Joey Song
English Language and Literature Ph.D. Candidate, University of Michigan
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Bio: Joey Song is a 6th year English Language and Literature Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Michigan. His research is on contemporary (post-2008) Asian American cultural production, racial triangulation, and the maintenance of minor feelings. He is currently writing about the sonic profile of Asian American music.
Reorienting the Medium: Asian Americans and Television After Messianic Visibility
Dylan Rodriguez has drawn attention to how the #StopAsianHate consensus, which drummed up excitement by Asian Americans and non-Asian Americans alike for representation in mainstream media art, contributed to critical lacunae about Asian American partnerships with Zionism. Such work harkens back to the absence of discussions about television in Roots: An Asian American Reader (1971), in which the medium appears, if at all, as a vehicle for racist and imperial ideologemes. The papers of this panel seek to address this gap between the state of discourse in the media landscape and our interdiscipline’s radical commitments to collective liberation.
To that end, this panel displaces what panelist Melissa Phruksachart wrote about in early 2020 as messianic visibility: the widespread faith that popular media representation would deliver Asian Americans from harm – which became even more pronounced in the years that followed. Focusing on television’s formal seriality and processes of adaptation, we revert neither to the outright dismissal of media’s imaginative pleasures nor to the facile celebration of cultural representation apart from the political crises unfolding around us by reading the medium’s embedded racialized aesthetic logics. This session will be moderated by Peter X. Feng, whose work has consistently offered Asian American studies a way beyond the liberal impasses of stereotype critique. Together, we ask: How can critical practice reorient our relationship to the medium of television beyond its images? What are the possibilities of television after the critique of its failed representational realism and corporate political economy?
Are There Asian American Sounds?
Beginning with the observation that there is no unifying Asian American genre of music, it is not immediately clear how racial identity influences the music Asian Americans create. Music, like all other forms of cultural production, is simultaneously a product of its time yet also a potential disruptor that can influence our attachments to racial identification. With such strong ties between music, activism, representation, performance, and gender expression, it’s paramount to study music as a tool in shaping what it means to be Asian American.
However, within Asian American Studies, not enough has been written about music’s role in establishing Asian American identity. Scholars such as Deborah Wong, Su Zheng, Grace Wang, and Amy Stillman have addressed this lacuna through their instrumental work, but previous scholarship can mostly be classified as ethnomusicology through its focus on the social and historical forces at play in the lives of Asian American musicians. While an ethnographic approach provides key insights on a macro level, I posit that formal analysis through music theory could also help illuminate how Asian American musicians might explore their racial identity through choices in harmony, rhythm, timbre, instrumentation, etc. Are there musical elements that frequently occur in the music Asian Americans create that reflect (and comment on) shared experiences or cultural affiliations? In this paper, I analyze songs by Mitski and Rina Sawayama through harmonic analysis in order to demonstrate the potential of utilizing music theory in the characterization of Asian American racialization.
Joey Song
English Language and Literature Ph.D. Candidate, University of Michigan
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