Claiming Diaspora: Music, Transnationalism, and Cultural Politics in Asian/Chinese America (review)

An engaging work, Claiming Diaspora examines the musical culture of Asian/ Chinese America from the second half of the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. This book fills a critical lacuna in the knowledge of Chinese American and Asian American musics, with the exception of Asian American jazz, in the United States as they have been much neglected in the examination of Asian American history and cultural identities by Asian Americanists. Furthermore, music in Asian/Chinese America represents an essential signifier that generates complicated and at times contradictory cultural meanings. Yet despite its roles in affirming the heterogeneity of Asian cultural heritages (including the conveyance of sonic vestiges of colonialism and Westernization), in being a part of racialized Asian American history fraught with diasporic cultural politics, and in its cultural signification "to link the two sides of the Pacific" (p. 7), it still eludes the attention of mainstream American media.

In Asian American studies, two somewhat interrelated cultural paradigms have taken hold: (1) the concept of "claiming America" that has its roots in the Asian American movement started in the 1960s that supported the power of solidarity among different Asian communities to stand against racism and to foster the spirit of an antithetical culture to help better the lives of Asian Americans; (2) the notion of European immigrants who, through the process of assimilation, adopted a new life, distanced themselves from the "Old World" and their musical traditions, and gradually became an integral part of American musical heritage. In her book, Su Zheng skillfully unravels the debates that marred these two models. Claiming Diaspora offers an alternative view to "claiming America" by acknowledging the mutable and evolving nature of music in Chinese America as a sociopolitical platform in discussing current cultural struggles while also paying homage to the history of Asian exclusion in the United States. Furthermore, Zheng also advocates new models for Asian American music scholarship that demonstrate that the path music-making in Asian American communities has taken differs from that of European immigrants. She also challenges the traditional perception of non-Western music as conventional and immobile by highlighting the diasporic experiences of Asian Americans within the context of space, place, and displacement:

The transnational quality of the Chinese American experience and its musical expression, I contend, is conditioned by constant multilevel interactions and negotiations between the host country, the homeland(s), internal cultural conflicts, historical consciousness, and the aspirations of individual musicians. . . . Chinese American musical culture interacts with these forces at the same time it is shaped by them. The local manifestation of music and cultural politics draws on regional, national, and transnational resources, and its transpacific resonance reaches far beyond not only city limits, but also national borders.

(p. 14)

The opening pages of the first chapter (introduction) report on the strong musical participation of Asian Americans and Chinese Americans in a series of cultural events held from 1989 to 1996 in order to illustrate changing demographics throughout the United States. These events also highlighted the struggles faced by Asian Americans to gain full rights to participate in the formation of the country's political and cultural landscapes. However, as Hawaii, New Mexico, California, and Texas had become "majority-minority" states by 2007 and as "Caribbean New York" has become a concept, one may speak of the "browning" of America (p. 6), a process that will likely continue in forging a new America. So, in light of the country's increasingly multifarious population, what constitutes an American cultural identity? How should we perceive contemporary Asian American cultural identity and Chinese American cultural identity separately and together? How are Asian American musical activities affected by local, national, and transnational cultural politics and histories? What is their place in cultural America?

The book attempts to examine these salient questions and other related ones on different levels. Scholars in Asian American studies view...