Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America

Refiguring American Music

by Christine Bacareza Balance

In Tropical Renditions Christine Bacareza Balance examines how the performance and reception of post-World War II Filipino and Filipino American popular music provide crucial tools for composing Filipino identities, publics, and politics. To understand this dynamic, Balance advocates for a "disobedient listening" that reveals how Filipino musicians challenge dominant racialized U.S. imperialist tropes of Filipinos as primitive, childlike, derivative, and mimetic. Balance disobediently listens to how the Bay Area turntablist DJ group the Invisibl Skratch Piklz bear the burden of racialized performers in the United States and defy conventions on musical ownership; to karaoke as affective labor, aesthetic expression, and pedagogical instrument; to how writer and performer Jessica Hagedorn's collaborative and improvisational authorial voice signals the importance of migration and place; and how Pinoy indie rock scenes challenge the relationship between race and musical genre by tracing the alternative routes that popular music takes. In each instance Filipino musicians, writers, visual artists, and filmmakers work within and against the legacies of the U.S./Philippine imperial encounter, and in so doing, move beyond preoccupations with authenticity and offer new ways to reimagine tropical places.

 

Genres: Music

256 pages, Hardcover

First published April 22, 2016

About the author

I am an Associate Professor of Performing & Media Arts, Asian American Studies, and the Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) at Cornell University. My writings on former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos, Asian American YouTube artists, Bruno Mars, Glee’s karaoke aesthetics, and spree killer Andrew Cunanan have been published in Women and Performance: a feminist journal, Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS), Women's Studies Quarterly (WSQ), and Theatre Journal. My first book, TROPICAL RENDITIONS: MAKING MUSICAL SCENES IN FILIPINO AMERICA (Duke University Press, 2016), examines how the performance and reception of post-World War II Filipino/Filipino American popular music compose Filipino identities, publics, and politics. My current book project, MAKING SENSE OF MARTIAL LAW, analyzes how former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and First Lady Imelda Marcos employed the sensorial and sensational, during their 21-year dictatorial rule, and how U.S.- and Philippines-based performances, events, and cultural objects critique the “Marcosian imaginary,” modeling new forms of cultural memory.

My research has been supported by the Consortium for Faculty Diversity (CFD), UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (UCPPFP), and the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Program. During the 2014-2015 academic year, I was a Society for the Humanities fellow. From 2003-2006, I previously served as a Research Consultant for the Ford Foundation’s Arts & Culture Program, an Events Associate in NYU’s Asian/Pacific American Studies Program, and Editorial Assistant to writer Jessica Hagedorn on the literary anthology CHARLIE CHAN IS DEAD 2: AT HOME IN THE WORLD (Penguin, 2004).

I continue to collaborate with Prof. Lucy San Pablo Burns (UCLA) on our forthcoming anthology, CALIFORNIA DREAMING: MOVEMENT & PLACE IN THE ASIAN AMERICAN IMAGINARY (University of Hawai’i Press, 2020).