Fusion Sign-Vehicles: A Semiotics Analysis of Social and Musical Behavior in South Asian Fusion A Cappella

Abstract

In 1996, the first collegiate South Asian a cappella group, Penn Masala, was founded at the University of Pennsylvania. Over the last twenty-two years, nearly fifty such groups have been established at colleges and universities across the United States. These ensembles blend Western popular music with South Asian music, namely Bollywood film songs. Membership in these groups typically involves participants with South Asian ethnic backgrounds as well as participants from various other ethnic groups. Through a case study with the ensemble Dhamakapella, this paper explores the ramifications and outcomes between the multifaceted essence of South Asian a cappella and the multifaceted ethnicities of its members, using the concept of sign vehicles to show how identities are blended, reinvented, and performed in both musical and social settings. Introduction and Background In 1996, the first collegiate South Asian a cappella choir, Penn Masala, was founded at the University of Pennsylvania. Over the last twenty-two years, nearly fifty such groups have been founded at colleges and universities across the United States. These ensembles blend Western popular music with South Asian music, namely Bollywood film songs. Membership in these groups typically involves participants with South Asian ethnic backgrounds as well as participants from various other ethnic backgrounds. This paper discusses the way in which signvehicles of South Asian a cappella performance aid in the construction of the ethnicities of its performers, showing how identities are blended, reinvented, and performed in both musical and social settings. Specifically, I will analyze the way that Dhamakapella, a South Asian a cappella choir at Case Western Reserve University, behaves in a fashion that conveys a fusion of South Asian and Western identities. In order to make the theoretical concept of identity more tangible, I will rely on the work of Erving Goffman, Judith Butler, and Thomas Turino. The former two scholars view identity as performative, and the latter scholar uses Peircean semiotics to understand how music can be interpreted as a sign and an identity marker. The theoretical perspective of Erving Goffman maintains that individuals monitor their actions to perform their identities. In his 1959 text, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman introduces his dramaturgical theory, which asserts that individuals are constantly acting roles, utilizing props and nonverbal behaviors as “sign-vehicles” so that other people they interact with, such as the audience, view them in the best and most desired manner befitting their role. He maintains that we are all constantly acting, and that this perspective offers researchers a valuable starting point for understanding group function: The perspective employed in this report is that of the theatrical performance; the principles derived are dramaturgical ones. I shall consider the way in which the individual in ordinary work situations presents himself and his activity to others, the ways in which he guides and controls the impression they form of him, and the kinds of things he may and may not do while sustaining his performance before them. ... The justification for this approach ... is that the illustrations together fit into a coherent 1 Muffitt: Fusion Sign-Vehicles Published by Digital Commons @ Kent State University Libraries, 2019 framework that ties together bits of experience the reader has already had and provides the student with a guide worth testing in case-studies of institutional social life. As I will be completing a case study for this project, I find Goffman’s use of dramaturgical terms helpful. They are accessible to me and easily understood. His approach allows for better understanding individual “actors” as well as “teams,” a distinction that I propose will be useful in my study of group musical performance. While Goffman’s theory was not originally intended for use in literal performance environments, his notions of a social front stage and back stage also serve to function as a guide for understanding the literal front stage and backstage habits of performers. Judith Butler also utilizes a theatrical lexicon to describe her understanding of identity construction. In “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Butler discusses gender as a performed condition, rather than an objective reality, noting that “what is called gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo.” While Butler relates this theory of performativity specifically to gender, I posit that other elements of identity, including ethnicity, are also performative. Butler’s essay speaks mostly in the theoretical perspective and to her own lived experience as opposed to a field study, but her notion of identity construction as a performance within social norms offers a valuable paradigm. Synthesizing the concepts of Goffman and Butler, there is no “one true self.” To use Goffman’s terminology, I maintain that people make decisions to “give off” a certain expression, in order to maintain others’ impressions of them. These decisions vary by role and stage. The desire to have a certain expression given off comes from our desire to perform what is socially sanctioned and avoid that which is taboo. We are accepted or rewarded based on the quality of our performance. This suggests that there is a best way to play the part of a singer, college student, American, American with South Asian ancestry, and so on. Each expression is a way to construct and maintain a desired identity. Many ethnomusicologists have written about music and identity from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Thomas Turino (1999) utilizes Piercian semiotic theory to analyze the way Peruvian migrant youth create a group identity. He identifies elements of music as icons that are used to construct identity. Concerning such icons, he says “Icons are, at root, signs of identity in that they rely on some type of resemblance between sign and object, as, in fact, do all relationships of identity. ... Musical forms that ‘sound like,’ that is, resemble, in some way, other parts of social experience are received as true, good, and natural.” South Asian a cappella, in its use of both Indian and Western musical concepts, serves as an icon for the social experiences of being an American, a South Asian, or an American of South Asian descent. I contend that the inclusion of Bollywood melodies found in South Asian a cappella music are icons of India and can thusly be used as identity markers in the way Turino discusses. 1 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959) xi-xii. 2 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 520. 3 Goffman, 1959, 2. 4 Thomas Turino, "Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Peircian Semiotic Theory for Music," Ethnomusicology 43, no. 2 (1999): 234. 2 Muffitt: Fusion Sign-Vehicles https://digitalcommons.kent.edu/epar/vol6/iss1/2