This paper discusses Asian women performers and the haunting legacy of the “yellow woman” stereotype as it impacts the contemporary musical stage. As cultural theorist Anne Cheng notes in her groundbreaking book, Ornamentalism, the figure of the “yellow woman” is at once invisible and everywhere, “suffused with representation” to the point that she washes into the Western subconscious (2019: xi). I engage with Cheng’s work and others in critical race and music studies to interrogate an incident in 2020, where Canadian authorities detained and harassed the acclaimed Chinese pianist Yuja Wang before her solo recital and during a surge in anti-Chinese xenophobia. I connect this event with the archival traces of Afong Moy, the first-known Chinese woman in the United States who was exhibited as a foreign “curiosity” beginning in 1834. I do not, however, discuss Wang or Moy as a “yellow woman;” as Cheng notes, this is a racialized figure that must not be conflated with actual Asian and Asian diasporic women whose lives are complex, diverse, and full of meaning. Rather, in this transhistorical lineage of stage performance, I argue that we see the continued intersections between the Western stage and colonial legacies of conquest, erasure, and racialization of Asian women. This paper addresses this issue to show the continued traumas of the concert stage and the Orientalist histories that structure how Asian musicians must perform in circumscribed ways consistent with Western imaginations of the Other.

When Japanese American internment camp survivors relocated after the war, a range of Japanese sensibilities endured and were transmitted to future generations. While valuable research has been undertaken about the lives of Japanese American (JA) detainees within internment camps and after their release, little has been written about the survivors’ legacy transmitted to and embodied by the next several generations. This presentation traces some of the Japanese sensibilities that specifically enabled JA women’s psychological and physical resilience to survive the traumas of detainment and how these sensibilities persisted within JA communities in the 80 years since internees’ release. Many aesthetic and conceptual sensibilities persisted in the camps through various arts practices. Sensibilities that have endured in some form in the diaspora include gaman and mottainai (respectively, the Japanese practice of enduring the unbearable with dignity; and the belief that objects have intrinsic value and spirit that must not be wasted but instead creatively repurposed). How have these and other sensibilities endured in the diaspora as a continuation of camp resilience and activism? How have such practice arts influenced the community spirit, wellbeing, and the transmission itself? Examples drawn from women performers’ lives trace how such sensibilities have shaped and situated these women’s legacies. This presentation includes perspectives on the impact of containment and the transgenerational historical trauma that influenced generations forward in difficult yet also uplifting, positive ways.

On February 29, 2020, TaikoArts Midwest presented “HERbeat: Taiko Women ALL-STARS” at the Ordway Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. Billed as a “revolutionary lineup of women rock star Taiko players from around the globe,” the concert “put women center stage” in an historically male dominated tradition. Reclaiming the stage, the production stands in stark contrast to the prior four decades of Asian/American girls and women on the Ordway stage. Through auto/ethnography and interviews with Minnesota based activist artists, I offer an Asian American feminist activist critique of four musical productions at the Ordway since its founding in 1985. The domination of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, as bell hooks writes, is maintained through acts of violence “primarily enacted on the bodies of women and children”; a domination that separates us from our bodies (2013). And yet, “Love begins with the body…The act of loving our bodies as women of color is itself an act of resistance and decolonization. But then what do we do? Where do we go? How do we live in a world that isn’t ready for us?” (ibid). How might “HERbeat” be considered as an act of resistance, a reclamation, and a reconnection to the body for Asian/American women? Engaging concepts of the racial mundane (Kim 2015) and racially ambiguous (Ho 2015), I contextualize Asian American racialization and racial performances of Asian Americans (Lee 2016) and the historic “feminist process of musical collaboration” (Wong 2024) of HERbeat to help us prepare for ongoing reconnection and resistance.

Nobuko Miyamoto lost her voice for a year. She was sixty years old and an established singer-songwriter. She never got a conclusive diagnosis from either the western medical complex or holistic practitioners. Her voice eventually returned but was different: she now has a head voice quite distinct from her former chest voice. I explore how ideologies linking voice to agency and presence create overdriven approaches to Asian American subjectivity. What is the/a voice to Miyamoto? In her memoir, Miyamoto repeatedly cites the importance for Asian Americans of having a voice, and she describes how she and Chris Iijima famously wrote their songs to generate an Asian American voice. I reach into my own experience of having no voice for a terrified month after thyroid surgery. I refocus my ears on the vocal cords that won’t vibrate and on the breathy whisper of a voice understood as soundless. For Miyamoto – and for me – relearning a voice alongside other Asian American women was both fraught and powerful. Not-being-heard is quotidian for Asian American women; not being able to speak thus has a distinct doubled horror. The voice that emerges out of involuntary silence is shaped by the dreadful familiarity of not being heard. This presentation is based on long-term, sustained conversations with Miyamoto; on close readings of her memoir (in early drafts and as published); on the new voice studies; and on experience-near ethnography. How does the ideal of the voice rub up against its own materiality?