Two Studies of Music in the Filipino-American Diaspora

Ethnomusicologists and the field of ethnomusicology continue to further musical research through “the study of why, and how, human beings are musical” (Rice 2014, 1). However, music, movement, and dance in research are not confined to ethnomusicology. Theodore Gonzalves’s The Day the Dancers Stayed and Antonio Tiongson Jr.’s Filipinos Represent are two recent works in the discipline of Asian American studies utilizing music and dance to explore such inquiries as identity politics and diasporic studies. Both works will resonate with those looking for case studies addressing sonic and visual negotiations of identity within diasporic communities, particularly among youths. Readers with specialized interests on Filipinos performing “Filipinicity” in diasporic communities in the United States—that is, the performing of one’s Philippine identity, or Filipinoness, regardless of location or surroundings (Trimillos 1998)—will be intrigued by both.

In The Day the Dancers Stayed, Gonzalves “traces a genealogy” of a popular cultural form known as the “Pilipino Cultural Night” (PCN), which was popularized by Filipino students in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s (9). Gonzalves argues that the “PCN represents the invention, and occasionally also the misinterpretation, of cultural repertoire” (19). Gonzalves investigates how Filipino students “address their bodies to what has been perceived as the irreversibility of linear time, the inevitability of national formations, and the incommensurability of Filipino experiences throughout the diaspora” (10).

Through the PCN, Gonzalves looks at the relationship between the invention of a performance repertoire that came into existence in the initial decades of the twentieth century in Manila, the repertoire’s nationalization, and its development by Filipino Americans to (re)connect to a distant and imagined Philippine homeland. Seen as a space in which Filipino American youth negotiate their identities as Filipinos and Americans, Gonzalves iterates, “Cultural performances [e.g., the PCN] … give us [as researchers and scholars] an opportunity to be respectful and critically skeptical about how each generation throws forth its own challenge to be relevant. Rather than establishing clear lines of benefaction from one generation to the next, cultural performances reveal that multiple pasts engage multiple presents” (146–47).

Gonzalves turns to Foucault in explaining his genealogical approach; as Foucault writes, “Genealogy … operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times” (1977, 139). Gonzalves’s methodology is effective and evident throughout the book, and its success lies in its ability to allow readers to zoom in and out of the context of the PCN, permitting a balance between micro and macro perspectives.

Two performance studies scholars that Gonzalves employs to ground his own thoughts are Diana Taylor (2003), who presents distinctions between archives and repertoires, and Joseph Roach, who explores the “three-sided relationship of memory, performance, and substitution.” Roach’s concept of “surrogation,” “how culture reproduces and re-creates itself … as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric,” features prominently (1996, 2). Further critical insights into Taylor’s and Roach’s ideas could have enhanced this discussion. For instance, how do these compare with the insights of other relevant scholars, or are the two ideas completely satisfactory? Furthermore, greater interaction between the theoretical frameworks and the central themes—“the relationship between the invention of performance repertoire and the development of diasporic identification” (9)—could stand to strengthen Gonzalves’s own thoughts and arguments.

The book is organized into five clearly structured chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on the creation of a national folkloric repertoire. In anticipation of the Philippines...