This article examines Diane Paragas’ film Yellow Rose (2019) for its capacity to offer important insights into the reparative utility of music for a child separated from a parent due to deportation. While the film depicts the brutality of contemporary U.S. migration policies, Yellow Rose is also a story about the role of aesthetic expression in childhood’s diasporic imaginaries. The film teaches us about the agentic potential of music as a mode of dealing with the trauma of forced separation. In particular, the genre of American country music is affectively instrumentalized by the film’s young, Filipinx protagonist. In deepening my argument, I work with the film to explain that the kinship between Rose and a genre of music that is hegemonically associated with whiteness produces a “queer sonic” that serves as conduit for the emergence of contingent networks of care and methods of survival. I propose that queer sonic expression, or the unassimilable qualities of sound and genre, is a site where we can broaden racialized imaginings of Filipinx childhood, as it offers an opportunity for reparation.
Patrick Cruz is a Toronto-based painter whose artistic practice is informed by his experience of migrating from the Philippines to Canada. The Filipinx diaspora in Canada is large but often not given adequate attention in queer theories of nationhood. This article makes the argument that the textures or “skin” of Patrick Cruz’s canvases are an extension of his interior world and insist on the complex psychic, corporeal, and sonic contours of Filipinx migration and diasporic subjectivity in Canada. It proposes a queer theory of listening to suggest that Cruz’s paintings are important for their expression of Filipinx diaspora. Bringing sound studies to bear on notions of skin, surface, and queer affect, this article makes the case that when one listens closely to a painting a new intimacy with the work and the Filipinx artist is forged. Central to arguments made is scholarship produced in the fields of queer diaspora studies and Filipinx studies.
to become agents in processes of change. All in all, Audible Empire includes grounded scholarship with an array of approaches and arguments that complement and challenge the ideas presented in the introduction. And I believe that the work's major strength lies precisely in its heterogeneous content. For example, while Philip Bohlman's and Kofi Agawu's essays provide a fitting counterpart to the introduction, Brent Edwards moves in a different direction, as he calls for the need to think beyond a solely imperial archive, noting that "what is demanded is not reverence in the shadow of tradition, but instead a spark of innovation that revives that legacy by shattering, re-making, going beyond its prior manifestation" (284). Penny Von Echen suggests an alternative to discourses of Western triumphalism and "a counterhegemonic aural archive of the cold war" (190), while Michael Dennings explores early twentieth-century vernacular gramophone recordings as a fundamental part of decolonization and stresses the historical disconnect between the decolonizing political project and the decolonizing cultural revolution (30), and Andrew Jones addresses the reciprocal and multilayered musical flows that have blurred the boundaries of empire. But this volume brings to the foreground more than an array of perspectives on the audible aspects of empire formation; it highlights the many tensions that are involved in writing history and thinking historically, about empires and about music making in general. Hence, empire appears in many attires here, through geographical and commercial routes and within human networks, but also within intellectual paradigmatic narratives within music scholarship.
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