Performing China on the London Stage: Chinese Opera and Global Power, 1759–2008

Abstract

peril anxieties” triggered by Asian American musicians’ success. In perhaps one of the most insightful arguments sustained throughout the book, Wang also situates this reactive anxiety in the context of a shifting Asia-U.S. power dynamics epitomized by China’s rise in global politics and the global economy since the 1990s (p. 39). If one tiny bone can be picked with this brilliant volume, it might be the slipperiness of the concept of belonging. Belonging—or rather, how racial narratives rendered full acceptance and belonging impossible for Asian American musicians—is important, as it lendsWang’s analyses a sense of urgency, and the desire to belong is indeed the affective motor that drives her interviewees’ efforts. But belonging, taken in this book as a teleological endpoint of minority integration, may entail a lot of different things in the realms of immigration status, social and financial capital, cultural fluency in white Americana, or minority community and family dynamics; each inflected by different intersecting identities such as gender. The nuances of belonging could perhaps have been explicated, but Wang does demonstrate its complexities through sketches of many different people striving toward amultitude of Asian American belongings. Ultimately, Soundtracks delivers more than it promises. An elegant elucidation of “the racial soundtracks that powerfully shape narratives about music,” it also beautifully captures “the ineffable yearnings—for beauty, freedom, self-definition, and community—that music simultaneously thwarts, fulfills, and inspires in racialized subjects” (p. 27). In each of the four chapters, Wang offers deeply affecting and convincing accounts of her interviewees as very real people white-knuckling with conflicts between hopes, pains, and disappointments. It is hard not to empathize with them, and through them readers can both understand and feel the stranglehold of race that resounds across Asian America. Grace Wang’s Soundtracks of Asian America will be an important addition to the libraries of scholars interested in the relationship between music and racial imaginations, in Asian America, in diaspora studies, and inWestern classical music as a cultural system. Though theoretically sophisticated, Wang’s prose is rich and engaging, accessible to undergraduate students in upper level courses. This book can and should also be read by the practitioners and pedagogues of Western classical music.