[PB 13.2 (2012) 189-191] Perfect Beat (print) ISSN 1038-2909 doi:10.1558/prbt.v13i2.189 Perfect Beat (online) ISSN 1836-0343 © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheield, S3 8AF. Review Marvin D. Sterling. 2010. Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Ras- tafari in Japan. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223- 4722-4 (pbk). 299pp. Reviewed by: James R. Edwards, University of California, Los Angeles james.rhys.edwards@gmail.com From a geopolitical perspective, the island nations of Jamaica and Japan could hardly be more diferent. Both nations, however, are well-known as centers of so- called soft power and exporters of cultural commodities. In Babylon East: Perform- ing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan (2010), anthropologist Marvin D. Sterling explores contemporary Japanese engagements with Jamaica’s most widely-known cultural exports: reggae music and dance, and Rastafarian iconog- raphy and ideology. Grounding his analysis on a broad concept of social perfor- mance that is rooted in the work of Victor Turner (1982, 1987), Erving Gofman (1959), and Judith Butler (1993), Sterling demonstrates how roots reggae, dance- hall, and Rastafari have been embraced by young Japanese as means of construct- ing and performing non-normative, yet still markedly Japanese, identities. Based on more than two years of multi-sited ethnographic ieldwork, Babylon East ofers a consistently fascinating account of Japanese-Jamaican cultural transactions which challenges the (caucasian) West’s assumed status as mediator of transna- tional discourse, revealing the increasingly multipolar nature of the global social imaginary. In his Introduction and chapter 1, Sterling situates the ‘retooling of Jamaican cultural symbols according to Japanese prerogatives’ (33) with respect to a global ‘symbolic economy of race’ (55), in which blackness serves as ‘a lexible, often performatively realized metaphor’ (35) through which both black and non-black individuals and communities articulate their desires, concerns, and aspiration. Reggae, dancehall, and Rastafari constitute powerful symbols of Afro-Jamaican blackness for a growing subcultural demographic in post-bubble Japan, where the high psychological cost of adopting a normative identity and the decreasing certainty of socioeconomic beneit have driven many young people to embark on ‘searches for self’ (jibun sagashi) outside the mainstream (4). Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are centered on ethnographic encounters with such young Japanese, whose searches for self have led them to the transnational performative ield of Jamaican