Guest Speaker
Anjeline de Dios
Location: Humanities 2441
Current
debates on contemporary popular music performance by migrants in/from Asia and
the global South may be understood through two intertwined research themes on
racial-national difference: the postcolonial cultural politics of constructing
the labor values of authenticity and originality in musical representation
(Born and Hesmondhalgh, 2000), and the creative economies of producing
distinctive national musical products for competition in the global media,
tourism, and heritage industries (Connell and Gibson 2003; Brandellero and
Pfeiffer 2011). While important, I suggest that these scholarly foci preclude
diverse practices and sectors of popular music operating outside these basic
assumptions of place/race-as-identity and authenticity-as-commodity.
The present
research proposes to expand the critical understanding of music and migration
by attuning to one such excluded sector of popular music production: the
regular performance of "Western" music in leisure venues such as
hotels, theme parks, and cruise ships in Asia by overseas Filipino musicians
(OFMs). Drawing from qualitative data collected from 2012 to 2013 in the
Philippines, Macao, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, I argue that live music
entertainment in leisure venues constitutes a significant creative industry,
notable for its reliance on a mode of embodied creative labor that is
simultaneously configured as a form of service work.
I make a second claim
that this industry is premised on a transnational migrant labor economy
unevenly segmented by race, gender, and other sociospatial categories of
differentiation (McDowell, 2008; Kelly, 2012). As migrant creative workers in a
post-Fordist production regime of intense labor precarity, OFMs dominate this
performance sector in spite and because of their corporeal marginality as
purveyors of Western popular music. Key to their niching is the racialization
of flexibility as an ideal of migrant creative labor, articulated through the
global branding of OFMs as “cheap, high-quality talent.” By tracing the
cultural and economic geographies of OFMs in Asia, I seek to speak to a more
complex politics and economics of music—as labor, mobility, and differential
value.
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