Conference Agenda

This roundtable explores intersections between music theory, Asian American Studies, and the broader Asian/American political project (Palumbo-Liu 1999), which are inseparable from configurations of race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and empire.

Three decades have passed since Ellie Hisama (1993) called attention to the systemic exoticization of Asian women in anglophone popular music, and how such harmful representations perpetuate long-standing racist and sexist stereotypes. The persistence of anti-Asian violence in recent years—multiple attacks against Asian/Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic and mass shootings in Atlanta, Indianapolis, and Monterey Park—highlights the urgency of revisiting earlier interventions by Asian/Americanist music theorists (Gopinath 2009; Hisama 2004; Rao 2009). Speaking from our positionalities as Asian/American scholars, we strategize how music theory can confront its “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchal” foundations (hooks 2003), center issues of Asian/American identity and politics in music analysis, and imagine new possibilities for Asian/American music-theoretical work.

Our roundtable consists of five 10-minute papers followed by reflections from a respondent and open discussion. Through personal narratives, theoretical interventions, and critical historiographies, the presenters explore how their Asian/American subjectivities shape their music-theoretical work. These presentations contribute to ongoing conversations about equity and justice in U.S./Canadian music theory (Ewell 2020; Kim 2021) by exploring what it might mean to center Asian/American subjectivities in music-theoretical research, teaching, and service. Echoing Deborah Wong, we aim to expand conversations on Asian/American identity, cultural representation, and visibility to imagine a music-theoretical practice that turns “toward activist commitment” (2004).

This position paper asks what more can we do at SMT to center minoritized voices in leadership, teaching, research, and mentoring? Drawing on sociologist Parminder Bhachu’s notion of the “multiple migrant” (1985, 2021), I first explore my own South Asian positionality to highlight how colonial methods of using labels to organize broad racial categories erase important differences. I expand the discussion to include Anne Anlin Cheng (2019), who further problematizes labels, particularly “woman of color,” which she sees as excluding Asian women.

In keeping with ethnomusicologist Lei X. Ouyang’s (2022) analysis of how Asian/Americans wrestle with this particular label, the central section explores how subjectivities animate categories that are handed to us, pre-made, and ready to put to institutional use. I praise the excellent initiatives of Engaged Music Theory and Project Spectrum, which lend nuance to our understanding of racial-cultural categories by centering minoritized lived experiences. In response, I explore the classroom as a space where we should be mindful of individual challenges that are obscured by incomplete information signaled by labels and the expectations that they carry.

As the Society finds ways to provide intellectual and emotional support that is both immediate and developmental, it can help members forge bonds with one another to create a community that values inclusive representation across the domains of service, research, teaching, and leadership. Building lifelong relationships contributes to a sense of belonging and an expansion of the Society that defies the constraints of labels.

Guy Ramsey passionately asks non-Black jazz scholars to consider the way that their racial upbringing elucidates the genesis of their research. However, as Asian-American cultural studies scholars have shown, articulating my Asian-American identity is a difficult task. Specifically, these scholars highlight the complications that arise from Asians being considered a “model minority” while also being excluded from larger power structures. Since Asian-American identities are often socially constructed as a minority that will not fundamentally challenge or change grander hegemonic structures, my ability to consider my positionality in jazz studies becomes complex and contradictory. Ramsey’s call to action is part of a broader diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative to reconfigure the basic ways in which we think about, understand, and ultimately embody equity. In this sense, the double allegiance of Asian-American identity becomes a paradoxical issue. I can speak to the ways that my identity has shaped my approach to jazz studies. Doing so presents me as an ideal “diverse” candidate, a minority who discusses race in music mostly performed by Black Americans. However, my ability to speak on my racial positionality is part of my privilege as growing up as a “model minority,” it is fundamentally different from the musicians I study. In this sense, the current state of DEI privileges my ability to reflect on my racialized experience with jazz in a manner that seems diverse, but is certainly not so in the more idealistic way Ramsey describes, beginning the question: “how do I hear here?”

In this paper, I take up Yamada’s (2002 [1979]) and Roshanravan’s (2018) provocations for Asian/American visibility and cross-racial alignment as they relate to the Society for Music Theory. First, I argue that a pervasive affect of contingency shapes music theorists from the margins to the core of the discipline. Second, I ask what kinds of particular contingencies might be felt within a society whose history is grounded, as Lett (2023) describes, in “exclusionary and assimilationist world-building practices”? That is, how have the SMT’s epistemological foundations perpetuated structural barriers to cross-racial alignment—amongst the membership of the Society, as well as within its central activities? And how and why does the affect of contingency often render these barriers invisible?

I conclude by exploring how the tenure pipeline habituates professors to adopt a mindset of insecurity and powerlessness in the face of institutional hegemony, while encouraging them to perceive any challenges to the institution as personal threats. I draw a connection between versions of this mindset in relation to this academic pipeline: those pre-tenure, post-tenure, and in administrative roles. In doing so, I ask: What is the relationship between the fear of inevitable harm and the affect of contingency? How do we allow this fear to hold us back from our best intentions and perpetuate harm? How does it strengthen the White racial frame (Ewell 2020) and the model-minority racial project? And, in view of these pervasive feelings, what alternatives can we collectively imagine toward coalition, cross-racial alignment, and equity?

Claiming the identity of the “professional music lover” was a central strategy in early feminist and queer music studies. Through calling attention to scholars’ loving relationships with music, this scholarship made a case for understanding musical experience through gender and sexuality. However, recent feminist and queer music scholarship has argued that music loving as a concept and practice also risks reinforcing structures of oppression by minimizing the harm that music can do. This paper expands on this ambivalence by examining how music loving affects professional identities and spaces. How might the obligation to perform music loving in our scholarship cause harm, and even foster hate? And how might music theory attend to these negative consequences?

To answer these questions, I draw on Cathy Park Hong’s notion of “minor feelings” (2020) to theorize the melancholy, shame, and (self-)hate that animate the everyday experiences of minoritized subjectivities, such as Asian/American identities, in music theory. Aligning with other perspectives on negative affects, Hong’s term describes the conditions of living with a constant dissonance of one’s own racialized reality pushing against a racist-capitalist enforcement of optimism. To bring these ideas to music research, I reflect on the minor feelings of making my minoritized position legible in the field—the internalized doubt that regulates my work as an Asian/American feminist and queer music scholar. Following Hong’s experiment with shaping these feelings into prose, my paper gives form to these moments of disciplinary love-hate to rethink what it means to become professional music lovers.