A wide range of performing arts and practices of the Asian diasporas across the world are examined by scholars of Asian studies, theatre studies, anthropology, cultural studies, dance ethnology and ethnomusicology.

In 1971, Canada became the first country to adopt an official policy of multiculturalism. Performing the Intercultural City explores how Toronto—a representative global city in this multicultural country—stages diversity through its many intercultural theater companies and troupes. The book begins with a theoretical introduction to theatrical interculturalism. Subsequent chapters outline the historical and political context within which intercultural performance takes place; examine the ways in which Indigenous, Filipino, and Afro-Caribbean Canadian theater has developed play structures based on culturally specific forms of expression; and explore the ways that intercultural companies have used intermediality, modernist form, and intercultural discourse to mediate across cultures. Performing the Intercultural City will appeal to scholars, artists, and the theater-going public, including those in theater and performance studies, urban studies, critical multiculturalism studies, diaspora studies, critical cosmopolitanism studies, critical race theory, and cultural studies.

This book illustrates how ethnographic investigation of musical performances might contribute to the analysis of diaspora. It embraces diverse examples such as 'mourning and cultures of survival' amongst Aboriginal and Jewish communities in Australia, remembering a Kazakh 'homeland' in Western Mongolia, celebrating Diwali in New Zealand and the circulation of musical performances in Mozambique, Portugal and the UK. Some of the topics discussed in Musical Performance in the Diaspora include: the expression and shaping of diasporic and postcolonial identities through performance musical memory in diasporic contexts the geographies of performance the politics of 'new' forms of diasporic music-making. This book presents a rich array of theoretical approaches and wide ranging ethnographic case studies to reconsider and challenge discourses that have favoured uncritical notions of diasporic 'hybridity' and to broaden current analyses of performance in the diaspora.

P’ansori is the quintessential traditional Korean musical drama, in which epic tales are sung and narrated by a solo singer accompanied by a drummer. Drawing on her extensive research in Korea and its diasporas, Haekyung Um describes and analyses the creative processes of p’ansori, weaving into her discussion musical, social and cultural aspects that include the evolution of p’ansori performance, origins and historical development, textual and musical materials, stylistic features of different p’ansori schools, transmission of knowledge, aesthetics, and changing interpretations of tradition. Also explored is the complexity of historical and contemporary influences that give shape to p’ansori as a ’living tradition’ across the ages and into the present, and as a cultural icon with an enduring narrative and emotional impact. Social, economic and political dynamics are created in the nexus of traditional feudal values, colonial modernity and nationalism. The impact of aspects of late modernity such as technology, mass media, migration and globalization, has transported p’ansori into digital and transnational domains. By bringing all these creative and contextual processes together, Haekyung Um explains how a tradition is created, maintained and redefined by the dynamic interactions of agents, values, meanings, strategies, identities and artistic hybridity.

This book traces the particularities of music migration and tourism in different global settings, and provides current, even new perspectives for ethnomusicological research on globalizing musics in transit. The dual focus on tourism and migration is central to debates on globalization, and their examination—separately or combined—offers a useful lens on many key questions about where globalization is taking us: questions about identity and heritage, commoditization, historical and cultural representation, hybridity, authenticity and ownership, neoliberalism, inequality, diasporization, the relocation of allegiances, and more. Moreover, for the first time, these two key phenomena—tourism and migration—are studied conjointly, as well as interdisciplinary, in order to derive both parallels and contrasts. While taking diverse perspectives in embracing the contemporary musical landscape, the collection offers a range of research methods and theoretical approaches from ethnomusicology, anthropology, cultural geography, sociology, popular music studies, and media and communication. In so doing, Musics in Transit provides a rich exemplification of the ways that all forms of musical culture are becoming transnational under post-global conditions, sustained by both global markets and musics in transit, and to which both tourists and diasporic cosmopolitans make an important contribution.

Asian diasporas are all too often seen in terms of settlement problems in a host nation, where the focus is on issues of crime, housing, employment, racism and related concerns. The essays in this volume view Asian diasporic movements in the context of globalization and global citizenship, in which multiple cultural allegiances, influences and claims together create complex negotiations of identity.Examining a range of cultural documents through which such negotiations are conducted — literature and other forms of writing, media, popular culture, urban spaces, military inscriptions, and so on — the essays in this volume explore the meanings and experiences involved in the two major Asian diasporic movements, those of South and East Asia.

Using ethnographic data collected in China and South Korea between 2004 and 2011, author Sunhee Koo provides a comprehensive view of the music of Koreans in China (Chaoxianzu), from its time as manifestation of a displaced culture to its return home after more than a century of amalgamation and change in China. As the first English-language book on the music and identity of China’s Korean minority community, Sound of the Border investigates diasporic mutations of Korean culture, influenced by power dynamics in the host country and the constant renewal of relationships with the homeland. Between the 1860s and the 1940s, about two million Koreans migrated to China in search of economic opportunity and political stability. Settling primarily in the northeastern part of China bordering the Russian Far East, these Koreans had flexibility in crossing geopolitical and cultural boundaries throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In 1949, the majority of Koreans in China accepted their new citizenship designation as one of the PRC’s fifty-five official national minorities. The subsequent partition of the Korean peninsula in 1953 further politicized their ethnic identity, and for the next forty years they were only authorized to interact with North Korea. It was only in the early 1990s that Chaoxianzu were able to renew their relationship with South Korea, although they now faced new challenges due to an ethno-national prejudice as it focused on the nation’s industrial advancement as the most prominent measure of its social superiority. Sunhee Koo examines the unique construction of diasporic Korean music in China and uses it as a window to understanding the complexities and diversification of Korean identity, shaped by the ideological and political bifurcation and post–Cold War political resurgence that have affected Northeast Asia. The performances of Korean Chinese musicians—positioned between their adopted state and the two Koreas—embody a complex cultural intersection crisscrossing ideological, political, and social boundaries in historical and present-day Northeast Asia. Migrants enact their agency in creating a unique sound for Korean Chinese identity through navigating cultural resources accessed in their host and the two distinctive motherlands.

This book is the first edited collection to respond to an undeniable resurgence of critical activity around the controversial theoretical term ‘interculturalism’ in theatre and performance studies. Long one of the field’s most vigorously debated concepts, intercultural performance has typically referred to the hybrid mixture of performance forms from different cultures (typically divided along an East-West or North-South axis) and its related practices frequently charged with appropriation, exploitation or ill-founded universalism. New critical approaches since the late 2000s and early 2010s instead reveal a plethora of localized, grassroots, diasporic and historical approaches to the theory and practice of intercultural performance which make available novel critical and political possibilities for performance practitioners and scholars. This collection consolidates and pushes forward reflection on these recent shifts by offering case studies from Asia, Africa, Australasia, Latin America, North America, and Western Europe which debate the possibilities and limitations of this theoretical turn towards a ‘new’ interculturalism.

This is the first systematic study of networks of performance collaboration in the contemporary Chinese-speaking world and of their interactions with the artistic communities of the wider East Asian region. It investigates the aesthetics and politics of collaboration to propose a new transnational model for the analysis of Sinophone theatre cultures and to foreground the mobility and relationality of intercultural performance in East Asia. The research draws on extensive fieldwork, interviews with practitioners, and direct observation of performances, rehearsals, and festivals in Asia and Europe. It offers provocative close readings and discourse analysis of an extensive corpus of hitherto untapped sources, including unreleased video materials and unpublished scripts, production notes, and archival documentation.

Providing comprehensive coverage of a variety of Asian American cultural forms, including folk tradition, literature, religion, education, politics, sports, and popular culture, this two-volume work is an ideal resource for students and general readers that reveals the historical, regional, and ethnic diversity within specific traditions. An invaluable reference for school and public libraries as well as academic libraries at colleges and universities, this two-volume encyclopedia provides comprehensive coverage of a variety of Asian American cultural forms that enables readers to understand the history, complexity, and contemporary practices in Asian American culture. The contributed entries address the diversity of a group comprising people with geographically discrete origins in the Far East, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, identifying the rich variations across the category of Asian American culture that are key to understanding specific cultural expressions while also pointing out some commonalities. Entries are organized alphabetically and cover topics in the arts; education and politics; family and community; gender and sexuality; history and immigration; holidays, festivals, and folk tradition; literature and culture; media, sports, and popular culture; and religion, belief, and spirituality. Entries also broadly cover Asian American origins and history, regional practices and traditions, contemporary culture, and art and other forms of shared expression. Accompanying sidebars throughout serve to highlight key individuals, major events, and significant artifacts and allow readers to better appreciate the Asian American experience.