Noriko Manabe to Give Talk on Japanese Protest Music for Asian Studies Speaker Series

The Department of Music and the Asian Studies Program host Noriko Manabe of Temple University. Manabe will present "How Demonstrations Shape Sound, and How Sound Shapes Demonstrations" as part of the Asian Studies Speaker Series in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. The talk will be held at 5 p.m. Friday, Feb. 8, in Vol Walker Hall in the Schollmier Auditorium (WALK 250) and is open to the public.

Manabe will delve into the complexities of protest in Japan and the vital role music plays in demonstrations. In light of the 3-11 Fukushima nuclear disaster, the talk centers on the use of music in anti-nuclear protests. Manabe contends that demonstrations tend to be more organized as a protest tactic in Japan and often result in louder, more complex narratives than in the United States. 

Manabe's research presented in this talk comes from her ongoing study of protest music. Her 2016 monograph, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima (Oxford University Press), has garnered wide praise. The monograph won the John Whitney Hall Book Prize (for the best book in Japanese studies) from the Association for Asian Studies and Honorable Mention for the Alan Merriam Prize (for the best book in ethnomusicology) from the Society for Ethnomusicology. 

Manabe joined the Boyer faculty in January 2016. She previously taught at Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, and CUNY, and she has held visiting research positions at SOAS, the Library of Congress, Tokyo University of the Arts, and International Research Center for Japanese Studies. She received her doctorate from CUNY Graduate Center, where she completed doctoral requirements for both ethnomusicology and music theory. Her research draws from the social sciences, ethnography, and musical analysis.

Manabe's research centers on music and social movements and on popular music. Her first monograph, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima (Oxford University Press, 2015/2016), addresses the different roles of musicians in the performance spaces of cyberspace, demonstrations, festivals, and recordings. The book won the John Whitney Hall Book Prize (for the best book in Japanese studies) from the Association for Asian Studies and Honorable Mention for the Alan Merriam Prize (for the best book in ethnomusicology) from the Society for Ethnomusicology. Manabe has also published journal articles and book chapters on Japanese hip-hop, rap and language, ringtones, online radio, children's songs as propaganda, Cuban modernists, and Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez. Her articles have appeared in Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, Asian Music, Latin American Music Review, Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Oxford Handbook of Children's Musical Cultures, Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, and other publications. Many of her publications can be seen at temple.academia.edu/NorikoManabe.

Manabe is currently revising her second monograph, Revolution Remixed: Intertextuality in Protest Music (Oxford, under contract), which considers the prevalence of intertextuality in protest culture and analyzes musical cases drawn from the Japanese antinuclear movement. She is co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Protest Music (with Eric Drott, under contract) and the book of essays, Nuclear Music (with Jessica Schwartz, under contract with Oxford). She is also writing a monograph on the role of Japanese children's songs in shaping national identity from the Meiji Era to the Allied Occupation, and another on transnational identity in Japanese hip-hop, reggae, and techno. 

Manabe is series editor for 33-1/3 Japan, a series of books on Japanese popular music from Bloomsbury Publishing and an extension of its popular 33-1/3 book series. She serves on editorial boards for Twentieth-Century Music, Music and Politics, and the SOAS Musicology Book Series;as contributing editor for the Asia-Pacific Journal; as Chair of the Investment Committee for the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM); and on the Diversity Committee for the Society for Music Theory (SMT). In 2016, she served on the Program Committee for the SMT annual conference.

Manabe's research has been funded by fellowships from NEH, Kluge Center, Japan Foundation, and SSRC/JSPS. In addition to the John Whitney Hall and Alan Merriam Prizes, her first book won subventions from SEM and the Barr-Feree Foundation, and the second book won subventions from SMT. The article, "Music in Japanese Antinuclear Demonstrations" (Asia-Pacific Journal2013) won the Waterman Prize from SEM. Conversant in several languages, she has conducted field and archival work in Cuba, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Bali, Germany, and the Netherlands in addition to Japan.