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Eight years ago, Poke Rafferty, an American travel writer, and his Thai wife, Rose, adopted a Bangkok street child named Miaow, forming an unconventional intercultural family. That family has weathered extreme challenges—each of its three members carried the scars of a painful and dangerous history—but has stuck together with tenacity and love (and a little help from some friends). Now that family is in jeopardy: the birth of Poke and Rose’s newborn son has littered their small apartment with emotional land mines, forcing Poke to question his identity as a dad and Miaow to question her identity as a daughter. At the same time, the most cantankerous member of the small gang of Old Bangkok Hands who hang out at the Expat Bar suddenly goes missing under suspicious circumstances. Engaged in the search for the missing American, Poke is caught completely off-guard when someone he thought was gone forever resurfaces—and she has the power to tear the Raffertys apart.
It is common to hear talk of how music can inspire crowds, move individuals and mobilise movements. We know too of how governments can live in fear of its effects, censor its sounds and imprison its creators. At the same time, there are other governments that use music for propaganda or for torture. All of these examples speak to the idea of music's political importance. But while we may share these assumptions about music's power, we rarely stop to analyse what it is about organised sound - about notes and rhythms - that has the effects attributed to it. This is the first book to examine systematically music's political power. It shows how music has been at the heart of accounts of politica...
"Displacement, relocation, dissociation: each of these terms elicits images of mass migration, homelessness, statelessness, or outsiderness of many kinds, too numerous to name. This book aims to create opportunities for scholars, practitioners, and silenced voices to share theories and stories of progressive and transgressive music pedagogies that challenge the ways music educators and learners think about and practice their arts relative to displacement. Displacement is defined as encompassing all those who have been forced away from their locations by political, social, economic, climate, and resource change, injustice, and insecurity. This includes: - refugees and internally displaced per...
Musical community is a notion commonly evoked in situations of intensive collective activity and fervent negotiation of identities. Passion Square shows, the daily singing of Chinese pop classics in parks and on street corners in the city of Wuhan, have an ambivalent relationship with these ideas. They inspire modest outward signs of engagement and are guided by apparently individualistic concerns; singers are primarily motivated by making a living through the relationships they build with patrons, and reflection on group belonging is of lesser concern. How do these orientations help complicate the foundations of typical musical community discourses? This Element addresses community as a quality rather than as an entity to which people belong, exploring its ebbs and flows as associations between people, other bodies and the wider street music environment intersect with its various theoretical implications. A de-idealised picture of musical community better acknowledges the complexities of everyday musical experiences.
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HONK! A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism explores a fast-growing and transnational movement of street bands—particularly brass and percussion ensembles—and examines how this exciting phenomenon mobilizes communities to reimagine public spaces, protest injustice, and assert their activism. Through the joy of participatory music making, HONK! bands foster active musical engagement in street protests while encouraging grassroots organization, representing a manifestation of cultural activity that exists at the intersections of community, activism, and music. This collection of twenty essays considers the parallels between the diversity of these movements and the diversity of th...
In this first musicological history of rap music, Cheryl L. Keyes traces the genre's history from its roots in West African bardic traditions, the Jamaican dancehall tradition, and African American vernacular expressions to its permeation of the cultural mainstream as a major tenet of hip-hop lifestyle and culture. Rap music, according to Keyes, is a forum that addresses the political and economic disfranchisement of black youths and other groups, fosters ethnic pride, and displays culture values and aesthetics. Blending popular culture with folklore and ethnomusicology, Keyes offers a nuanced portrait of the artists, themes, and varying styles reflective of urban life and street consciousne...
A remarkable exploration of how sound permeates all aspects of life - from the streets to our homes, and from shopping malls to the underground.