Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:23:07.064Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Soundtracks of Asian America: Navigating Race through Musical Performance. By Grace Wang . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. - Resounding Afro Asia: Interracial Music and the Politics of Collaboration. By Tamara Roberts . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2017

Nancy Yunhwa Rao
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Book Review
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , August 2017 , pp. 370 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Wong, Deborah, Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music (New York: Routledge, 2004)Google Scholar.

2 Hung, Eric, “Performing ‘Chineseness’ on the Western Concert Stage: The Case of Lang Lang,” Asian Music 40, no. 1 (2009): 131–48Google Scholar; Ee Tan, Shzr, “New Chinese Masculinities on the Piano: Lang Lang and Li Yundi,” in Gender in Chinese Music, ed. Harris, Rachel and Pease, Rowan (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2013), 132–51Google Scholar; Yang, Mina, Planet Beethoven: Classical Music at the Turn of the Millennium (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2014), 110–17Google Scholar, quotation on 117.

3 Wong, Speak It Louder, 107.

4 One exception is a section where she incorporates Tamara Roberts's discussion of racialized genres, styles, and categories (131–32).

5 Grace Wang cites W. Anthony Sheppard, “Global Exoticism and Modernity: The Case of ‘Chinked-Out’ Music” (paper presented at the Asian Popular Music Conference, Princeton University, March 2011). Sheppard presents the argument about self-orientalization fully later on. See Anthony Sheppard, W., “Global Exoticism and Modernity,” in The Cambridge History of World Music, ed. Bohlman, Philip (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 606–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Roberts's analyses of three types of interracial collaboration are more productive than the model of sonic-racial triangulation to which she frequently returns to discuss racial politics. It is a geometric model for understanding the positioning of sonorities associated with whiteness, blackness, and Asianness along axes of superior/inferior (vertical hierarchy of status) and insider/foreigner (horizontal array of belongingness).

7 My summary here points to the potential of Roberts's category by drawing a stronger connection to the posthuman theory of feminist Karen Barad. With the notion of intra-activity, Barad draws attention to the ontological inseparability of the “parties” of phenomena. Barad, Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University. Press, 2007), 393.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 In his excellent analysis of “Chee-Lai,” Jean, Richard So describes such vision as “fantasy.” See his Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Global Cultural Network (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 109.Google Scholar

9 Lee, Erika, The Making of Asian America (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2015), 10 Google Scholar.