Popular Musics in Transnational Asia

4 credits · Undergraduate

This course explores the complex webs and flows of historical and contemporary transnational musical exchanges of Asian/Asian American popular music in the 20th and 21st centuries. For each musical practice, we will give attention to the histories of violence, im/migration, contested claims about national identity, and technological development that have produced the conditions in which the particular music was created. Resisting a monolithic imagination or understanding of “Asia,” this course will show how popular musical practices enable us to “hear” a dynamic production of Asia through hidden histories, memories, distant places, social differences, struggles, and innovations that go far beyond geographic national borders.