nami rose
writing
blending & self love.
reflections on a night out, jimmy fallon's hands, and a new york pizza parlor
Free-form personal essay. “I think about this night often, and I remember it in fragments. The rise and fall of a night out. A milestone. The comedown. The welcome touch of one warm pair of hands and the cold invasion of another. A new feeling. An old feeling. The freedom of young adulthood coupled with the helplessness of a small child. So many of us crave freedom, but we often aren't ready to shoulder the responsibility it portends.”
ringo no uta
Personal essay. “Your story begins with the scratch on a record; an apostrophe in time...”
they never told us these things
Personal essay. “Remembering comes in waves until you stub your toe on yet another tiny big hypocrisy, then grief washes in in tsunami tides...”
with Ishii Junko, Kobe-based jazz singer who launched her career performing on U.S. military bases in her teens.
Biting Down on a Double-Edged Promise of “Liberation”:
Musical Performance & Embodied Inflections of Agency
in
the Allied Occupation of Japan 1945-53
Academic thesis advised by Dr. Kevin Fellezs, Dr. Aaron Fox, and Dr. Gillian Gualtieri. A sociological and ethnomusicological study examining musical performance and consumption as sites for enacting and negotiating agency in Japanese people's reimagining of their gendered and ethno-national identities under U.S. Occupation. Using lenses of social performativity, embodiment, colonial mimicry/hybridity, deviance, and historical materialism, I analyze seven in-depth interviews I conducted with Japanese cultural producers who facilitated musical performances on and surrounding U.S. military camps between 1945-53, finding that music imported from and inspired by the United States held a double-edged symbolism as a vector of both liberation from prewar and wartime repression and incurred alignment with a new, globalized patriarchy. Email me for a full copy of my thesis.
