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Somiah, Abena

University of British Columbia

Contemporary scholarship around Black geographies has emphasized how Black people have negotiated space and place in the context of forced and chosen displacement. However, most of this geographic work has been Transatlantic, discussing African diasporas in North America and Western Europe, and hence little geographic work has been conducted on African diasporic presence in the Asia-Pacific region, and subsequent Afro-Asian placemaking. Of the sparse work on Afrodiasporic presence in East Asia, a few scholars have conducted historical analyses of the interactions between Japanese people and Black people, showing how both negative and positive connotations around “Blackness” are affected by transnational discourse around racial hierarchy. This research posits that the understanding of “Blackness” in Japan is not monolithic, nor static, and can be deployed differently depending on whether a person is sub-Saharan African, African American, Caribbean, or biracial. Regardless of temporal context, it can be said that such phenotypically different subjects claiming rights to Japanese nationhood troubles the idea of racial homogeneity in Japan, which is central to Japanese societal constructions. This project highlights how Japanese subjects make sense of African migrants, they do not discuss how African migrants navigate, challenge, and expand definitions of “belonging” as a critique of Japanese integrationist migration policy. My thesis expands this concept by deciphering current understandings of race and community among sub-Saharan communities in Tokyo. This research aims to understand the experiences of sub-Saharan Africans in Japan in terms of how they navigate their racial and ethnic identities in this terrain. Using semi-structured interviews, this thesis centers the voices of Ghanaian, Togolese, and Cameroonian long-time immigrants to Japan. I first explore the how their context of their arrival shapes the pathways to citizenship that they are given, and the motivations they have behind their long term stays in Japan. I then place their stories of racialization in a Japanese context in line with Japanese societal development, which has created several newcomer and oldcomer minority groups. Finally, I spatialize their contributions to the diversifying Japanese sociopolitical landscape, by analysing several spaces of sociality in which an Africo-Japanese identity can be constructed.

Text

2024-10-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89485

Geography

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/