Resounding Afro Asia by Tamara Roberts, Paperback | Indigo Chapters

Cultural hybridity is a celebrated hallmark of U. S. American music and identity. Yet hybrid music is all too often marked -and marketed - under a single racial label. Resounding Afro Asia examines music projects that counter this convention; these projects instead foreground racial mixture inplayers, audiences, and sound in the very face of the ghettoizing culture industry. Giving voice to four contemporary projects, author Tamara Roberts traces black/Asian engagements that reach across the United States and beyond: Funkadesi, Yoko Noge, Fred Ho and the Afro Asian Music Ensemble, andRed Baraat. From Indian funk and reggae, to Japanese folk and blues, to jazz in various Asian and African traditions, to Indian brass band and New Orleans second line, these artists live multiracial lives in which they inhabit - and yet exceed - multicultural frameworks built on essentialism andsegregation. When these musicians collaborate, they generate and perform racially marked sounds that do not conform to their individual racial identities. The Afro Asian artists discussed in this book splinter the expectations of racial determinism, and through improvisation and composition, articulate newidentities and subjectivities in conversation with each other. These dynamic social, aesthetic, and sonic practices construct a forum for the negotiation of racial and cultural difference and the formation of inter-minority solidarities. Resounding Afro Asia joins a growing body of literature thatis writing Asian American artists back into U. S. popular music history, while highlighting interracial engagements that have fueled U. S. music making. The book will appeal to scholars of music, ethnomusicology, race theory, and politics, as well as those interested in race and popular music. | Resounding Afro Asia by Tamara Roberts, Paperback | Indigo Chapters