Conference Agenda

Lee Tung Foo (1875–1966), the pioneering Chinese-American professional vaudeville baritone, emerged as a prominent figure in American popular music during the early 20th century. This paper focuses on Lee's career as a case study to examine the portrayal of Chinese and Chinese Americans in early American popular songs and the intricate negotiation of racial identity within the context of music and performance. Existing research has illuminated the link between early American popular songs with Chinese themes and racial discourse; however, a gap in scholarship remains regarding the racialization of Chinese American voices within this cultural spectrum. This paper aims to bridge this gap through the lens of "racialized assimilation," a theoretical framework that combines concepts of assimilation and racialization, to analyze Lee's performances, audience reactions, correspondence with his vocal coach, and newspaper reviews. By examining these primary sources, the paper sheds light on Lee’s negotiation of racial identity through performance. I argue that while Lee achieved success in vaudeville, breaking barriers for other Chinese and Asian immigrants in American popular culture, his performances unintentionally reinforced negative stereotypes of Chinese immigrants through the process of racialized assimilation. The findings suggest that Lee's assimilation into American culture through his performances, while notable, followed a distinctive trajectory compared to his Irish and Jewish American counterparts, as it was complicated by racialized perceptions. Therefore, the adoption of a racialized assimilation framework may best capture Lee's experience as a Chinese-American singer. This study seeks to contribute to the existing scholarship on the intersections of racial issues, American popular songs, and Chinese American performance practices. An exploration into the racialized dimensions of Lee's performances, alongside the broader implications of Chinese-themed popular songs, expands the understanding of the historical struggles and representations of Chinese Americans, ultimately enriching a more nuanced perspective on race and music in American society.

In a Santiago de Chile newspaper article, written at the close of the 1972 local operatic season, readers were informed that Mozart’s operas “signified the start of the anti-feudal revolt,” that Beethoven’s Fidelio was “a shout of resistance against autocracy,” and that Verdi was nothing less than “a symbol of revolutionary struggle.” When this article appeared, Chile’s democratically-elected Marxist president Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity government had already initiated their attempt to lead the country on a peaceful path to socialism. While the Popular Unity’s embrace of the folk-based, popular music movement known as Nueva canción has been widely recognized by scholars (McSherry 2015, Mularski 2014, Taffet 1997, among others), I argue that it was not Nueva canción, but instead Western art music, that government officials found particularly advantageous for diplomatic cultural exchange, due to the musicians’ ability to draw on a largely shared repertoire and standardized performance conventions. Drawing on archival documents housed at the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile in Santiago, as well as on interviews with musicians, I show that during the course of Allende’s brief presidency (1970-73), Chile signed formal, bilateral cultural agreements with the Soviet Union, Cuba, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic. These cultural agreements, which were in line with Allende’s diplomatic strategy of establishing or maintaining friendly relationships will all Communist states, led to the circulation of musicians, ensembles, records, scores, and instruments between Chile, Cuba, and Eastern Europe. I also demonstrate that in Chile, these agreements necessitated a discursive re-framing of European classical music into revolutionary terms, in order to weaken its association with bourgeois culture. I thus build on Elaine Kelly’s (2019) move to take account of the musical diplomacy not only of the superpowers, but also between the periphery states that were active participants in the global Cold War. Furthermore, my paper contributes to an emerging body of scholarship (Fugellie 2020, Gavagnin 2020, Richter-Ibáñez 2020) that conceives of the international Cold-War political left as a network that enabled transatlantic musical exchange between Latin America and Europe.

In this paper, I consider the 2013 production of The Magic Flute in Lagos, Nigeria, by the Musical Society of Nigeria (MUSON), as a means of rethinking broad conceptions of opera performance in postcolonial Africa. MUSON is an organization comprised of Nigerian and foreign musical amateurs founded through diplomatic relations between high-net-worth professionals and the British High commissioner. It has been at the fore of art music performance and education in Nigeria for about three decades (Konye 2007). I explore the extent to which visual representation in this production creates cultural contact, exchange, and hybridity, affording an experience of the opera from both Western and African perspectives without a clash of homogenizing differences.

This study privileges Achille Mbembe’s writings on Afropolitanism as a framework for examining the multiple modes of meaning and identity created through visual elements that speak to specific indigenous knowledge. Mbembe argues against notions of culture and race that pit Africa against the West in many post-independence African settings (Mbembe 2007; 2010). He defines the Afropolitan ethos as an awareness of “here and elsewhere”, the domestication of the unfamiliar, to work with what appear to be contradictions (Mbembe 2019). In other words, Afropolitanism is the consequence of and a response to the African experience of the movement of products and people across global borders (Morosetti 2018).

I explore the overlap of meaning between African and Western contexts through an analysis of material elements such as costumes, props, and set. By scrutinizing these material elements through an Afropolitan lens and conceiving them as sites of localized ideological/identity struggles, I argue specifically that opera in Nigeria transcends rhetorics of “whiteness” and attempts at indigenization (Gilbert 2005; Roos 2010; Pistorius 2019). I further argue that the production locates its identity within Nigerian indigenous epistemologies by mapping famous indigenous figures to the characters in the opera. I will show that this staging invokes indigenous knowledge from Yoruba, Benin, and Hausa religious and socio-cultural conceptions. In other words, mixed codes of visual elements operate as cultural signifiers that perpetuate an Afropolitan identity through which audiences interact with this art form.