Drumming Asian America

This book is urgently important and deeply informed. Ahlgren models the power of intersectional interpretation, and she shows how taiko players activate intimate allyships across difference when asymmetries and ambivalences are acknowledged. I urge taiko players to read this book.

Auteur
Angela K. Ahlgren is an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University, where she teaches Theater History and Performance Studies and advises a collegiate taiko group. She is affiliated with Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Culture Studies at BGSU.

Texte du rabat

With its dynamic choreographies and booming drumbeats, taiko has gained worldwide popularity since its emergence in 1950s Japan. Harnessed by Japanese Americans in the late 1960s, taiko's sonic largesse and buoyant energy challenged stereotypical images of Asians in America as either model minorities or sinister foreigners. While the majority of North American taiko players are Asian American, over 400 groups now exist across the US and Canada, and players come from a range of backgrounds. Using ethnographic and historical approaches, combined with in-depth performance description and analysis, this book explores the connections between taiko and Asian American cultural politics. Based on original and archival interviews, as well as the author's extensive experience as a taiko player, this book highlights the Midwest as a site for Asian American cultural production and makes embodied experience central to inquiries about identity, including race, gender, and sexuality. The book builds on insights from the fields of dance studies, ethnomusicology, performance studies, queer and feminist theory, and Asian American studies to argue that taiko players from a variety of identity positions perform Asian America on stage, as well as in rehearsals, festivals, schools, and through interactions with audiences. While many taiko players play simply for the love of its dynamism and physicality, this book demonstrates that politics are built into even the most mundane aspects of rehearsing and performing.

Résumé
Taiko is a dynamic form of drumming that originated in 1950s Japan and inspired Japanese Americans in the 1960s. Through interviews, historical research, and the author's taiko experience, Drumming Asian America connects taiko with Asian American politics, arguing that taiko players of many identities perform Asian America on and off stage.

Contenu

• Preface

• Acknowledgments

• 1. Introduction: Drumming Asian America, Performing Cultural Politics
• 2. A New Taiko Folk Dance: San Jose Taiko and Asian American Movements
• 3. Taiko Scenarios: Performing Asian America in the Land of 10,000 Lakes
• 4. Practicing Ambivalence: White and Black Women in Asian American Performance
• 5. Butch Bodies, Big Drums: Queering North American Taiko
• 6. Conclusion: "This Occasion Needs Context"

• Appendix A: List of Interviews by the Author

• Appendix B: List of Life History Interview Transcripts Consulted

• Notes

• Selected Bibliography

• Index