Japanese New York : migrant artists and self-reinvention on the world stage /

Sooudi, an anthropologist at the University of Amsterdam, uses ethnographic fieldwork to examine the national and cultural identities of Japanese artists seeking to make careers in New York City. Her work is based on two years of research carried out between 2005 and 2006 in New York and between 2006 and 2007 in Tokyo. This research included extended, semi-structured interviews with Japanese artists in New York and with returnees from New York to Japan and participant observations in four locations in lower Manhattan. The book's primary strength lies in the presentation of stories of individual lives in a world in which ambitions and social mobility increasingly take place on the world stage. The author shows how living outside their homeland leads Japanese expatriates to think about Japanese national identity. She also explores the problems and challenges of life in a global center. The book's main limitation is that it does not consider how migrant artists may differ from other expatriates. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Carl Leon Bankston, Tulane University