Reviews
Tropical Renditions is an ambitious and exhilarating study that beckons us to listen carefully to the underground sound of Filipino and Filipino American 'translocal' cultures. Christine Bacareza Balance takes her readers to a range of sonic 'scenes' in the Filipino diaspora--from karaoke house parties to Pinoy indie rock shows to the experimental performance spaces of Jessica Hagedorn and the West Coast Gangster Choir, in turn showcasing an insurgent musicality that speaks back to and, in many ways, sings through and against the long roll of imperial violence. Like a radical postcolonial mixtape, Balance's book captures the urgency of Filipino identity in sonic motion., In this stunningly refreshing take on the musicological and performative dimensions of Filipino American historical and cultural experiences, Christine Bacareza Balance makes intricate and superb sonic connections between seemingly separate realms such as colonialism, migration, youth culture, leisure, and labor. Standing alone in its incisive cultural critique and superb interpretive readings of a culture and a people spanning thousands of miles, Tropical Renditions makes a pioneering contribution to Asian American studies and performance studies., Balance's book is a major contribution to a flowering of contemporary scholarship on the Filipino diaspora and musical performance. . . . From DJing and karaoke to performance art and indie Pinoise rock, Balance's book draws out the rich implications of such musical scenes, and in doing so, shows how Filipino America has been made, and made uniquely meaningful, through music., A gift to the fields of Asian studies, sound studies, and cultural studies, speaking between and across each in order to posit a theory of sound that is attuned to the affective and sociopolitical contours of the Filipinx diasporic experience. . . . Seminal in its theorizing of the social conditions that dictate how the Filipinx performing body is consumed., With her careful survey of ethnographic texts and implicit use of ethnographic research techniques, Balance sets a new standard for accounts of popular music culture in performance studies., Tropical Renditions offers a script from which to begin rehearsing a multiscalar phonography of place, race, and music that is . . . relentlessly and productively disobedient., In this stunningly refreshing take on the musicological and performative dimensions of Filipino American historical and cultural experiences, Christine Bacareza Balance makes intricate and superb sonic connections between seemingly separate realms such as colonialism, migration, youth culture, leisure, and labor. Standing alone in its incisive cultural critique and superb interpretive readings of a culture and a people spanning thousands of miles, Tropical Renditions makes a pioneering contribution to Asian American Studies and performance studies.
