Join us for the New York launch of scholar Christine Bacareza Balance’s new book Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America(Duke 2016), a vital exploration of post-WWII Filipino literary and musical culture. We’ll also feature former AAWW Literary Award winner Patrick Rosal’s new poetry collection Brooklyn Antediluvian (Persea 2016). His work channels DJ culture, family history, soul music, dance, and Galeanoesque myth-making to explore vital questions about race in America. The evening will culminate with a conversation moderated by legendary novelist Jessica Hagedorn, author of Toxicology and former bandleader of The Gangster Choir.
RESERVE A SEAT!
$5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
In her new book, Tropical Renditions, Christine Bacareza Balance (Associate Professor, Asian American Studies, UC Irvine) examines how the performance and reception of post-World War II Filipino and Filipino American popular music provide crucial tools for composing Filipino identities, publics, and politics. A vital call for “disobedient listening,” the book reveals how Filipino musicians challenge dominant racialized U.S. imperialist tropes of Filipinos as primitive, childlike, derivative, and mimetic. Balance’s essays on former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos, Asian American YouTube artists, Bruno Mars, Glee’s karaoke aesthetics, and spree killer Andrew Cunanan have been published in various scholarly journals. She continues to collaborate with Lucy San Pablo Burns (UCLA) on the forthcoming anthology California Dreaming: Production and Aesthetics in Asian American Art and with Gary Gacula Gabisan on the blog/events production company, Super Astig (www.superastig.com). Balance is one-eighth of the New York-based indie rock band, The Jack Lords Orchestra.
Patrick Rosal is the author of Brooklyn Antediluvian (2016), Boneshepherds (2011), My American Kundiman (2006), and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (2003). His collections have been honored with the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award, Global Filipino Literary Award and the Asian American Writers Workshop Members’ Choice Award. Junot Díaz writes that, “Rosal, almost sorcerous in his abilities, has called up a language, a hurricane, a world, a searing meditation.”
Jessica Hagedorn’s novels include Toxicology, Dream Jungle, The Gangster Of Love, and Dogeaters, winner of the American Book Award, a finalist for the National Book Award, and one of the central books in the Asian American “canon.” She has won honors including a Guggenheim Fiction Fellowship, Lucille Lortel Playwrights’ Fellowship, an NEA-TCG Playwriting Residency Fellowship, and fellowships from the Sundance Playwrights’ Lab and the Sundance Screenwriters’ Lab. From 1975-85, Hagedorn was the leader of a band called The Gangster Choir.
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