James Gui: Notes On Asian Diaspora Music Cultures
Notes On Asian Diaspora Music Cultures
by James Gui, Fall 2021 ESS Curatorial Fellow
This started out as an essay to accompany an online concert I’d curated for Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. Titled Eastern Resonance, the concert featured six different Asian artists, generally categorized as “experimental” or “underground”, who may or may not have heard of each other but were at most two steps removed from each other in their respective musical circles or networks. I wanted to think about what this burgeoning “scene” of Asian electronic musicians contributed to the construction of an Asian diasporic identity, what it meant culturally, politically and historically. It was Dhanveer Singh Brar’s recent book Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski that inspired this search. His musings on Black sonic ecologies brought me to Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, and I soon found a field–Cultural Studies–that contained a toolbox of theory to draw from. Yet after scanning the literature, I noticed a lack of writing that united my particular interests, namely imperialism, sound studies, post-colonialism, critical theory, etc. as they pertain to music in Asia. Was it the fragmentation of Asian diasporas, cultural forms, and experiences with colonization? Where were the Halls, the Gilroys of the Asian diaspora?
I found a journal–Inter-Asian Cultural Studies–whose contents somewhat resembled what was in my mind’s eye. The journal’s editor, Chen Kuan-Hsing, wrote a book titled Asia as Method that sounded promising; could “Asia as Method” be the Pacific analogue to Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic”? Not quite; the book outlined an interesting framework for “deimperialization”, but the particular histories and potentialities of music did not figure much in his analysis. IACS itself is a trove of case studies, however. Kalinga Seneviratne demonstrated what Said termed “contrapuntal” analysis, reading dangdut music as a hybrid challenge to the cultural imperialism of the West. Chua Beng Huat gestured toward an “East Asian popular culture”, examining the consumption of East Asian pop forms–K-pop, television dramas–across borders. Individual cases studies abound, but a scholar that unites these fragmented phenomena has yet to surface. I don’t presume to be that scholar, but I would like to take a stab at theorizing Asian musical forms in that manner.
Of course, such an endeavor is the stuff of masters theses, of dissertations; I don’t have the time, or resources, or training, to do the subject justice. So here, I’ve just compiled some notes, a rough bibliography, and a smattering of guiding questions to direct my thinking, in case circumstances change in the future (or I get so bored that I spend the bulk of my free time reading).
An excerpt I wrote, perhaps fit for the first sentences of an introduction for a paper or manuscript:
The shorthand of the “Asian diaspora” elides the particular moments of contact between each of its constituent groups and “the West”. Some nations’ experience is directly tied to U.S. militarism, nations like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines whose development of popular culture was influenced, in varying ways, by the presence of American military bases.
A list of theoretical frameworks that I found generative: Ronald Radano’s resonance, Andrew Jones’s circuit listening, Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, Chen’s Asia as method, Bhabha’s mimicry and hybridity, Benedict Anderson’s imagined community (of course), Kobena Mercer’s diaspora aesthetic, etc.
A list of guiding questions: How has Western, particularly U.S. imperialism and militarism, impacted the development of underground music cultures in Asia? How can we read dance music cultures–funkot, budots, vinahouse, trot–contrapuntally, as experimental genres in their own right that reappropriate Western forms for local contexts? What do underground scenes at the margins of Asian cities have in common with each other, and what does that mean for the construction of an Asian diasporic identity? What systems of power do these scenes and forms reify, and which ones do they challenge? Using Gilroy’s Black Atlantic as a framework, can we trace a pan-Asian cultural history and theory?
Books
Edward Said, Cultural and Imperialism
Stuart Hall, Essential Essays Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
Andrew Jones, Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s
Dhanveer Singh Brar, Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century
Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music
Ronald Radano, Tejumola Olaniyan (eds.), Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique
John Lie, K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea
Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital
Simon Frith, Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Media & Cultural Studies
Helen Kim, Making Diaspora in a Global City: South Asian Youth Cultures in London
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers Of Color And The Performance Of Politics
John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction
Damien Charrieras, François Mouillot (eds.), Fractured Scenes: Underground Music-Making in Hong Kong and East Asia
Sebastian Darchen, Damien Charrieras, John Wilsteed (eds.), Electronic Cities: Music, Policies, and Space in the 21st Century
Frances R. Aparicio, Candida F. Jacquez, Musical Migrations: Transnational and Cultural Hybridity in Latin/o America
Kuan-Hsing Chen, Chua Beng Huat (eds.), The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader
Wendy Matsumura, The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community
Bart Barendregt, Peter Keppy, Henk Schulte Nordholt (eds.), Popular Music in Southeast Asia: Banal Beats, Muted Histories
Virinder S. Kalra, Raminder Kaur, John Hutnyk (eds.), Diaspora & Hybridity
Matthew Collin, Rave On: Global Adventures in Electronic Dance Music
Articles
Lily Cho, The Turn to Diaspora
Rey Chow, Listening Otherwise, Music Miniaturized: A Different Type of Question about Revolution
Toshiya Ueno, Techno‐Orientalism and media‐tribalism: On Japanese animation and rave culture
Dhiraj Murphy, Communicative Flows between the Diaspora and ‘Homeland’: The Case of Asian Electronic Music in Delhi
Thomas Solomon, Theorizing Diaspora and Music
Kenichiro Egami, East Asia informal networks beyond the borders: sharing of ideas, skills, and experiences against capitalization of the commons
James E. Roberson, “Doin’ Our Thing”: Identity and Colonial Modernity in Okinawan Rock Music
Shin Hyunjoon, HO Tung-hung, Translation of ‘America’ during the early Cold War period: a comparative study on the history of popular music in South Korea and Taiwan
C.J. W.-L. Wee, Imagining the Fractured East Asian Modern: Commonality and Difference in Mass-Cultural Production
… and many more that I’m too lazy to list.
All of this is to say that in my view, Asian diaspora musical history, culture, and politics have been under-theorized, scholars opting for particularist studies of individual scenes and migrations but eschewing the kind of ambitious reading that intellectuals in the Black Atlantic have forged. I hope these scattered thoughts are a movement in a productive direction.