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.

Original essays and interviews by artists and scholars who are making, defining, questioning, and theorizing Asian American dance in all its variety.

Focus: Music in Contemporary Japan explores a diversity of musics performed in Japan today, ranging from folk song to classical music, the songs of geisha to the screaming of underground rock, with a specific look at the increasingly popular world of taiko (ensemble drumming). Discussion of contemporary musical practice is situated within broader frames of musical and sociopolitical history, processes of globalization and cosmopolitanism, and the continued search for Japanese identity through artistic expression. It explores how the Japanese have long negotiated cultural identity through musical practice in three parts: Part I, "Japanese Music and Culture," provides an overview of the key characteristics of Japanese culture that inform musical performance, such as the attitude towards the natural environment, changes in ruling powers, dominant religious forms, and historical processes of cultural exchange. Part II, "Sounding Japan," describes the elements that distinguish traditional Japanese music and then explores how music has changed in the modern era under the influence of Western music and ideology. Part III, "Focusing In: Identity, Meaning and Japanese Drumming in Kyoto," is based on fieldwork with musicians and explores the position of Japanese drumming within Kyoto. It focuses on four case studies that paint a vivid picture of each respective site, the music that is practiced, and the pedagogy and creative processes of each group. The downloadable resources include examples of Japanese music that illustrate specific elements and key genres introduced in the text. A companion website includes additional audio-visual sources discussed in detail in the text. Jennifer Milioto Matsue is an Associate Professor at Union College and specializes in modern Japanese music and culture.

2020 Alan Merriam Prize for Best Book Published in Ethnomusicology, Society for Ethnomusicology A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Louder and Faster is a cultural study of the phenomenon of Asian American taiko, the thundering, athletic drumming tradition that originated in Japan. Immersed in the taiko scene for twenty years, Deborah Wong has witnessed cultural and demographic changes and the exponential growth and expansion of taiko particularly in Southern California. Through her participatory ethnographic work, she reveals a complicated story embedded in memories of Japanese American internment and legacies of imperialism, Asian American identity and politics, a desire to be seen and heard, and the intersection of culture and global capitalism. Exploring the materialities of the drums, costumes, and bodies that make sound, analyzing the relationship of these to capitalist multiculturalism, and investigating the gender politics of taiko, Louder and Faster considers both the promises and pitfalls of music and performance as an antiracist practice. The result is a vivid glimpse of an Asian American presence that is both loud and fragile.

Recueil de textes sur l'échange culturel, symbolique ou matériel. Les auteurs montrent que les échanges peuvent constituer le fondement de l'entente entre les peuples. Des textes analysent cette pratique dans le cadre de relations ethniques, éclairant la situation des Indiens, notamment en Californie et au Mexique.

"A funny and clever radical revision of the 1958 Broadway hit."-Time magazine "An artistic success, revealing a revitalized score and a dramatic complexion that's far richer than the original."-Variety "One of the Year's 10 Best."-Los Angeles Times One of Rodgers and Hammerstein's most compelling love stories is re-made enchantingly in a new adaptation by the renowned Asian-American playwright, David Henry Hwang. This new version was a runaway hit last year in Los Angeles and now is playing on Broadway. Set in San Francisco's Chinatown in the late fifties, this is a funny and moving story which explores what it means to be an American and touches the history of every person whose forebearers once arrived as a stranger to these shores. The book also includes an essay by cultural critic Karen Wada on the history of Flower Drum Song and its relationship to the Asian-American community. David Henry Hwang was awarded the 1988 Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics and John Gassner Awards for his Broadway debut, M. Butterfly, which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His most recent play Golden Child received a Tony nomination and a 1997 OBIE Award.

Originally published in 1957, one of the first novels of the Chinese-American experience is now back in print to tie in with the Broadway revival.