Fall 2021 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, anthropology
Nia Whitmal is a first year Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell. She completed her bachelor's degree in sociocultural anthropology at Yale College in 2021. Nia's research interests stem from her studies and experiences of Blackness in East Asia. Nia's work focuses specifically on Afro-Japanese encounters and their manifestations in visual and material cultural productions from the 20th and 21st century. Nia studies instances of racial mimesis within the fluid, ever-changing socio-historical contexts of Japanese national identity formation and Black liberation movements. She asks: As the focus and forms of Black liberation movements shift and Japan's aspirational national identity evolves, how do these forces answer one another? In what ways and why do these two narratives reference one another? In combination, what impact do such phenomena wield upon Black Americans, Black hafu, and additional ethnic minorities (e.g. Zainichi Koreans) living in Japan? Nia hopes to answer these and many other thought and unthought questions in her graduate studies.