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Published
2022-10-14
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Lesson Plan
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Copyright (c) 2022 Warren Stanislaus
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Copyright of all lesson plans remains with the author(s).
Examining Afro-Japanese Encounters Through Popular Music
Warren Stanislaus
University of Oxford
Keywords: Afro-Japanese, Afro-Asia, Playlist, Cultural Diplomacy, Blackness
Abstract
The following lesson plan introduces a class-wide collaborative creative project that requires students to select songs to be compiled into a class Spotify playlist. Originally delivered in an online format at Rikkyo University’s Global Liberal Arts Program in Tokyo to a class of Japanese students in the fall of 2020 as part of the course “Afro-Japanese Visions: Past, Present and Futures,” this specific assignment asked students to imagine that they were leading a cultural exchange event to introduce Black British artists and culture to the Japanese public as part of the UK’s Black History Month celebrations through their curated Spotify playlist. In particular, this assignment aims to use popular music to encourage students to consider how contemporary Japanese society represents “blackness” as well as connecting this to wider historical Japanese interactions and intimacies with African diaspora populations.
