In this interdisciplinary panel, we put three studies on the transnational movement of different research objects in conversation with each other. By disorienting or refashioning sensorial experiences across borders, these papers explore how the cultural consumption of different texts and materials reveal new understandings of racialized or persecuted bodies, identities and cultures. Building on his experiences of consuming illegal copies of Bollywood films in Pakistan, Naveed explores how the 'distracting' sensory cues and audio-visual ruptures introduced through piracy both challenge and reinforce the India-Pakistan border. Han examines how the act of consumption is depicted in Japanese diasporic literature, and how the intimacy of eating, incorporating, and digesting can transform the ways in which we understand space and identity. Somiah discusses how the creation, wearing and visual consumption of ankara-based “Japanese” clothing rewrites a colonial past, giving way to an Afrocentric embodiment that is fluid, not pinned down by geography. In this way, all three presenters on this panel unsettle the boundaries of identity and tradition through sensorial experiences lived in various transnational spaces.

Fahad Naveed ∆ (Asian Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada)

Shadows on My Screen, Chatter in My Ears: Border-Crossings Through Camrips

‘Camrips’ or ‘cams’ are bootlegged copies of films made by covertly recording a movie inside a cinema. These recordings often feature unintended effects of piracy, including audience laughter, clapping, chatter, and visual disruptions from camera autofocus or shadows cast by viewers onto the theater screen—elements that interrupt the visual and auditory continuity of the film. While films are crafted as curated sensory experiences, with filmmakers carefully controlling what audiences see and hear, camrips introduce extraneous sensory information that ‘distract’ from the filmmakers’ vision. In this paper, I explore these ‘distractions’ as an evolving layer of the film’s reception post- release. Drawing on scholarship in reception studies, I analyze camrips to examine how the audiences illegally recorded in the theater are experiencing the film—and how this contrasts with my experience watching the film from afar, separated by time and space. By doing sequence analyses of camrips of three Bollywood films, I investigate how these additional sensory cues influence or disrupt the cinematic narrative. Building on my experience of growing up watching pirated Bollywood films banned in my home country of Pakistan, I ultimately question whether camrips can offer viewers like myself a communal cinegoing experience from home, across borders.
Keywords: camrip, Bollywood, piracy, unwanted sound, visual distractions

Ying Han ∆ (Asian Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada)

Eating Other, Becoming Other, Birthing Other: Reading Food in Japanese Diasporic Literature

Unlike the Abrahamic religions where God created Man in His image, and then Eve from the rib of Adam, Japanese creation myths would have incestuous goddesses producing the first humans and lands. People have long been fascinated with that mystery pit of a woman’s body from which life somehow springs forth since time immemorial and have now countlessly retold these stories of the endlessly awesome potentiality of production and reproduction into the contemporary era, whether in the form of horror movies or, in the case of this paper, in literature. The two books I focus on, Ruth Ozeki (b.1956)’s debut novel My Year of Meats (1998) and Hiromi Goto (b.1966)’s My Kappa Child (2001), both retell the story of generative possibility within what we know as “women”—from the food they consume, to the beings they then gestate. In this paper, I focus on the ways in which the acts of consumption, digestion, and pregnancy become transformative experiences of intimacy and connection as the protagonists in both stories learn how to renegotiate their own racialized bodies within diaspora.

Keywords: pregnancy, consumption, literature, Japanese diaspora 

Abena Somiah (Geography, McGill University, Canada)

Vlisco in Tokyo: Reading African Kimonos as Black Pacific Archive

During fieldwork in Tokyo in 2023, I attended the inaugural “All About Africa” cultural festival. On the second day of this festival, among performances of African artists and performers, a fashion show of a brand called Masht Star took place. This brand uses Ankara, a colorful fabric worn around West and Central Africa, to make dresses, pants, and tops, all to be modeled by mixed Japanese people during the festival. I found that the products of this brand were reminiscent of the work of a Cameroonian designer and artist, Serge Mouange, who made headlines a few years ago thanks to his creation of an “African Kimono”, an art piece, in which he used Ankara fabric to create several kimonos. I argue that textile fusions in the form of ankara based “Japanese” clothing are an archive of Black Pacific intimacies. While being cognizant of Ankara’s transoceanic and colonial history, these clothes refashion and redefine both African and Japanese “traditions”, and point towards a decolonial future. This paper looks at textile reinventions of Ankara sold or displayed in West Africa for Japanese consumption as material archive of the Black Pacific that can “touch” the eyes as well as the body.
Keywords: Ankara, Japan, archive, Black Pacific