Speak it Louder: Asian Americans Making Music / Edition 1

by Deborah Wong

Overview

Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music documents 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 and reception transform individual perceptions of time, space, and society. Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music encompasses 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415970402
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	06/28/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Deborah Wong is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Riverside. She is a widely recognized authority on Asian and Asian American music and performance, popular media, and cultural studies. She resides in Riverside, CA.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Southeast Asian Immigrants Sounding Off Chapter 1: Asian American Performativities Chapter 2: History, Memory, Re-Membering Chapter 3: Taking (to) the Street: Cambodian Immigrants in the Philadelphia Mummers Parade Chapter 4: Karaoke as Phantasm: Mass Mediation and Agency in Vietnamese American Popular Music Chapter 5: Vietnamese American Technoculture in Orange County: Pham Duy at Home II. Encounters Chapter 6: Taking (to) the Streets Again: Theorizing the Asian American Festival Chapter 7: Listening to Local Practices: Asian American Performance and Identity Politics in Riverside, California III. New Interventions Chapter 8: The Asian American Body in Performance Chapter 9: Taiko in Asian America Chapter 10: Just Being There: Making Asian American Space in the Recording Industry Chapter 11: Finding an Asian American Audience: The Problem of Listening. Chapter 12: ImprovisAsians: Free Improvisation as Asian American Resistance Chapter 13: Ethnography, Ethnomusicology, and Post-White Theory Chapter 14: My Father's Life in Music. Appendix A: "Thinking of the Old Village," by Khamvong Insixiengmai (transcription and translation) Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

"[Speak It Louder] is a remarkable and important achievement and is no doubt poised to be a significant influence in the worlds of musicology and ethnic studies." --Women & Music

From the Publisher