On Tuesday, January 20, the Hamilton Lugar School's 21st Century Japan Politics and Society Initiative (21JPSI)* hosted Professor Marvin Sterling (Indiana University) for a public talk in 21JPSI’s multidisciplinary “Japan Politics and Society” speaker series. Prof. Sterling is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology whose research interests include contemporary Japan, African diaspora, Afro-Asia, and transnationalism. He also teaches a course on “Anthropology of Japan.”
30 students, faculty, staff, and community members from Bloomington and beyond braved 15-degree (F) temperatures to hear Prof. Sterling’s public lecture on “Hyperinvisibilities: Representing Black Japanese Mixed-Race Experiences in Contemporary Japan.”
As Prof. Sterling noted in his talk, Japan in recent years has witnessed a small but steady growth in the number of Japanese citizens of mixed racial ancestry. While the academic literature on this population has grown accordingly, there remain few works that focally explore the experiences of mixed-race Japanese people who specifically share African ancestry. This is remarkable given the visibility of black Japanese public figures especially dating back from the immediate postwar era to the present day.
Prof. Sterling’s research explores Japanese feature filmmaking as a means to reflect on imaginings of black-Japanese mixed-race experiences through the trope of “hyperinvisibility,” in which a pointed social presencing of black-Japaneseness also doubles as its absence. He argued that this hyperinvisibility reflects and reproduces majoritarian silences surrounding black-Japanese identities not only in the ethnic terms in which their presumed difference has often been viewed, but also in racial terms. These manifestations of black-Japanese hyperinvisibility, are best understood as expressions of a broader displacement of race in Japanese public discourse, even as these silences are being ruptured by the increasing numbers of black-Japanese people being born in the country today.
Prof. Sterling concluded his prepared remarks by showing several video clips: from “Proof of the Man”; Kiku’s Legacy; and “Padre Project.” The session closed with a lively audience Q&A featuring questions from faculty, students, and community members representing diverse disciplinary perspectives—including cinema studies, sociology, political science, and international studies.
Prof. Sterling’s event was co-sponsored with the Anthropology Department, the Center for Research on Race & Ethnicity in Society, the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, and the East Asia Studies Center.
*The 21st Century Japan Politics and Society Initiative (21JPSI) was launched at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies in 2018. Under the leadership of Founding Director and Hamilton Lugar School faculty member Adam Liff, from its base in the Midwest 21JPSI aims to invigorate and expand research, teaching, and programming on contemporary Japanese politics, society, and international (esp. U.S.-Japan) relations, and to educate, raise awareness, and debate policy responses to the various political, social, and foreign policy challenges that Japan faces today.For more information about 21JPSI and upcoming events, please visit https://jpsi.indiana.edu/ and sign up for our event announcement mailing list.
If you would like to support 21JPSI’s mission through a tax-deductible gift to the IU foundation, please click here or contact HLS’ Senior Director of Development. (For the IU Foundation’s full disclosure statement, see go.iu.edu/89n.)