Marvin D. Sterling

Assistant Professor, Anthropology Department
Ph.D., 2002, University of California at Los Angeles

mdsterli@indiana.edu
Student Building 166
(812) 855-3858

Research Interests

• Contemporary Japan
• African Diasporic Culture
• Critical Race Theory
• Performance Theory
• Transnationalism
• Post-Colonial Theory

Teaching Experience

• Field Studies Instructor, "Social Inequality" Immersion Quarter, UCLA Department of Anthropology, Spring 1995

Awards and Distinctions

• Sasakawa Fellowship 1998
• Hiroshi Wagatsuma Fellowship, 1998, 1996
• UCLA Institute of American Cultures Research Grant, 1997

Publication Highlights

• Sterling, Marvin. Race as a 'Glocal' System: Performative Identifications with Jamaican Culture in Japan. Forthcoming, Duke University Press.
• "Transcending 'Slackness', Overcoming 'Class', Remaking Spiritual Self: On the Ideological Uses of Rastafari in Japan." (Revise and re-submit, Cultural Anthropology.)
• Sterling, Marvin. 2001. Nihon no regee shi-n o saguru. [Exploring Japan's Reggae Scene]. Strive 3: 25.

Recent Conferences

• "Performing Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Afro-Asian Transnational: Dancehall Reggae Culture in Japan," at the Blacks and Asians in the Making of the Modern World Conference, Boston University, April 11-13, 2003.
• "The Most Compelling of Idioms: Jamaican Culture in Japan." Paper presented at Jamaica in the Pacific Conference." Reggae Studies Unit, University of the West Indies. Kingston, Jamaica, December 13, 2002.
• "Negotiating Black Identity in Contemporary Japan," at the Srinakharinwirot University & Salisbury State University Joint International Conference on American Studies, and the Literature of America, Great Britain and the Pacific Rim. Bangkok, Thailand, January 8-10, 1998.

Marvin Sterling's CV

My research centers on the popularity of a range of Jamaican subcultural forms - primarily roots reggae, dancehall reggae, and Rastafari (an anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist, socioreligious movement emerging from within the Afro-Jamaican underclass) - in contemporary Japan. This research directly reflects several of my current theoretical interests. I am interested in performance and transnational theories, for instance, as means by which to ethnographically situate the local practices through which Japanese engage with these Jamaican cultural forms, as well as to understand how Japanese movement across African diasporic space informs and authenticates these local practices. In my most recent line of research I try to historicize the discursive life of the Western idea of race in modern Japan, such as inflected through minzokugaku (folklore studies); early Japanese anthropology; the nation's early modern negotiation of Western popular cultural forms in which the notion of race may be understood to significantly inhere (for instance, jazz); Japanese colonial and wartime propaganda; nihonjinron (theories of Japaneseness); and, today, kokusaika (internationalization).