Music and Sound in Transpacific East Asia

Music and Sound in Transpacific East Asia establishes transpacific circulation as a framework to understand the movement of music, sound, media, objects, texts, and people across East Asia and its diasporas. This collection of fourteen essays details a wealth of musical and sonic formations that emerged from neglected histories of transpacific circulations – from Cantonese opera in late-nineteenth-century San Francisco and Japanese tango musicians in 1930s Shanghai to church bells constructed from U.S. military oxygen tanks in post-Korean War South Korea. The essays explore such locations as transforming spaces of performance and sites of cultural negotiation, networked through migration, empire, war, and religion. Drawing from post/colonial history, anthropology, sound studies, memory studies, deaf studies, historical linguistics, and critical area studies, this collection offers new perspectives that challenge nation-, land-, and genre-based premises of musical authenticity.