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

Su Zheng's book on the musical life of Chinese America is as much an exploration of its cultural meanings, social functions, and roles in identity formation as it is a documentation of the multifarious forms of musicking in the Chinese community itself. In the book's eight chapters, Zheng takes the readers through its thickly entangled and interconnected conceptual territories, its racialized yet rich historical past, its present-day plurality of voices, its public (re)presentations and paradoxes, its most widely enjoyed genre—popular music—disseminated through transnational mass media, its connection to the global community, and, finally, its multiple interactions with the host country. No author who decides to trace the meaning and practice of such a vast number of musical groups and genres over more than 150 years through a relatively detailed ethnography and historical delineation has an easy task. This book, however, succeeds in balancing historical and critical analysis with keen observation and rich documentation.

The first chapter addresses broad conceptual themes, such as "diaspora," cultural identity, transnationalism, urban ethnomusicology, and the complicated relations between culture and place. Zheng also introduces the theoretical and pragmatic dilemmas that arose from her fieldwork. The multiple roles that she herself assumed while interacting with the musical lives of Chinese Americans in New York City in the 1990s comprised a perplexing set of negotiations, and she notes, "Writing ethnography therefore can itself become 'another way of writing our own identities and communities'" (21).

Chapter 2 traces the history that formed the backdrop to the Chinese diaspora in the United States, framed cleverly within the notion of "travel." Through a brief survey of the histories of the US Chinese Exclusion, Sino-American cultural exchanges, and the roles of students and the intelligentsia in the Chinese American transnational community, Zheng brings transnational historical perspectives to bear on the study of Asian American music. The emphasis on the transnational condition is prudent, distinguishing Zheng's critical voice. Instead of common prescriptive questions, such as "What is Chinese/Asian American music?," Zheng is far more interested in "a descriptive strategy that prioritizes Asian Americans' relationships with music" (57), and by adhering to this objective, she avoids the traps inevitably associated with any search for a definition of Chinese/Asian American music.

The theoretical chapters are followed by six chapters that use "detailed ethnographic data and descriptions" to document the music life of Chinese America. As Zheng reasonably contends, "writing it down and having it in print is a means of empowerment for unprivileged [musicians]." (8) Chapter 3 documents the earliest extant music-related materials on the Chinese in America and situates them in the larger historical and social context, including analyses of the racializing gaze in nineteenth-century magazine cartoons and popular displays. Zheng then analyzes songs of Chinese sojourners and provides a respectable account of the history of Cantonese opera in New York City from 1853 to the 1950s, uncovering several valuable early playbills. Noting the changes of demographics in the Chinese American community in the post-World War II era, Zheng concludes this chapter with a survey of music groups that emerged from the 1950s into the 1970s.

"Present and Here" is the title of chapter 4, documenting musical activities according to genres and organizations such as Cantonese and Peking opera clubs, Chinese ensembles, Western orchestras, choruses, the muyu song of Taishan rural immigrants, contemporary new music of post-Cultural Revolution young composers, and Asian American jazz musicians. Posters and programs of musical events, as well as the score of one particularly famous art song and the lyrics of a muyu song, are combined effectively with informants' narratives to convey the sense of kindred spirit and significant meaning deeply ingrained in these music activities.

In chapter 5, Chinese American music groups are considered as organizations: their formation; characteristics of their memberships and gatherings; the social meaning of their performances; their roles in the transmission...