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Lecture with Deborah Wong, Ethnomusicologist
The University of California, Riverside
http://www.honors.ucr.edu/prof_of_year03.html
April 7
5:00 p.m.
Belk Library 421
"Looking (at Taiko, at Performance, at Alterity)"
How does Japanese American drumming suggest a new kind of visual ethnomusicology? I offer a model for visual documentation of taiko that folds the history of the colonial gaze into a mindful practice of looking. Contemporary heritage festivals are in many ways multiculturalized versions of the world expositions at the turn of the last century. It is impossible to do visual documentation of any kind (still photography, video, etc.) without reenacting colonial and tourist traditions of looking. These acts of looking are unavoidably the way that we see, and are the way that anyone—including taiko players themselves—are forced to 'see' taiko. I offer an unbeautiful, uncelebratory visual ethnomusicology that acknowledges the guiding force of colonial surveillance, National Geographic, Kodak, and Benetton in our ability to see, and yet I try to deploy visual technologies to get inside the performance of alterity, from the viewpoint of a participant. I thus offer a willfully conflicted yet mindful attempt to document taiko as an intervention into these economies.
Bio
Deborah Wong teachs at the
University of California, Riverside and is an ethnomusicologist. She specializes in the musics of Asian America and Thailand and holds an M.A. and Ph.D. (1991) from the University of Michigan and a B.A., magna cum laude (1982), in anthropology and music from the University of Pennsylvania. She has published two books: Sounding the Center: History and Aesthetics in Thai Buddhist Ritual (University of Chicago Press, 2001) addresses musicians' rituals and their implications for the cultural politics of Thai court music and dance in late twentieth-century Bangkok, and Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music (Routledge, 2004) focused on music, race, and identity work in a series of case studies including Southeast Asian immigrant musics, Chinese American and Japanese American jazz in the Bay Area, and Asian American hip-hop. She is a member of Satori Daiko, the performing group of the Taiko Center of Los Angeles, and her book in progress will address Japanese American drumming in California. She is President of the Society for Ethnomusicology for 2007-09.
