Department of Anthropology

Geographical areas of specialization
Japan; Caribbean

Research Interests
Contemporary Japan and Jamaica; cultural transnationalism, performance theory, race (global blackness, mixed-race identities), Afro-Asia, human rights, and ethnographic writing.

My research history has centered on three main projects.  The first concerns a range of Jamaican cultural forms in Japan, including roots reggae music, dancehall reggae music, and the religious movement Rastafari. In this project I explore how notions of blackness as they have circulated around the globe inform Japanese performances of racial, ethnonational, gendered, and other identities within the local, national, and transnational spaces of these subcultures.  The results of this research were published in Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan (Duke University Press, 2010). In a second line of research, conducted with the support of funding from the National Science Foundation (2015), I trace the development of human rights discourse and practice in Jamaica, with focus on how the dimensions of this discourse and practice have been critically informed by the nation’s colonial legacy.  I am currently writing a book manuscript based on this research.  A third, ongoing project, conducted with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Advanced Social Science Research on Japan (2023-2024), the Wenner Gren Foundation's Post PhD Research Grant (2023-2024) and the Japan Foundation’s Japanese Studies Research (Long-Term) Fellowship (2019-2020), concerns the experiences of mixed-race Japanese individuals who are partly of African descent.  This project focuses on how ethnographic study of the lives of Black Japanese individuals affords insight into these experiences valued not only on their own terms, but also for how they disclose mixed-race and majority Japanese ideas about what it means to be Japanese today.  The results of this research will be published as a third, single-authored book manuscript.  Many of the issues of race and representation in Asian studies that transect the first and third projects are reflected in a collection of essays I have co-edited with Will Bridges and Nitasha Sharma.  The collection, part of the Association for Asian Studies’ Asia Shorts Series, is entitled, Who is the Asianist?  The Politics of Representation in Asian Studies (Columbia University Press, 2022).  With my IU colleague Pedro Machado of the Department of History, I also co-edit a book series, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, called Afrasia:  Contours, Crossings and Connections.

Bridges, Will, Nitasha Tamar Sharma and Marvin D. Sterling. 2022. “Who is The Asianist?” The Politics of Representation in Asian Studies. Association for Asian Studies, Asia Shorts Series. New York: Columbia University Press.

Sterling, Marvin D. 2016.  “Between National Subjectivity and Global Artistry:  Ethnography, Afro-Asia, and Jamaican Music in Japan.”  Popular Music and Society 39.

Sterling, Marvin D.  2015.  "Race, Ethnicity and Affective Community in Japanese Rastafari."  In "Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production:  Two Haiku and a Microphone."  Nina Cornyetz and William Bridges IV, editors.  Lanham, MD:  Lexington Books

Sterling, Marvin D. 2011. “Searching for Self in the Global South: Japanese Literary Representations of Afro-Jamaican Blackness.” Journal of Japanese Studies 31(1):53-71.

Sterling, Marvin D. 2011. “Toward an Analysis of Global Blackness: Race, Representation, and Jamaican Popular Culture in Japan.” In Racial Representation in Asia. Yasuko Takezawa, Editor. Kyoto, Japan and Melbourne, Australia: Kyoto University Press and Trans Pacific Press.

Sterling, Marvin D. 2011. Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae and Rastafari in Japan. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.