Speak it Louder: Asian Americans Making Music

by Wong; Deborah

• ISBN13: 9780415970402
• ISBN10: 0415970407
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2004-06-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Musicdocuments the variety of musics-from traditional Asian through jazz, classical, and pop-that have been created by Asian Americans. This book is not about "Asian American music" but rather about Asian Americans making music. This key distinction allows the author to track a wide range of musical genres. Wong covers an astonishing variety of music, ethnically as well as stylistically: Laotian song, Cambodian music drama, karaoke, Vietnamese pop, Japanese American taiko, Asian American hip hop, and panethnic Asian American improvisational music (encompassing jazz and avant-garde classical styles). In Wong's hands these diverse styles coalesce brilliantly around a coherent and consistent set of questions about what it means for Asian Americans to make music in environments of inter-ethnic contact, about the role of performativity in shaping social identities, and about the ways in which commercially and technologically mediated cultural production andreception transform individual perceptions of time, space, and society.Speak It Louder: Asian AmericansMaking Musicencompasses ethnomusicology, oral history, Asian American studies, and cultural performance studies. It promises to set a new standard for writing in these fields, and will raise new questions for scholars to tackle for many years to come.

Table of Contents

SECTION I Southeast Asian Immigrants Sounding Off	1	(114)
Asian American Performativities	3	(16)
History, Memory, Re-Membering	19	(34)
Taking (to) the Street: Cambodian Immigrants in the Philadelphia Mummers Parade	53	(16)
Karaoke, Mass Mediation and Agency in Vietnamese American Popular Music	69	(20)
Pham Duy at Home: Vietnamese American Technoculture in Orange Country	89	(26)
SECTION II Encounters	115	(44)
Making Space, Making Noise: Locating Asian American Resistance in the Festival	117	(22)
Listening to Local Practices: Performance and Identity Politics in Riverside, California	139	(20)
SECTION III New Interventions	159	(180)
The Asian American Body in Performance	161	(34)
Taiko in Asian America	195	(38)
Just Being There: Making Asian American Space in the Recording Industry	233	(24)
Finding an Asian American Audience: The Problem of Listening	257	(18)
ImprovisAsians: Free Improvisation as Asian American Resistance	275	(24)
Ethnography, Ethnomusicology, and Post--White Theory	299	(22)
My Father's Life in Music	321	(18)
Appendix	339	(1)
``Thinking About the Old Village'' (Khit haut baan kao)	339	(8)
Bibliography	347	(36)
Index	383