Rina Sawayama Is British: Japanese-British Identity in SAWAYAMA
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2025-08-15
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en
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This thesis analyses how Japanese-British artist Rina Sawayama's album SAWAYAMA (2020) articulates her complex identity as a Japanese-British person. She does so by infusing her genre-bending pop music with lived experiences in Japan and Britain regarding microaggressions, translocational positionality, and cultural appropriation. The album’s exploration of belonging became even more resonant when Sawayama was deemed ineligible for prestigious British music awards due to her lack of British citizenship. This sparked public outrage with #SawayamaIsBritish trending on Twitter. Eventually, this campaign led to a change in the awards' criteria. The controversy surrounding Sawayama's Britishness mirrors the themes explored on SAWAYAMA itself, underscoring how her work and public reception together reveal the wider cultural tensions around belonging in an increasingly globalised world. This intersection of music and public discourse underlines the necessity of a translocational exploration of complex identity.
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