An important center of dancehall reggae performance, sound clashes
are contests between rival sound systems: groups of emcees, tune
selectors, and sound engineers. In World Clash 1999, held in
Brooklyn, Mighty Crown, a Japanese sound system and the only
non-Jamaican competitor, stunned the international dancehall
community by winning the event. In 2002, the Japanese dancer Junko
Kudo became the first non-Jamaican to win Jamaica's National
Dancehall Queen Contest. High-profile victories such as these
affirmed and invigorated Japan's enthusiasm for dancehall reggae.
In "Babylon East," the anthropologist Marvin D. Sterling traces the
history of the Japanese embrace of dancehall reggae and other
elements of Jamaican culture, including Rastafari, roots reggae,
and dub music.
Sterling provides a nuanced ethnographic analysis of the ways
that many Japanese involved in reggae as musicians and dancers, and
those deeply engaged with Rastafari as a spiritual practice, seek
to reimagine their lives through Jamaican culture. He considers
Japanese performances and representations of Jamaican culture in
clubs, competitions, and festivals; on websites; and in song
lyrics, music videos, reggae magazines, travel writing, and
fiction. He illuminates issues of race, ethnicity, gender,
sexuality, and class as he discusses topics ranging from the
cultural capital that Japanese dancehall artists amass by immersing
themselves in dancehall culture in Jamaica, New York, and England,
to the use of Rastafari as a means of critiquing class difference,
consumerism, and the colonial pasts of the West and Japan.
Encompassing the reactions of Jamaica's artists to Japanese
appropriations of Jamaican culture, as well as the relative
positions of Jamaica and Japan in the world economy, "Babylon East"
is a rare ethnographic account of Afro-Asian cultural exchange and
global discourses of blackness beyond the African diaspora.
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