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  • Resounding Afro Asia: Interracial Music and the Politics of Collaboration by Tamara Roberts
  • Zachary Price (bio)
Resounding Afro Asia: Interracial Music and the Politics of Collaboration. By Tamara Roberts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016; 248 pp.; illustrations. $99.00 hardcover, $24.95 paper, e-book available.

Resounding Afro Asia focuses on the interminority politics of music and interrogates how contemporary Afro Asian performance ensembles create "physical and/or sonic spaces in which blackness and Asianness coincide within a juxtaposition of musical traditions, visual representations, and the identities of the artists that perform them" (3). Using a synthesis of ethnographic and archival research, Roberts develops a theory of the "sonoracial" in order to make legible the process through which music becomes raced. In the case of "sono-racialization" music becomes "black" or "Asian" based on an organization of sounds that attach themselves to taxonomies of racialized conceptions of bodies—a process which, in turn, produces racial hierarchy (4). However, not unlike Gaye Johnson's concept of "spatial entitlements," (2013:x) in which "reclamations of space occur through the formation of interracial political and artistic coalitions," (11) the "sono-racial" can also be a possibility for developing coalitional politics through Afro Asian music, "in which artists employ racialized sound to form and perform interracial rapport" (6). It is the possibility of a coalitional politics through sound with which Roberts's project seems most acutely concerned.

In foregrounding a multiplicity of raced bodies and sounds, Afro Asian ensembles perform group identities and aesthetic utterances that enact a politics of disruption because these utterances and identities cannot be collapsed into one racial category. In this context, Roberts argues, Afro Asian performance (explicitly political or otherwise) is a constant historical reference to the Bandung Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference held in Indonesia in 1955 during which 29 newly formed African and Asian nations met to forge a path free from imperialism (51). Yet, in acknowledging Claire Jean Kim's work on "racial triangulation" (1999) Roberts also demonstrates how sono-racialization can reify essentialist understandings of identity formation wherein constructions of whiteness (neutral and universal), blackness (superior/inferior), and Asianness (insider/foreigner) maintain a cultural hegemony that is adherent to neoliberal multiculturalism.

The opening chapter begins with a reading of Billy Johnson and Bob Cole's song "The Wedding of the Chinee and the Coon" (1898). The piece is a confluence of sonic and visual racial stereotypes drawn from the 19th-century blackface and yellowface minstrel show, A Trip to Coontown (1898). The production was the first full-length musical written by African Americans and was performed, produced, and directed by black artists. Roberts's analysis demonstrates how sono-racialization operated to suture sound into singular racial meaning and how sono-racial triangulation created varying forms of racial hierarchy. In contrast, Roberts offers Paul Robeson's global anti-imperialist Afro Asian performances on his album Chee Lai: Songs of New China (1941) in collaboration with Chinese conductor and composer Liu Liangmo as evidence of a sono-racial resistance against dominant sounds of the culture industry. The Afro Asian collaboration on "Chee Lai (March of the Volunteers)" fulfilled "a growing cross-racial and transnational political consciousness that fomented in the early twentieth century" (30). Roberts then links this early transnationalism to a "music of color" embodied in the work of the Bay Area Asian American jazz scene, Sun Ra's "India" (1956), Duke Ellington's The Afro Eurasian Eclipse (1971), and more contemporary Afro Asian performances represented in the music of Wu Tang Clan.

Chapter 2 examines Afro Asian performance as sono-racial collaboration through the music of contemporary musician Yoko Noge and her bands Japanesque and Jazz Me Blues Band. [End Page 188] While acknowledging the manner in which Noge's appropriation of the jazz/blues tradition can be problematic, Roberts's analysis of Noge's work further expands the concept of "music of color" as a possibility for "cross-racial nonwhite access to a shared body of mixed cultural material" (61). Noge's work demonstrates not only sono-racial collaboration in the US, but how, as Shannon Steen has discussed in Racial Geometries of the Black Atlantic, Asian Pacific and American Theatre (2010), the...

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