How can working across disciplinary boundaries increase digital access to, and community engagement with, audiovisual archives? This paper, co-authored by a musicologist and two librarians, argues that multifaceted transdisciplinary collaborations can support sustainable research infrastructures that themselves serve multiple purposes. We describe the creation of a bilingual open access online portal and digital archive to provide curated access to the Fonds Jean Trudel (150+ hours of audio/video, 2000+ digital objects) and propose faculty-library collaboration as a means of working within university structures to create meaningful and sustained community engagement with archives. Following Barwick (2019), who distinguishes between archivists, end users, and “knowledge holders,” where the latter are deeply embedded in the community with which an archive is associated, we argue that a musicology-library partnership has created the necessary infrastructure for the musicologist to move beyond preservation, organization, and documentation to community-oriented transmission and dissemination, or what Seeger and Chaudhuri (2015) call the “collaborative archiving of community traditions” (25). The Fonds Jean Trudel ensures the long-term preservation and accessibility of a faculty member’s research, embeds experiential learning for information students, expands multilingual and audiovisual capacity within the library’s shared Islandora-based infrastructure, and strengthens partnerships with allied memory institutions to sustain the circulation of carefully curated, human-produced knowledge (Rothman 2024). These outcomes support the mandate of the library (Lankes 2011; Kisilowska-Szurmińska et al. 2024)

In 2028, the Louisiana Music Museum is expected to open to the public in downtown Lafayette, Louisiana. According to their vision statement, the museum seeks to stand “as a testament to the rhythms and harmonies that resonate within the history of our state, from Indigenous roots to the globally-connected present.” Towards this vision, the second story will feature a functional dance floor meant to emulate regional dance hall venues, once popular communal sites fundamental to local social life throughout the twentieth century. Importantly, histories and memories of these spaces have been largely transmitted through oral traditions, which have since been collected and mediated through archival institutions. Drawing from contemporary theories in heritage studies, I consider the interconnection of sound, dance, and oral history in heritage construction processes. I am interested in how sound and dance is integral to remembering dance hall experiences and how it facilitates the negotiation of local heritages in relation to senses of (un)belonging. Through archival research in the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Center for Louisiana Studies and interviews with local heritage authorities linked to the Louisiana Music Museum, I explore the ways in which archival mediation and museum re-presentation of oral histories contribute to reactivating the sociocultural significance of dance hall life in the public imaginary. My research seeks to weave together theoretical insights from heritage studies with ethnomusicological methods, developing a framework for understanding how individuals, as parts of larger multivocal community networks, engage with sound as a mode of heritage negotiation.

My paper synthesizes historiographical theory to explore how nhạc vàng (“golden music”), a sentimental genre associated with the former Republic of Vietnam, functions as a counter-archive that circulates historical consciousness through sonic and affective means. Long condemned by the postwar Vietnamese state as politically reactionary and neocolonial, nhạc vàng preserves lived experiences of wartime and postwar Vietnam and has persisted through censorship via underground and diasporic circulation. For many Southern Vietnamese in the diaspora, it remains a vital repository of memory, identity, and intergenerational connection. As a counter-archive, nhạc vàng renders historical narratives legible that are often absent from official memory: carceral experiences, displacement, fractured family histories, and enduring state suppression. Its archival power emerges through the naming and collective recognition of songs, artists, and narratives shaped by political struggle. Diasporic institutions such as Thúy Nga and Paris by Night have structured the genre’s circulation, mediating which histories are foregrounded, softened, or left unspoken through performance, production, and audience engagement. In dialogue with critical historiography on archival silence, oral history, and affective memory, this paper argues that nhạc vàng demonstrates how music can sustain politically and emotionally charged histories across geographies, generations, and migration contexts. As a living archive, it challenges conventional understandings of historical preservation and shows how sound, affect, and social memory create forms of historical consciousness that exist beyond state and textual archives.

In post-Renovation ("Đổi Mới") Vietnam, the "Bolero Wave" represents the public resurgence of pre-1975 South Vietnamese popular music—a repertoire historically marginalized by state pressure and pejoratively labeled "yellow music" (nhạc vàng) against North Vietnam's revolutionary "red music" (nhạc đỏ). Focusing on the 2000s to the late 2010s, this paper examines how "bolero" evolved from a rhythmic descriptor into a depoliticized signifier facilitating this music’s re-entry into the official public sphere. Rapidly expanding to absorb interconnected local genres, the term’s use culminated in mainstream phenomena like the show Bolero Idol (Thần Tượng Bolero, 2016). By mapping conceptual overlaps between bolero and diverse local categories—romantic nhạc trữ tình ("music conveying emotion"), pastoral nhạc quê hương (“homeland/countryside music”), and repertoires simultaneously praised as mùi (pungent) and disparaged as sến (maudlin)—this study reveals genre-making as a complex process of cultural negotiation. Musically, Vietnamese bolero mediates between Latin American rhythms signalling cosmopolitanism and the provincial aesthetics of southern traditional genres (e.g. cải lương). Discursively, adopting the "bolero" moniker eases the genre away from politically fraught wartime repertoires in favor of apolitical romanticism. This shift transforms a stigmatized, southern artifact into a pan-Vietnamese popular tradition, a reorientation I argue is embodied in the divergent performance styles of two prominent vocalists: southern-born Đàm Vĩnh Hưng and northern-born Lệ Quyên. Ultimately, this presentation highlights musical nomenclature and aesthetics as strategic tools for historical reclamation, offering ethnomusicological insights into how post-conflict societies navigate censorship, rehabilitate marginalized archives, and leverage genre to reshape cultural memory.