Movie: Oh, Saigon
Popular Music: Sounds of Home Resistance and Change - Kieu-Linh Valverde
Valverde discusses how artist, producers, and distributors engaged in the development and distribution of music in Vietnam, the US, and in the Vietnamese Diaspora in the US. These players had to navigate below and through the Vietnamese government’s censorship (especially coming from the Vietnamese diaspora in the US) and anticommunist sentiments and groups within the Vietnamese diaspora in the US. Given these two seemingly conflicting players, musicians, mixers, club owners, video store owners, and distributors still produced and distributed music in both Vietnam and within the Viet Kieu. In fact, music in Vietnam is influenced by Vietnamese Americans and Vietnamese musicians are influenced by the Vietnamese in Vietnam. Popular music from both Vietnam and Vietnamese American community is not necessarily mutually exclusive and is rather created by people from both places. Especially with the growth of information technology and travel, the flow of music was able to work around censorship from the two places and influenced each other’s development. . With the easing of controls from the US, Vietnam, and the Vietnamese in America during the past decade, it is expected that popular music in Vietnam and within the Viet Kieu will continue to meld together and grow.
I’m reminded of how K-Pop agencies in South Korea actively recruit Koreans in the US to become part of bands. It would be interested to research the history of the development of K-Pop and identify historical contacts, if any, that K-Pop had with the Korean diaspora (in the US?) (Interesting question: How did Korean trot develop from the Korean diaspora in Japan, many who were famous enka singers? John Lie talks about this, its history and contradictions in this article: http://www.tobiashubinette.se/hallyu_1.pdf)
And for the Korean diaspora in the US, how do Korean American embrace K-Pop to their own musical developments or perhaps their ethnic and cultural identity within multicultural US? How does the history of K-Pop and Korean Americans intersect along which notions? Nationalism, historically, economically, politically?
Diaspora Politics, Homeland Erotics and the Materializing of Memory - Louisa Schein
In Louisa Schein article, she discusses the discourses and events that materialize a homeland for Hmong in diaspora. Because of a long history of origin and migrations, Schein argues that Hmong people have multiple homelands. She presents two vignettes. One vignette talks about a specific Hmong New Year in Fresno, California, and its spectacular event because of two Lao Royal guests have been invited to attend. The second vignette talks about how male Hmong Americans have visited the Hmong villages in China, only to sleep with the young women who are promised a chance to go to U.S., but are left behind and forgotten by these men.
For the first vignette, Schein explains a history of the migration of Hmong people, originating from China. Possibly from conflict with Chinese imperialists, Hmong crossed the Chinese borders and into the south-east Asia territories, such as Laos, that became their new homes and now have centuries of huge historical depth for them. Then, when the Vietnam War reached Laos, Hmong in Laos allied with the French and Americans to fight back the communists. Unfortunately, when the U.S. pulled out of the war, it left many Hmong in persecution. So Hmong had to leave Laos to Thailand refugee camps, and eventually to the U.S. and other receiving countries to survive. These Hmong refugees went from a settled lifestyle in south-east Asia, to years of war trauma, and then to a new westernized country where education and language barriers were hard to adjust to. Whereas China is remembered in the nostalgic, Laos is romanticized and remembered concretely. Thus “Hmong American spatial commitments, then, are multiple and not constricted by a unidirectional program of return.”
So what made the Hmong New Year in 1996 so special and different were because of the two Lao Royalty guests that attended. They are the offspring of the former Lao king who are now living in exile in Paris. Their presence at the New Year represented a unified identity of Hmong and Laos through their similar experiences in political standing and struggles. The ceremonies for the Lao Royalties were a way to recreate a lost culture of Hmong memories in Asia, and a time when these high status officials were once able to make important political decisions.
Hmong Americans also play a retrograde character to their co-ethnics in the Chinese homelands. Because the Hmong in China are still in great poverty, they look up to the Hmong Americans for mentorship, educational, and economical assistance.
Finally, the diasporic Hmong (or Hmong Americans) have revisited their painful and embarrassing past thwart with Laotian oppression, American exploitation, and Chinese gentrification. Only, they come in droves of elitist, material driven wolves hungry to inflict or claim their rightful belongings in a space once called home, equipped with the Western weapons of colonialism, masculinity, and wealth. But what, as Schein so poignantly posits in her observation of Hmong American males reconstructing their past, is the relation of eroticism and most intriguing, the implicit, perhaps even suppressed, priapic inclinations of these Hmong men to conquer their shortcomings through sexual prowess? This leads to the belief and conjecture that at the very top of it all (dynasties, republics, monarchies, tribes, clans, etc.), and for those granted or earned the right to look down, all things seem absolute the same therewith (forgive my use of a cliché here and then some more in the following paragraphs describing Hmong phallic symbols and the justification of control by possession of the biggest phallus).
The message here is not why the Hmong American men use sex and wealth as a tool for reclaiming their dirt land and dying livestock, but the importance of citing any colonial power’s influence on their actions. It is rather a historical survey on what, given years of racism and hatred, will happen to a group of marginalized people when they discover they too harbor that same destructive power unleashed upon them. Is it not tempting to take up the power of the Dark side, to become Darth Vader, after a lifetime of goodness (“goodness” as in the sense of Hmong isolationism) that resulted in banishment? The entire nonsense concerning the phallus is real for the Hmong American men who have tasted the sticky stick of truth. For those who have sucked and gargled the sweetness of its strength and power, it is extremely hard to dismiss the sensuous excitement of its addictive elements. It is this primitive longing, this addiction, or so it seems, that somehow erects itself as a sensible knee-jerk reaction to possession. Unlike Schein, however, I believe homeland for the Hmong is not so easily materialized or fetishized in terms such as “eroticism” or “phallus”, or that these are implemented and premeditated as direct actions intended to reclaim the homeland. Schein conveniently paints this picture of fragmentation and disillusionment, of an extended stop in the current home of the Hmong in America, and theorize that sex is, or has to be, the most logical discourse in understanding the idea of a nomadic group of people clinging to something that was and will never exist.
What then, given this inherent desire to sexually reclaim the homeland that does not really exist as aforementioned, affects the current home in America for the Hmong people? Do the Hmong do their best to mimic the White Americans and adhere to enlightened and progressive concepts such as “eroticism” and “phallus” in order to only become puppet rulers? Or this may create a new generation of rapacious Hmong individuals realizing that they must overtake America by these same means encouraged by phallic symbols. The excitement of critiquing the Hmong people with Western philosophical concepts is something worth exploring, even if the concept is wholly meant to explain all races and ethnicities, or so we may assume.
Why Asian Girls go for White Guys (The PHALLIC conspiracy!!!):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SI3lPLsbwjw
From Japanese to Nikkei and Back: Integration Strategies of Japanese Immigrants and their Descendants in Brazil - Jeffrey Lesser
During the first half of the 20th century, many Japanese immigrants migrated to Brazil . It was suggested that these Japanese immigrants and their descendants were more original and authentic than those who were already members of the European descendant. Japanese residents in Brazil quickly began to construct a hyphenated ethnic identity that was both Brazilian and Japanese. Society’s goals were to incorporate Japanese culture and maintain a permanent Japanized space in Brazil through the preservation of language, culture, and religion. Community-run schools utilized Japanese education materials to exposed Brazilian-born children to the Japanese language and culture of their parents. Many Japanese immigrants married Brazilians because it was a positive thing to do. They produced “white” children and this gave them a higher racial status because whites were known as the elite. Japanese immigrants who migrated to Brazil have lost nothing but the spectral connections of place and time. They have kept their culture and language; Brazil emerged into a multicultural country.
Question:
1. How does history play an important part in defining a Homeland? Why are Hmong Americans committed to multiple nation-states/homelands?
2. In your opinion, did the Japanese lose anything from migrating to Brazil?
3. What forces challenge and define transnational popular music development in Vietnam and within the Vietnamese in America?
By: Diana, Gaukue, Ninh, Desun, and Ving
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