Overview

In Tropical Renditions Christine Bacareza Balance examines how the performance and reception of post-World War II Filipino and Filipino American popular music provide crucial tools for composing Filipino identities, publics, and politics. To understand this dynamic, Balance advocates for a ""disobedient listening"" that reveals how Filipino musicians challenge dominant racialized U.S. imperialist tropes of Filipinos as primitive, childlike, derivative, and mimetic. Balance disobediently listens to how the Bay Area turntablist DJ group the Invisibl Skratch Piklz bear the burden of racialized performers in the United States and defy conventions on musical ownership; to karaoke as affective labor, aesthetic expression, and pedagogical instrument; to how writer and performer Jessica Hagedorn's collaborative and improvisational authorial voice signals the importance of migration and place; and how Pinoy indie rock scenes challenge the relationship between race and musical genre by tracing the alternative routes that popular music takes. In each instance Filipino musicians, writers, visual artists, and filmmakers work within and against the legacies of the U.S./Philippine imperial encounter, and in so doing, move beyond preoccupations with authenticity and offer new ways to reimagine tropical places.

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9780822359586

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Reviews

In this stunningly refreshing take on the musicological and performative dimensions of Filipino American historical and cultural experiences, Christine Bacareza Balance makes intricate and superb sonic connections between seemingly separate realms such as colonialism, migration, youth culture, leisure, and labor. Standing alone in its incisive cultural critique and superb interpretive readings of a culture and a people spanning thousands of miles, Tropical Renditions makes a pioneering contribution to Asian American Studies and performance studies. -- Martin F. Manalansan IV, author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora Tropical Renditions is an ambitious and exhilarating study that beckons us to listen carefully to the underground sound of Filipino and Filipino American 'translocal' cultures. Christine Bacareza Balance takes her readers to a range of sonic 'scenes' in the Filipino diaspora-from karaoke house parties to Pinoy indie rock shows to the experimental performance spaces of Jessica Hagedorn and the West Coast Gangster Choir, in turn showcasing an insurgent musicality that speaks back to and, in many ways, sings through and against the long roll of imperial violence. Like a radical postcolonial mixtape, Balance's book captures the urgency of Filipino identity in sonic motion. -- Daphne A. Brooks, author of Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910

In this stunningly refreshing take on the musicological and performative dimensions of Filipino American historical and cultural experiences, Christine Bacareza Balance makes intricate and superb sonic connections between seemingly separate realms such as colonialism, migration, youth culture, leisure, and labor. Standing alone in its incisive cultural critique and superb interpretive readings of a culture and a people spanning thousands of miles, Tropical Renditions makes a pioneering contribution to Asian American Studies and performance studies. --Martin F. Manalansan IV, author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora

Author Information

Christine Bacareza Balance is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. 

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