Introduction to the Special Issue on Musics of Coeval East Asia

Abstract

A number of scholars in critical Asian Studies have pointed out the persistent construction of East Asia as the Other across Anglophone humanities. 1 They have cited ideologies that have continued to motivate the essentialist construction of East Asia as static, archaic, and separate from the West – from orientalism, a hallmark of European and US imperialisms, to post-war Boasian culturalism, which emerged as a kind of critique of cultural standardization brought on by Western imperialisms. 2 It would be an exaggeration to say that current Anglophone scholarship on the music of East Asia overtly partakes in the othering practices of the past. However, the legacies nevertheless continue to shape the epistemic ground of this scholarship in subtle ways. This is seen, for example, in the ways in which knowledge is organized and presented in reference books, textbooks, and syllabi. ‘ Chinese ’ , ‘ Japanese ’ , and ‘ Korean ’ music is depicted first and foremost as a range of traditional musics; Western, popular, or other hybrid forms of music do make an appearance but are given secondary or supplementary status. 3 This structure of knowledge reinforces a ‘ United Nations ’ model where nations are represented by traditional music and exist within nationally bounded space and time. It is difficult to paint in broad strokes the rapidly changing terrain of recent research; however, it is possible to locate a constructivist strain, which, despite its critical work, still maps music onto notions of national or ethnic identity. In this constructivist frame, there is a productive recognition that the traditional in twentieth-century music is reconstructed through the identity discourses of nationalism and globalization. 4 However, what lies outside this reconstructed soundscape remains underexplored, and thus music remains tethered to a ‘ nation-bound, identity-driven hermeneutics ’ . 5