Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"Marvin D. Sterling sensitively portrays the wide range of Japanese reggae dancehall practitioners, from chart-topping stars such as Miki Dōzan to underground pioneers such as Rankin' Taxi, as well as Junko Kudo, the unlikely winner of Jamaica's premier dance-diva contest. Along the way, we get to know the urban musicians who make up the traveling groups known as sound systems, as well as 'Japanese Rastafari' in the countryside. By considering Japanese youth who travel to Jamaica on journeys of self-discovery and the Jamaicans who sometimes look ambivalently on the explosion of the reggae scene in Japan, Sterling completes an engaging circle of analysis in this fascinating and insightful book."--Ian Condry, author of "Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Babylon East

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface....................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments............................................................................................xiiiIntroduction...............................................................................................11 The Politics of Presence PERFORMING BLACKNESS IN JAPAN..................................................352 Music and Orality AUTHENTICITY IN JAPANESE SOUND SYSTEM CULTURE.........................................613 Fashion and Dance PERFORMING GENDER IN JAPAN'S REGGAE DANCE SCENE.......................................1014 Body and Spirit RASTAFARIAN CONSCIOUSNESS IN RURAL JAPAN................................................1435 Text and Image BAD JAMAICANS, TOUGH JAPANESE, AND THE THIRD WORLD "SEARCH FOR SELF".....................1916 Jamaican Perspectives on Jamaican Culture in Japan.......................................................223Notes......................................................................................................257Bibliography...............................................................................................267Index......................................................................................................281

Chapter One

How have Jamaicans and Japanese, their islands oceans apart, come into the kinds of contact that have made Jamaican culture so popular in Japan? What are the cultural, historical, and ideological vectors along which this distance is traversed? How, specifically, are the ideas about blackness that inhere in Jamaican culture worked through in Japan? In this chapter, I provide a context for my argument that the various terms in which the idea of blackness has circulated around the world have a significant impact on the consumption and reproduction of Jamaican culture in Japan. In doing so I focus on the case of Afro-Jamaican popular culture, I argue that blackness as encoded in these popular-cultural movements represents a flexible, often performatively realized metaphor through which black as well as nonblack peoples in a range of global sites voice their various sociopolitical concerns. I argue that much of the variability in how blackness is constructed around the world turns importantly on racial demography-specifically the relative presence of black people-in a given site. I focus this discussion on performativities of blackness in Japan, given their relevance to my explorations of Jamaican popular culture in the country.

Perspectives on Global Blackness

Especially over the last two decades, globalization has come to exert a powerful influence on processes of cultural production and consumption. This influence is one of accelerated flows of people and commodities, of capital and information within an increasingly interlinked global economy (Appadurai 1996; Clifford 1997). Ideas also transcend national boundaries. One of these is that of blackness.

The presence of the modern racial idea of blackness on the international stage, however, is not particular to the current era of globalization. One aspect of the historical construction of global blackness-the worldwide movement of black peoples, as well as of the dynamic complex of cultural and ideological expression associated with black peoples-is the notion of diaspora (Gilroy 1993; Roach 1996). Black people were originally categorized as such according to a Western scientific regime employed in part to morally justify their abduction from Africa and enslavement throughout the New World. Rastafarians, roots reggae musicians, and many dancehall musicians (Luciano, Capleton, Sizzla, and Anthony B) invoke the diaspora as the ancestral memory of this uprooting and the desire for repatriation to the continent. The religious and musical movements that have valorized Africa and called for pan-African unity have developed great followings throughout much of the continent (Savishinsky 1994). They also effect a sense of political and cultural community among black people in places where the diaspora intersects with the metropolitan West, including such sites of Jamaican immigration as New York (Manuel and Marshall 2006) and London (Cashmore 1983).

In addition to the diaspora, a second-related, and more recently ascendant-dimension of the scholarship on blackness around the world concerns the politicization of black identity in Latin America (Green 2007; Harris 1993; Lewis 1995; Wade 1995; Whitten and Torres 1998). Of concern is how peoples of African descent in this region have come to claim this heritage not only against domestic valorization of whiteness and/or racial mixedness, but also across national boundaries. Many Afro-Latin peoples have seen in roots reggae and Rastafari internationally recognizable modes through which to performatively realize their racial political identities-both long-standing and emergent, deeply felt and opportunistic-as black citizens. The renowned Brazilian band and cultural group AfroReggae uses the popularity of reggae and other African diasporic music as a way of addressing issues of social justice-urban poverty, police brutality, and drug violence-that have long faced Afro-Brazilian peoples (Yudice 2001). Maroons in Suriname, French Guiana, and Colombia have used reggae music as a way of communicating their sense of kinship with black people not only in Jamaica and their own countries but also in other parts of the African diaspora (Bilby 1999, 2000).

A third recent perspective on global blackness is one which to date remains almost entirely disconnected from the scholarship mentioned above on blackness internationally: work on race in modern East Asia. In this literature, the assumption that race as a Western notion does not apply to Asia gives way to analysis of clear manifestations of racial thinking in the region, including Japan's racializations of its Asian colonial subjects (Robertson 1998; Tamanoi 2000). This broad body of literature also includes works dealing with blackness, such as those on the Afro-Asian (Gallicchio 2000; Jones 2001; Jones and Singh 2003; Mullen 2004; Prashad 2001; Raphael-Hernandez and Steen 2006). These are usually critical-theoretical analyses, as well as cultural and political histories of African and Asian peoples' encounters within international spaces structured by Western power. Another vein within this work on race in East Asia that is relevant to blackness explores the contemporary encounter between blacks and Asians in East Asia (Russell 1991a, 1991b, 1991c, 1998; Sautman 1994), and to this extent as understood from an East Asian perspective.

Mapping Global Blackness

Given this sense of Asia's disconnection from discussions about blackness in the modern world, it might be useful to identify some criteria with which to map, if only at this point in a broad way, discursive construction of blackness globally. One possible approach is to group countries according to their historical relations to black transatlantic slavery. In doing so, one also groups these countries according to the relative numbers of black people resident in each country. By extension, this...