In Soundtracks of Asian America, Grace Wang explores how Asian Americans use music to construct narratives of self, race, class, and belonging in national and transnational spaces. She highlights how they navigate racialization in different genres by considering the experiences of Asians and Asian Americans in Western classical music, U.S. popular music, and Mandopop (Mandarin-language popular music). Her study encompasses the perceptions and motivations of middle-class Chinese and Korean immigrant parents intensely involved in their children's classical music training, and of Asian and Asian American classical musicians whose prominence in their chosen profession is celebrated by some and undermined by others. Wang interviews young Asian American singer-songwriters who use YouTube to contest the limitations of a racialized U.S. media landscape, and she investigates the transnational modes of belonging forged by Asian American pop stars pursuing recording contracts and fame in East Asia. Foregrounding musical spaces where Asian Americans are particularly visible, Wang examines how race matters and operates in the practices and institutions of music making.

This book brings theory from popular music studies to an examination of identity and agency in youth films while building on, and complementing, film studies literature concerned with genre, identity, and representation. McNelis includes case studies of Hollywood and independent US youth films that have had commercial and/or critical success to illustrate how films draw on specific discourses surrounding popular music genres to convey ideas about gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and other aspects of identity. He develops the concept of ‘musical agency’, a term he uses to discuss the relationship between film music and character agency, also examining the music characters listen to and discuss, as well as musical performances by the characters themselves

This book examines the role of music in British-South Asian postcolonial literature, asking how music relates to the construction of postcolonial identity. It focuses on novels that explore the postcolonial condition in India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom: Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, Amit Chaudhuri's Afternoon Raag, Suhayl Saadi's Psychoraag, Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, and Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, with reference to other texts, such as E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and Vikram Seth's An Equal Music. The analyzed novels feature different kinds of music, from Indian classical to non-classical traditions, and from Western classical music to pop music and rock 'n' roll. Music is depicted as a cultural artifact and as a purely aestheticized art form at the same time. As a cultural artifact, music derives meaning from its socio-cultural context of production and serves as a frame of reference to explore postcolonial identities on their own terms. As purely aesthetic art, music escapes its contextual meaning. The transgressive qualities of music render it capable of expressing identities irrespective of origin and politics of location. Thereby, music in the novels marks a very productive space to imagine the postcolonial nation and to rewrite imperial history, to express the cultural hybridity of characters in-between nations, to analyze the state of the nation and life in the multicultural diaspora of contemporary Great Britain, and to explore the ramifications of cultural globalization versus cultural imperialism. It will be a useful research and teaching tool for those interested in postcolonial literature, music studies, cultural studies, contemporary literature and South-Asian literature.

The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media offers readers a comprehensive examination of the way that Asian Americans have engaged with media, from the long history of Asian American actors and stories that have been featured in mainstream film and television, to the birth and development of a distinctly Asian American cinema, to the ever-shifting frontiers of Asian American digital media. Contributor essays focus on new approaches to the study of Asian American media including explorations of transnational and diasporic media, studies of intersectional identities encompassed by queer or mixed race Asian Americans, and examinations of new media practices that challenge notions of representation, participation, and community. Expertly organized to represent work across disciplines, this companion is an essential reference for the study of Asian American media and cultural studies.

Japanese popular culture has been steadily increasing in visibility both in Asia and beyond in recent years. This book examines Japanese popular music, exploring its historical development, technology, business and production aspects, audiences, and language and culture. Based both on extensive textual and aural analysis, and on anthropological fieldwork, it provides a wealth of detail, finding differences as well as similarities between the Japanese and Western pop music scenes. Carolyn Stevens shows how Japanese popular music has responded over time to Japan's relationship to the West in the post-war era, gradually growing in independence from the political and cultural hegemonic presence of America. Similarly, the volume explores the ways in which the Japanese artist has grown in independence vis-à-vis his/her role in the production process, and examines in detail the increasingly important role of the jimusho, or the entertainment management agency, where many individual artists and music industry professionals make decisions about how the product is delivered to the public. It also discusses the connections to Japanese television, film, print and internet, thereby providing through pop music a key to understanding much of Japanese popular culture more widely.

The first volume focusing on film music as a worldwide phenomenon

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 cultural production and reception transform individual perceptions of time, space, and society. Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music encompasses ethnomusicology, oral history, Asian American studies, and cultural performance studies. It promises to set a new standard for writing in these fields, and will raise new questions for scholars to tackle for many years to come.

In Asian America Through the Lens, Jun Xing surveys Asian American cinema, allowing its aesthetic, cultural, and political diversity and continuities to emerge.

In Chains of Babylon, Daryl J. Maeda presents a cultural history of Asian American activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, showing how the movement created the category of "Asian American" to join Asians of many ethnicities in racial solidarity. Drawing on the Black Power and antiwar movements, Asian American radicals argued that all Asians in the United States should resist assimilation and band together to oppose racism within the country and imperialism abroad. As revealed in Maeda's in-depth work, the Asian American movement contended that people of all Asian ethnicities in the United States shared a common relationship to oppression and exploitation with each other and with other nonwhite peoples. In the early stages of the civil rights era, the possibility of assimilation was held out to Asian Americans under a model minority myth. Maeda insists that it was only in the disruption of that myth for both African Americans and Asian Americans in the 1960s and 1970s that the full Asian American culture and movement he describes could emerge. Maeda challenges accounts of the post-1968 era as hopelessly divisive by examining how racial and cultural identity enabled Asian Americans to see eye-to-eye with and support other groups of color in their campaigns for social justice. Asian American opposition to the war in Vietnam, unlike that of the broader antiwar movement, was predicated on understanding it as a racial, specifically anti-Asian genocide. Throughout he argues that cultural critiques of racism and imperialism, the twin "chains of Babylon" of the title, informed the construction of a multiethnic Asian American identity committed to interracial and transnational solidarity.