Overview

Cultural hybridity is a celebrated hallmark of U.S. American music and identity. Yet hybrid music is all too often marked -and marketed - under a single racial label. Resounding Afro Asia examines music projects that counter this convention; these projects instead foreground racial mixture in players, audiences, and sound in the very face of the ghettoizing culture industry. Giving voice to four contemporary projects, author Tamara Roberts traces black/Asian engagements that reach across the United States and beyond: Funkadesi, Yoko Noge, Fred Ho and the Afro Asian Music Ensemble, and Red Baraat. From Indian funk & reggae, to Japanese folk & blues, to jazz in various Asian and African traditions, to Indian brass band and New Orleans second line, these artists live multiracial lives in which they inhabit - and yet exceed - multicultural frameworks built on essentialism and segregation.When these musicians collaborate, they generate and perform racially marked sounds that do not conform to their individual racial identities. The Afro Asian artists discussed in this book splinter the expectations of racial determinism, and through improvisation and composition, articulate new identities and subjectivities in conversation with each other. These dynamic social, aesthetic, and sonic practices construct a forum for the negotiation of racial and cultural difference and the formation of inter-minority solidarities. Resounding Afro Asia joins a growing body of literature that is writing Asian American artists back into U.S. popular music history, while highlighting interracial engagements that have fueled U.S. music making. The book will appeal to scholars of music, ethnomusicology, race theory, and politics, as well as those interested in race and popular music.

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9780199377404

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Reviews

Roberts' work offers vital insights into constructs and consequences of race and identity in music in the US and suggests more nuances articulations of the inherent complexities of this music. Readers unfamiliar with the US context still will find this work valuable as it provides a solid and accesible approach to ideas that, in some previous research, are oversimplified and lack Robert's rigour. Roberts also takes great care not to present false equivalences between the two minority groups, nor does she avoid diligent consideration of problematic definitions, tensions, exoticization, sensitivities, stereotypes, and more. In doing so, this work may carry broader implications as she presents a thorough and useful way to interrogate racial systems in their entirety, all while advancing discourses on hybridity, multiculturalism, and identity in an ever-shifting world. --2017 Yearbook For Traditional Music

Roberts' work offers vital insights into constructs and consequences of race and identity in music in the US and suggests more nuances articulations of the inherent complexities of this music. Readers unfamiliar with the US context still will find this work valuable as it provides a solid and accesible approach to ideas that, in some previous research, are oversimplified and lack Robert's rigour. Roberts also takes great care not to present false equivalences between the two minority groups, nor does she avoid diligent consideration of problematic definitions, tensions, exoticization, sensitivities, stereotypes, and more. In doing so, this work may carry broader implications as she presents a thorough and useful way to interrogate racial systems in their entirety, all while advancing discourses on hybridity, multiculturalism, and identity in an ever-shifting world. --2017 Yearbook For Traditional Music

Author Information

Tamara Roberts Assistant Professor of Music at University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches courses on popular music and politics. Other publications include Yellow Power, Yellow Soul: The Radical Art of Fred Ho (co-edited with Roger Buckley) and articles and essays in multiple journals and anthologies.

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