Description
Book Synopsis
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 cultur
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"[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
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
