Scholarly discourse tends to interpret music by non-Western artists from a basic sonic equivalence: sound does and should embody the musician’s cultural and geographical origin, their essence. But when we maintain this uncritical assumption, we risk reinforcing harmful colonial logics in our approach to musical difference and value. For instance, Asian musicians are primarily heard and marketed in terms of their racial-national identity to determine their income bracket, access to resources, and artist/worker rights, according to their ability to be either “authentic” or “original.” By this logic, Filipino and other Asian musicians whose livelihood consists of covering Western popular songs in hotels and cruise ships (i.e. not performing their “own” music) are seen as cheap, replaceable, and marginal in the global music industry.

This talk aims to disrupt this sonic reductionism by analyzing the class hierarchy of race as experienced by overseas Filipino musicians. Emerging from the Philippines’ 500-year history of musical colonization under the Spanish, Japanese, and Americans, they comprise a global musical underclass whose work is defined by labor conditions of mobility and flexibility. Musical liveness, fulfilling requirements of sonic perceptivity and emotional adaptability, may thus be seen as a form of care or service work performed by migrant subjects. In spite of their marginal position, Filipino musicans create openings of self-determination through everyday queerings of racial difference with their audiences and employers, and the longer promise of upward economic mobility for themselves and their families. By reading race intersectionally in this way—as a class position in the larger geography of cultural value—we can critically interrogate music in a way that dismantles the fixed categories by which we define the place of music from other places and by othered subjects.

Anjeline de Dios is a singer and scholar from Manila, Philippines. She explores the singing voice and its transcultural geographies of labor, art, care, and healing through her work in vocal performance, critical writing, and workshop facilitation. She has been featured in residencies, festivals, publications, and public seminars at institutional and collective platforms such as the Goethe Institut (Southeast Asia), the ArtsEverywhere Festival (Canada), SAVVY Contemporary (Germany), Lingnan University (Hong Kong), Studio Plesungan (Indonesia), and the Philippine Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. Anjeline holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophy from the Ateneo de Manila University (Philippines) and Linköping University (Sweden), and a PhD in geography from the National University of Singapore. She is the co-editor of The Elgar Handbook on the Geographies of Creativity, and the author of Living Song, Living Labor, an ethnography of overseas Filipino musicians.

Find further info on her website anjeline.net