Module 4 Asian American Traditions

This module covers a category that the people inside it had to invent. The phrase "Asian American" was coined in May 1968 by two graduate students at UC Berkeley as a deliberate political alternative to the older racial term "Oriental." Before then, the communities this module covers (Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, sometimes South Asian, sometimes Pacific Islander) were thought of separately, by themselves and by everyone else. Module 4 traces what happened in popular music after the new panethnic category came into being, and what was already happening on the Pacific routes and in West Coast ballrooms long before that.

Module 4 takes a different shape from Modules 2 and 3. Where Module 2 traced one tradition forward through time, and Module 3 moved chronologically across several distinct strands of a related diaspora, Module 4 covers a constructed category and the music that helped construct it. The five tracks span forty-three years (1973 to 2016) and five distinct strands of Asian American musical work: Asian American Movement protest folk, the 1980s Asian American Jazz movement, Tongan American family pop on a major label, the Filipino American Bay Area DJ scene that became the cradle of turntablism, and Japanese American indie rock at the moment that space began to rebalance. Each track teaches a different facet of what it has meant to make American popular music as an Asian American across the last half-century.

What is in this module

The pieces below are arranged in the order I recommend you complete them. The framing reading sets up what "Asian American" means as a category, the migration histories that built the communities, the long pre-history of Asian musicians in American popular music, and the modes of political work this music has done. The five tracks come next, in chronological order. The discussion and quiz close out the module.

Reading.Many Roots, Shared Routes
The framing reading. Covers the 1968 invention of "Asian American" as a panethnic category, the long pre-history (Filipino musicians on the Pacific, the West Coast Nisei jazz scene, the prewar San Francisco Chinatown nightclub circuit), the post-1965 immigration that built the modern communities, the modes of political work in this music, and the question of who and what the module leaves out.
Listening 1.Iijima, Miyamoto, and Chin, "We Are the Children" (1973)
The Asian American Movement node. Recorded for Paredon Records by three musicians in their twenties, "We Are the Children" is from A Grain of Sand, the first album released as Asian American music. The listening guide covers the Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the protest-folk vocabulary the trio inherited from Pete Seeger and the civil rights freedom songs, and the moment a panethnic political identity began to take musical shape.
Listening 2.Jon Jang, "Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan? / East Wind" (1984)
The Asian American Jazz node. A fifteen-minute composition for jazz ensemble, voice, and rap, recorded for the Bay Area independent label RPM Records and timed to release at the Asian Pacific Student Union conference at Stanford. The piece is Jang's compositional response to the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin and the lenient sentencing of his killers. Jang's work was at the institutional center of the Asian American Jazz movement, which from the late 1970s through the 1990s ran its own labels (Asian Improv), its own festivals (the Asian American Jazz Festival), and its own collaborations with the African American avant-garde jazz tradition.
Listening 3.The Jets, "Crush On You" (1986)
Tongan American pop on a major label. A family band of seven of the seventeen Wolfgramm children, raised in Salt Lake City and signed to MCA, working inside the Minneapolis sound that Prince and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis had recently invented. The track went Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in summer 1986 and is one of the rare Pacific Islander pop hits of the era. The listening guide covers what a Tongan American family was doing in mid-1980s Minneapolis pop, what Top 10 visibility meant for the group and for the kids in their audience, and how presence functions as political work.
Listening 4.Invisibl Skratch Piklz, "Vs. Da Klamz Uv Deth" (1996)
The Filipino American Bay Area scratch-DJ node. A roughly fourteen-minute turntable composition recorded by Q-Bert, Mix Master Mike, and Shortkut as the studio document of their 1996 ITF battle against the New York X-Men. The crew came up inside the Filipino American mobile DJ scene that Oliver Wang's Legions of Boom documents, and they took an art form invented by African American DJs in the South Bronx to its formal limit. The listening guide covers the mobile scene, the technique-lineage from Theodore and Flash, and what virtuoso participation in a Black-vernacular tradition does as political work.
Listening 5.Mitski, "Your Best American Girl" (2016)
Indie rock as institutional space. The lead single from Puberty 2, released by Dead Oceans on March 1, 2016, with a music video by Zia Anger that became one of the most-discussed indie rock videos of its decade. The listening guide covers Mitski's path from a State-Department-driven childhood in thirteen countries through the SUNY Purchase composition program to Dead Oceans, what indie rock was as a genre and an institutional space in 2016, and the productive split between reading the song as an Asian American statement and reading it as a love song.
Discussion.Pick a Reflective Question (in Canvas)
A discussion thread where you pick one of the five reflective questions at the end of the Module 4 listening guides and write about that track. Canvas will assign you two classmates' posts to respond to after the initial-post deadline.
Checkpoint Quiz.Module 4 (in Canvas)
A short quiz covering vocabulary from the framing reading and factual recall from the five anchor tracks. Low-stakes; you may retake it.

Deadlines

Module 4 unlocks as soon as you finish Module 3. The Module 4 quiz and the discussion initial post are due Sunday, June 21. The two discussion peer responses are due Sunday, June 28 (Canvas will assign you two classmates' posts to respond to after the initial-post deadline). Module 5 follows Module 4 in the same per-module shape after that. After Module 5 closes, the rest of the term is devoted to your final project.

Expect roughly 10 to 12 hours of work for this module: the framing reading runs about 45 to 60 minutes, the five listening guides with their tracks and reflective questions take about 6 to 8 hours combined, and the discussion and quiz add another hour or two.

A note on this module's content

This module engages with the long histories of legal exclusion, mass forced incarceration, and racial coding that have shaped Asian American experience in the United States. Three specific items are worth flagging in advance.

The framing reading covers the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1924 Asian Exclusion Act, the 1942 Japanese American incarceration under Executive Order 9066, and the post-1975 Southeast Asian refugee resettlement, all of which involve substantial human cost and direct discussion of state violence.

The Track 2 listening guide on Jon Jang covers the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese American draftsman who was beaten to death with a baseball bat in a Detroit parking lot by two white men who blamed Asian people for the decline of the American auto industry. The trial judge sentenced the killers to three years of probation and no jail time. The case sparked the largest pan-Asian American mobilization the country had seen, and Jang's composition is part of the artistic response to it.

The Track 5 listening guide on Mitski engages with the experience of mixed-race identity and racial coding inside the indie rock space. The song's two readings (a love song and an Asian American statement against the white indie rock landscape) are both available in the recording, and the listening guide holds them open rather than collapsing them.

If you need to talk through accommodations to engage with this material, please contact me early and consult Accessibility Services.

How to reach me

Email is the best way: ines.thiebaut@csueastbay.edu. I check it regularly and will respond as promptly as I can. Canvas Inbox also works but I check it less often.

Office hours are Mondays and Thursdays 10 am to noon, by Zoom at https://csueb.zoom.us/j/5108853126. If those times do not work for you, email me and we will find another time.