“Japanese in the Samba”: Japanese Brazilian Musical Citizenship, Racial Consciousness, and Transnational Migration

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Dissertations, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2013-09-15 17:41Z by Steven

“Japanese in the Samba”: Japanese Brazilian Musical Citizenship, Racial Consciousness, and Transnational Migration

University of Pittsburgh
2008
213 pages

Shanna Lorenz, Assistant Professor of Music
Occidental College, Los Angeles, California

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

his doctoral dissertation is an ethnographic study of musical culture among Japanese Brazilians in São Paulo, Brazil. Specifically, the study explores how the musical culture of this community has changed in recent years as a result of the dekasegui movement, the migration of hundreds of thousands of Japanese Brazilians who have traveled to Japan since 1990 in search of work. In order to explore these questions, I conducted fieldwork between May and November of 2003 on three musical groups, Zhen Brasil, Ton Ton Mi, and Wadaiko Sho, each of which have found different ways to invoke, contest, and reinvent their Brazilian and Japanese musical heritages. By exploring these groups’ musical practices, texts, dance, costumes, and discourses of self-definition, this study offers insight into shifts in the ethnic self-definition and racial consciousness of the Japanese Brazilian community that have taken place as the result of face-to-face contact between Japanese Brazilians and Japanese under the conditions of contiguous globalization. This study contributes to our current understandings of the impact of circular forms of migration on the musical culture and ethnic identity of diasporic communities in the contemporary world.

Read the entire dissertation here.

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Japanese-Brazilian Music and Ethnic Identity in the Post-Dekasegi Era: A lecture by Shanna Lorenz

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Live Events, Media Archive on 2013-02-19 22:22Z by Steven

Japanese-Brazilian Music and Ethnic Identity in the Post-Dekasegi Era: A lecture by Shanna Lorenz

Barnard College, Columbia University
Sulzberger Parlor, 3rd Floor Barnard Hall
3009 Broadway, New York, New York
2013-02-28, 18:00 EST (Local Time)

Shanna Lorenz, Assistant Professor, Music; Advisory Committee, Latino/a and Latin American Studies
Occidental College, Los Angeles

This talk explores how circular migration between Brazil and Japan since 1990 has led Japanese-Brazilians to push back against the stereotypes that have circumscribed their participation in Brazilian society and, in some cases, to assert more forcefully their allegiance with the Brazilian nation. At the forefront of these social changes, musicians are using their art to redefine perceptions of the Nikkei community in Brazil, reshaping the musical resources and national mythologies of Japan and Brazil.

For more information, click here.

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