EASC/Spelman College Lecture: Prismatic Blackness: An Ethnographic Excavation of Racial Configurations in Japan
EASC (OSU) and the Asian Studies Program (Spelman College) present:
Prismatic Blackness: An Ethnographic Excavation of Racial Configurations in Japan
JOHN DAVIS
Associate Professor
Chair of Anthropology & Sociology
Denison University
March 2, 2021
1:00 - 2:00pm (online)
Registration required: Registration Link
Abstract: What might Japan teach us about the Black experience writ large? Drawing on a selection of engagements with and analyses of Black bodies in the Land of the Rising sun, this presentation uses Japan as a socio-historical context to interrogate theories of race articulated in the West and to examine configurations of Blackness that cannot be reduced to a dichotomous relationship to Whiteness. Expanding Venesa Ribas’ concept of “prismatic engagement,” John Davis maps a set of competing constructions of Blackness that emerge at distinct temporal junctures, take form in various ethnographic settings, and circulate within multiple social spheres ranging from popular culture to political protest and everything in between. He will conclude by considering what the Black experience teaches us about Japan and the Asia Pacific.
Biography: Associate Professor John Davis joined the faculty at Denison in the fall of 2011. Prof. Davis is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose work explores the “social life” of rights by critically analyzing the processes by which transnational discourses and practices of human rights intersect with specific national and cultural contexts to shape everyday life. Prof. Davis’s dissertation used ethnographic modes of inquiry to illuminate the cultural politics of human rights in Japan through an exploration of how the burakumin minority operationalized the idea of human rights within their movement for social change.
Contact: Professor Tinaz Pavri, Founding Director, Asian Studies Program, tpavri@spelman.edu
This event is coordinated by the Asian Studies Program and made possible in part by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center.