Week 7_Kelly Wang_ASA 114

In Professor Valverde's reading, "Popular Music: Sounds of Home Resistance and Change", she focuses on the creation and reconstruction of shared hybrid culture across the Vietnamese and the diasporic group. Highlighting the stories of producing shared hybrid culture also brings to light all the dilemmas that come with "accepted notions of what constitutes culture and the belief that consumption can be controlled" (p. 30). The very statement that Vietnamese music borrows from multiple cultures shows how shared hybrid culture is everywhere. The impact shared hybrid culture can have is Vietnamese music as a connection to the homeland: Vietnamese refugees reconnecting with the past through continuing their career in the music industry abroad. I did not realize how much of an effect political ideologies, such as anti-communist sentiments, had on something such as popular music. However, Professor Valverde states that "The anti-communist ideology not only added to the "culture in a bubble" phenomenon; it also stalled collaboration between musicians in Viet Nam and those in the diaspora" (p. 63). In the second reading, "Diaspora Politics, Homeland Erotics, and the Materializing of Memory", Louisa Schein discusses the complexities that consist of homeland politics that aren't reviewed enough in diasporic studies. For example, for the Hmong community, their idea of homeland is fragmented among the population and "as nostalgic imaginings span out over Asia, it gives rise to diverse practices of recovery" (p. 698).  The long debate over where the Hmong community may have originated from is what also contributes to the struggle of homeland politics as well as forming cultural identity. Schein makes a call to action by stating that in order to "avoid normative regularities" and stabilize homeland practices, we need to focus on theorizing "(I) the potential plurality of translocal migration trajectories, (2) relations between representations of both migrant and homeland identities and their material effects, and (3) the dynamics of sexuality and gender as desires and structured opportunities intersect" (p. 723).

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