Marvin D. Sterling is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University.

Babylon East

PERFORMING, DANCEHALL, ROOTS REGGAE AND RASTAFARI IN JAPANBy MARVIN D. STERLING

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4705-7

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

The Politics of Presence PERFORMING BLACKNESS IN JAPAN

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 allows a discussion of the terms under which the humanity of black people is realized in interpersonal terms or is more fully the province of the mass media, with all the complexities both possibilities imply.

Applying this historicized politics of presence to explore global blackness -with examples from the Afro-Jamaican case-three broad regions present themselves. The first is the so-called peripheral (Wallerstein 1974) societies of Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. Here there are significant numbers of black people, who nevertheless have had to struggle with the direct as well as the indirect legacies of colonial rule to develop stable political and economic infrastructures. While largely or even predominantly composed of black people, these societies are often dominated by a minority of white, light-complexioned, or otherwise Western-identified peoples. This elite is often committed to the notion of nationhood not so much out of a sense of democracy but rather because, on the most practical level, it provides a structure through which to preserve and augment their power. In these countries, nationhood can be celebrated through Afrocentric cultural institutions that often offer the black citizen only symbolic investment in the nation, as these institutions are primarily managed by and reflect the interests of the neocolonial elite. Even in predominantly black countries, the conditions of European privilege and black marginalization, and of agentive Western selfhood and objectified black otherness, linger. Some Rastafarians question a national independence based on the motto, “Out of Many, One People,” since about 92 percent of Jamaica’s population is of African descent, and since, for these Rastas, such a motto unduly privileges Jamaica’s upper socioeconomic classes, a relatively large percent of whose members are of lighter complexion.

A second set of countries in which discourses of blackness may be seen as critically informed by racial demography are the so-called core countries, in which formerly colonized black people live as minorities among former colonizers. These include the countries of Western Europe and North America. In the case of the United States, the majority of the black population has been living in the country for several generations; in the case of Western Europe, most of this population arrived after the Second World War from the former colonial “periphery.” For its part, Europe has had to come to terms with the arrival of black peoples from Africa and the Caribbean (as well as peoples from Asia) with the independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s. One dimension of how blackness is constructed in Afrocentric Rastafari overseas has been its status among the children of Jamaicans immigrating to Britain immediately after the Second World War as a means of expressing resentment of British racist and xenophobic exclusion (Cashmore 1983; Gilroy 1991).

While nonwhite peoples imagine themselves and are imagined by other non-white peoples in many uniform ways (including through their shared adoption of the West’s political, educational, cultural, and other institutions), I would suggest that the global imagination of African diasporic peoples has been particularized by the vast drama of black slavery. I am not arguing here for or against the uniqueness of black suffering under slavery. Comparisons like those of blacks and Jews are interesting to me in the context of this discussion only in considering why each group has come to assume the prominent place they have in the global imagination. (In the case of African diasporic peoples, it is largely through Western corporate, mass-mediated, globally circulated tellings of the epic of slavery and its consumable legacies in the contemporary world, including the way it is told through such musical genres as reggae and hip-hop. In the case of Jews, it was through the horror of the Holocaust as a technologically modern phenomenon; through their status in international Christianity as protagonists of the Old Testament and, among anti-Semites, villains in the New Testament; and through stereotypes of their management of an international capitalism that is one definitive aspect of the modern experience.) Rather, I am acknowledging what I see as a powerful perception throughout much of the world of black people as being uniquely victimized. The staggering number of Africans abducted and sold across the Atlantic (11 million between 1500 and 1880); the millions who died in transit and on arrival in the Americas; the attempts to deny transplanted African people their heritage; the fact that the legacies of all these linger even now; and, crucially, black resistance (political, religious, and aesthetic) against all of these assaults-all have made a powerful impression around the world.

Given its multiple international rootings, blackness is flexibly, opportunistically constructed through a range of often contrasting terms. These include ideas of blackness and black people as apathetic slaves and as resistant maroons, as the vulgarity of the donnette and the nobility of Rastafarians, as rude-boy belligerence and dread spirituality, as impoverished vice and impoverished purity. Even as black and other peoples have moved to assert blackness in progressive terms, U.S. corporations today still circulate around the world images that clearly reference Western caricatures of blacks from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Several print ads and television commercials produced for Latin American audiences as recently as the late 1990s illustrate this point. For instance, in 1997, Goodyear ran a television commercial in Peru likening the thickness of its tires to that of a black man’s lips; in 1996, a Domino’s Pizza ad in Guatemalan newspapers featured a family of blacks (“negros”)-rendered in the familiar black-skinned white-lipped iconography-whose “cannibalistic” appetites could be satiated by offering them this company’s product. There was a recent controversy over the 2005 issue of stamps in Mexico celebrating a popular comic-book character, a boy called Memn Pingun This character’s bulbous, whitened lips and hapless demeanor recall similar caricatures of blacks originally produced in the United States. Many in Mexico dismissed American criticism of the stamps. They regarded Memn Pingun affectionately, as a nostalgic reminder of the 1940s, the era when this character was created. The Mexican historian Enrique Krauze asserts that among Mexicans, the “wise-cracking,” come-uppance-delivering character is “felt to represent not any sense of racial discrimination but rather the egalitarian possibility that all groups can live together in peace” (Krauze 2005). These interpretations do speak to the need to place any analysis of global blackness in national and local context, and the complex investments in such representations there. But however popular Memn Pingun may be, whatever present-day resonance he may have among what Krauze refers to as Mexico’s “poorer people,” the character also illustrates the remarkable pervasiveness and range of so-called darky iconography around the world. Images like these reflect the common ways in which their global recreations and appeal depend on erasures of provenance, on the sustained voicelessness of “the poorer people” who are both readily represented and underrepresented.

Representations of Blackness in Asia

Africans and Asians both at home (in Africa and Asia) and throughout their respective diasporas have forged cultural, ideological, and other alliances with each other. These alliances, famously emblematized by the encounter between W. E. B. Du Bois and Chairman Mao in 1959, are often a result of their mutual recognition of their marginalization by the hegemonic West (Prashad 2001). However, the alliances can contain tension-for example, when Asian-Americans move to become full, respected producers, not just consumers, of hip-hop (Wang 2006); when African Americans and Korean Americans live together in Los Angeles (Park 1996); and throughout the Caribbean between people descended from East Indians and those descended from Africans (Lopez-Ropero 2006). Just as understanding a people too narrowly in terms of their resistance can flatten appreciation of the fullness of their sociocultural life, assumptions about a given, reified solidarity between two resisting peoples can obscure the more complex political relations between them.

Part of the difficulty in these relationships can be understood by looking at the way blackness in Asia, a main region of the third of the three sets of countries (the other two being former colonies and metropolitan centers), is defined not so much in interpersonal terms as according to the range of the globally mass-mediated representations described above. This third region is defined by its having few people of African descent within its borders, given a lack of such an indigenous population and given its location outside the primary circuits of the Atlantic and Arab slave trades. Many Japanese imagine Afro-Jamaicans to be like the Western, mass-mediated stereotypes of them as happy-go-lucky and dangerous, as fond only of sex and dancing. On the other end of the Afro-Asian equation, many Jamaicans bear the Orientalist view of Japanese as exotic women and martial artists. Blackness, like Orientalism (Said 1979), is a discourse of the non-Western other that has circulated and taken root beyond the West. Part of the challenge of Afro-Asian scholarship, therefore, might be to investigate how Asians and blacks negotiate their relationships with each other vis–vis these globally circulated, locally situated discourses.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Babylon Eastby MARVIN D. STERLING Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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