IU Ethnography Forum Talk

The IU Ethnography Forum Presents
A Lunchtime Talk
Cosponsored with the East Asian Studies Center

"Towards an Afro-Asian Ethnography: Jamaican Perspectives on Reggae Music in Japan"
Dr. Marvin Sterling
Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Indiana University

Friday, April 18, 2008
Ballantine Hall 004 at 12 noon

Professor Sterling will explore the emergent scholarship on the Afro-Asian. He will focus on ethnography-such as employed in his work on Jamaican popular culture in Japan-as an important methodological lens through which the potential of Afro-Asian theory might be explored and realized. Rather than exploring these Jamaican cultural forms as they manifest themselves only in Japan, he argues that it is important, in fleshing out this theory, to consider how word of Japanese engagement with Jamaican culture is received on the Caribbean island. The ethnographically analyzable terms of the Jamaican-Japanese encounter both in Japan and in Jamaica foregrounds some of the commonalities and tensions, both disciplinary and empirical, implied in a convergence of the African and the Asian. He is author Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae and Rastafari in Japan (forthcoming, Duke University Press).