This paper investigates how sound and image combine to craft new visions of national identity in Taiwan’s 2022 National Day sound-and-lights show (SLS). SLS’s, spectacular shows that project moving images, music, and abstract lighting onto classical architecture or famous landscapes, have proliferated as tourist attractions at sites as diverse as Greece’s Acropolis (Marlowe 2001) and China’s West Lake (Zhang 2010). Since 2017, Taiwan’s annual National Day celebrations have also included a SLS projected onto the Presidential Office Building in Taipei. The 2022 National Day SLS centered on the theme of Taiwan’s film history, stitching together 25 iconic films to create a Taiwanese cinematic canon. Underscoring these media was a medley of classic Taiwanese popular songs, arranged by musical theater composer Owen Wang 王希文. Drawing on close readings and interviews with audience members, I suggest that Wang’s score leverages the “stickiness” of music (Abbate 2004) to craft emotional connections between audiences and a Taiwanese cinematic canon, creating a common set of referents indexing an emergent national identity. By attending to Taiwan’s National Day SLS, I expand our understandings of how artists and the state navigate Taiwanese identity at a time when the nation’s existence is an increasing source of regional tension. I also show how increasingly popular multimedia technologies facilitate new kinds of placemaking and new means of shaping the national imaginary. Specifically, I suggest that the National Day SLS blends Taiwan’s world-leading technological prowess with local musical and cinematic traditions to assert the legitimacy of its existence.

The uilleann pipes (Irish bagpipes) occupy a central emblematic role in Irish traditional music and nationalistic portrayals of Irishness. The discourse and practice of uilleann piping can simultaneously express finer degrees of place and belonging – to a region, a county or even a township. Conversely, the uilleann pipes’ development and current status are testament to centuries of migration, diaspora and globalisation, and today unite a vibrant global community of pipers. Understandings of place and nationality continue to motivate conflicting narratives of localism, nationalism, globalism, tradition and change in Irish traditional music, both internally and externally to the uilleann piping community. This presentation will examine the significance of place and nationality as both generative and constraining factors in the contemporary uilleann piping tradition. It will reflect on the symbolic and imaginative dimensions of place and sound in establishing productive connections between pipers and community, lineage and history, and the ways in which pipers exert agency against fetishistic or deterministic understandings of geography and ancestry. This research draws on ethnographic interviews with prominent uilleann pipers, especially the contemporary pipers “Blackie” O’Connell and Joey Abarta, coupled with analysis of recorded music. A central framework explored will be that of musical style, a vital but frequently ambiguous concept amongst practitioners of Irish traditional music, which can be used to illuminate pipers’ understanding of place and the broader processes of choice and necessity that guide musicmaking.

The reggae band Lauwarm (“lukewarm”) became a media sensation in 2022 when its concert at the local cooperative bar Brasserie Lorraine in Bern, Switzerland, was abruptly stopped at intermission due to concerns over cultural appropriations. Audience members had complained that the rasta dreadlocks and African clothing of the band’s members made them feel “uncomfortable.” In this presentation, I demonstrate how this band’s stunning shift from alternative left-wing scene to right-wing media darling symbolizes a deeper struggle to redefine identity in a liminal state.

The media debate following the aborted concert mostly neglected the fact that Dominik Plumettaz, the band’s lead-singer and creative mind, has an Angolan and Brazilian family background. Would an audience feel less “uncomfortable” knowing this and react differently to the band’s references to Rastafarianism? As Jessica Perea shows in Sound Relations, it is exactly mixed-race musicians who are most often denied the right to define themselves and who are pressed into a concept of identity that others constructed for them.

Instead of trying to affix a singular identity to Plumettaz, I argue that it is more helpful if instead we examined the “density of truths” (Perea) of the story. Using Diamond’s “alliance studies”, Perea’s “sound relations”, and Thomassen’s “liminality” models, I demonstrate how Plumettaz’s multitude of experiences challenges a traditional view of how reggae and people of color are situated in Switzerland: they are now no longer simply an exotic “other”, but have transitioned to become part of the fabric of a more diverse population.

Junior Panorama, Trinidad and Tobago’s preeminent youth steelband competition held annually during the Carnival season, has long been affiliated with both the Trinidadian government and with various nationalistic movements. As such, the competition represents a stage in which Trinidadian nationalism is developed and reinforced. Trinidadian nationalism movements, including those connected with youth spaces, are frequently understood along racialized ideologies emphasizing either Afro-Trinidadian or Indo-Trinidadian perspectives (Ballengee 2019, Nathaniel 2006, Dudley 2008). Despite the racialized understandings of nationalistic spaces in Trinidad, Junior Panorama is frequently discussed in race silent language (Escayg 2020), with many adult steelpannists claiming that race has no role in youth centered steelbands. However, representations of Trinidad’s racial demographics are frequently accentuated on the Junior Panorama stage through both music selections and visual representations, with youth participants understanding and conceptualizing the role of race within their spaces. In this paper, I explore the complexities of Trinidadian nationalism and its presence within the Junior Panorama competition, arguing that a racialized Trinidadian nationalism is performed and negotiated in the annual competition. Utilizing interviews completed from 2021-2023, and a detailed case study from the 2023 Junior Panorama competition, I prioritize youth perspectives to question long standing perceptions of race in youth spaces, solidifying the importance of the competition within larger discussions of race and society in Trinidad and Tobago.