Asian Americans in Music

What role does music play in the lives of Asian Americans, in shaping their identities and experiences? What kinds of music do Asian Americans make? How do different musical genres and styles affect the different articulations of identity and experience? What does it mean to make, perform, listen, respond, and react to music as Asian Americans or as Asian in/from America? Through different readings grouped together by musical genres and styles such as pop, hip-hop, jazz, western classical, and taiko, we will explore concepts surrounding identity, history and memory, and issues of cultural politics including appropriation, representation, migration, and citizenship. Borrowing Christopher Small's term of musicking, I hope for us to reflect on our relationships to music, relationships formed through music, and music as something we do and how it might inform the way we move through the broader world.