In the shadow of the universal other: Performative identifications with Jamaican culture in Japan

This dissertation ethnographically explores performative identification with Jamaican subcultures in Japan, particularly those oriented around dancehall reggae music, roots reggae, and Rastafari, the Jamaican socioreligious, anti-colonialist movement from which the musical forms largely emerged. With globalization theory as theoretical focus, it considers the ways in which “the Jamaican other” as figured in these Japanese popular and religious cultural appropriations is to be seen as a manifestation of black people's global discursive condition as “universal other”, largely understood as a fabricated function of the colonial and global postmodern West. It considers the global routes these individuals take in forging “authentic” subcultural selves. Methodology centers on participant observation of settings in which subcultural performances occur, context-bound conversation and interviews, and content analysis of books, magazine and newspaper articles, films, television programs and other mass media products disseminated during the sustained Japanese popular and underground interest in Jamaican culture. The ideological significance of individual and collective performance in Jamaica-identified Japanese subcultures is found to depend on such variables as age, gender, “class”, “ethnicity,” region of upbringing and current residence, and the period during which these performances take place. While the Jamaican other has primarily been represented as the “pure”, “simple”, “natural” Rastaman—who is thus made to embody ambiguously “positive” and “negative” values in anxiously postmodern Japan—a shift is currently underway in which this other has also become associated with the materialistically and sexually savvy “rude boys” and “divas” of Jamaican dancehall culture.