanese experience.

Silvio's study participants are young and tend to view icon worship in general as “a nostalgic cultural tradition” (p. 204) rather than as an integral part of their personal or social identity. Silvio posits that this “domestic background” (p. 204) approach to belief assists in the transformation from mass-produced toy into a religious icon. While mass production is considered by Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard as contributing to a loss of “aura” and a devaluation of the original object, or a disconnection from an originating signifier, Taiwanese collectors or worshippers opine that mass production in fact increases the icon's power. Mass production proves the “charisma” (p. 216) of the original character, and is consistent with religious traditions in which the god can become fully embodied and also manifest in that same body in more than one place simultaneously. Silvio's essay foregrounds the numerous ways by which Taiwanese toy-icon worshippers reconcile their religious practice with the initial manga or programs the toys are taken from, integrating the elements of mass production in a way that is not inherently negative, to enhance and not subtract meaning or significance.

Mechademia 3 includes non-traditional academic work as both “Komatopia” by Natsume Fusanosuke (pp. 65–72) and “The Signal of Noise” by Adele-Elise Prevost (pp. 173–188) present history and visual theory in manga form. Natsume provides an engaging overview of the history of visual techniques in manga storytelling, and more particularly how the use (or breaking) of the frame evolved. Prevost in particular explores issues of memory, identity, and digital media, presenting the digital realm as both “the end of indexicality” (p. 188), but also “a potential beginning of great things” (p. 188). This hybrid art-essay is both beautifully illustrated and theoretically sound. The compilation also offers more standard essays on a range of topics on Japanese animation and manga, dealing more specifically with the non-human, either animal or machine, and what it means for the posthumanities to blur the line between human and non-human. As Cary Wolfe posits in his “Postscript” (p. 255), posthumanism can be defined as “the ability to think about a variety of phenomena—phenomena that were previously lodged in ontologically or epistemologically discrete domains—in terms of dynamic, complex, non-linear systems” (p. 255). As such, Mechademia 3 pushes the limits of the human and the non-human for a greater understanding of both.