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81. Chinese Music and its Globalized Past and Present

Author:
Joseph Lam
Publication Date:
08-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
In September 2006, I toured China with a group of highly educated and musically sophisticated American businessmen, professionals, and retirees. During the tour, we took a boat ride upstream on the Agricultural Progenitor's Stream (Shennongxi), a tributary of the Yangtze River. There and then, we witnessed boatmen calls and female tour guides singing Chinese ethnic songs and American favorites. Prompted by the tour guides, we also sang, creating American echoes in scenic and tourist China.
Political Geography:
China and America

82. Global (Re)vision: Musical Imagination in African America

Author:
Ingrid Monson
Publication Date:
08-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
African American music has always been global, for it would never have come into being without that international trade in human beings known as the Atlantic slave trade. As historians of the slave trade have noted, Americans of African descent came from a variety of ethnic groups primarily from Central and West Africa. Many stopped first in the Caribbean before being transported for sale in various American cities of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. In the United States, unlike in the Caribbean, large groups of enslaved Africans from the same cultural group often did not reside together, which resulted in a synthesizing of diverse African cultural practices and values. People taken from what was then known as Senegambia (present day Senegal and Guinea) predominated numerically in the 17th century, but by the end of the North American slave trade approximately 40% of Africans in America came from central Africa (present day Cameroon, Gabon, both Congos, Central African Republic, Angola), 30% from the Gold Coast and Bight of Benin (present day Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Benin), 15% from Senegambia, and 15% from elsewhere on the continent. As Robert Farris Thompson's book Flash of the Spirit noted long ago, many traces of Yoruba, Kongo, and Mande cultural expression, religion, and visual arts can be found in North America.
Political Geography:
Africa, America, North America, and Nigeria

83. Response to Lam - 1

Author:
Hector F. Pascual Alvarez
Publication Date:
08-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
Music has often been described as the most noise conveying the least information. This International Roundtable lifts a skeptical eyebrow to such an assumption. The essays presented here demonstrate the critical role that music plays in human exchanges and in making us human. They engagingly foreground the significance of music as a multilayered text that can be “read” and interpreted outside of its subjective, formal, and sonic qualities. They also emphasize the power of music in shaping the symbolic dimension that permeates all facets of life, from the imaginative-emotional to the politico-social. I am very pleased to see how academic dialogue actively confronts the harmful prejudices which hold that the arts are less useful disciplines than, say, politics, economics, anthropology or sociology, to understand and engage with the world and its phenomena. Dr. Joseph Lam is a scholar who demonstrates how useful indeed the study of the arts can be in understanding the mechanisms of globalization.

84. 24 Response to Lam - 2

Author:
Chuen-Fung Wong
Publication Date:
08-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
Over the last decade or so, “globalization” has swiftly become one of the favorite buzzwords in various fields of Chinese studies, music being one of the last to embrace such interdisciplinarity. This is particularly salient among writings by the indigenous scholars who often join their “research subjects” in imagining a globalizing China in which music should not be ignored in the process. Optimistic critics deploy languages of modernist reformism and argue for a better and faster integration of Chinese music into the imagined global music family in which a seat is due to be secured. Pessimists, on the other hand, are never indolent in reminding their colleagues of the danger of cultural dilution and other unwelcome consequences in the seemingly irreversible wave of globalization.
Political Geography:
China

85. Response to Monson - 1

Author:
Miriam Larson
Publication Date:
08-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
I am very pleased to have been invited to be part of this Roundtable and it has been a special pleasure to respond to the insights Professor Monson has offered about music and globalization. As a student of music and of critical race studies, I have encountered very little work that brings together these two fields so fluently. In particular, Professor Monson's critical analysis of Malian and African-American music suggests that music participants, including musicians, listeners, businesspeople, and so on, have the potential to change the inequalities that exist in our musical cultures. In my critical race studies courses, the application of critical theory to everyday practice is known as “praxis.” In other words, a frequent discussion question is how to apply critical analysis to everyday life in order to address the inequalities that exist in our world. Unlike many areas in academia, music departments are actively involved in teaching both analytical and technical aspects of musical performance. However, while the proximity of analysis and practice have the potential to form a critical praxis, music students are rarely challenged with reading material that integrates social critique with musical analysis as provocatively as Professor Monson does, and even less frequently are they encouraged to apply this analysis to their playing and performing.
Political Geography:
Africa and America

86. Response to Monson - 2

Author:
Jane Rhodes
Publication Date:
08-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
I would like to thank Professor Monson for her fascinating and wideranging essay. In particular, I am delighted with the ways it effectively links black expressive culture with the myriad processes of globalization. The essay helps expand our understanding of the global exchange of goods, ideas, and bodies. It also demonstrates the manner in which music transmits the complex range of black American and African identities, politics, and social and political practices. In other words, black music is not the kind of frivolous enterprise that a more conventional analysis might have us believe. It is not “just about the party.” Rather, since the dawn of the Transatlantic slave trade, music has been and continues to be a chief interlocutor of the black diasporic experience. I appreciate the role of the International Roundtable theme this year in pushing us to interrogate this reality.