Stuart Hall's War of Auditory Positions: Sound, Diaspora, and Being Heard
Stuart Hall's war of auditory positions
In November 2013, a startling moment unfolded on Holland's Got Talent. Wang Xiao, a Chinese research student in the Netherlands, performed on a show dominated almost entirely by white contestants, with a small number of Black participants. When he finished, jury member Gordon, a white Dutch singer, greeted him with a laughing utterance of "surplise" — a stereotyping reference to the presumed Chinese difficulty pronouncing the "r" sound. The remarks escalated further into overtly racist jokes, and "Which number are you singing? Number 39 with rice?" became the most circulated line.
Gordon attempted to defend himself against national and international criticism by insisting it was merely humor. But the controversy exposed not only everyday racism in Dutch society, as documented by Essed and Hoving, but also a fundamental insight in sound studies: sound, in its relationship with social life, community, relational experience, and power, is always contested. Although our ears remain open — supposedly democratic and indiscriminate compared with other senses — hearing, and the voice that seeks to be heard, is always situated in a particular position. Gordon, positioned within the Dutch racial majority, did not actually hear Wang sing. His ears were already attuned to what he expected from a Chinese voice: comical mispronunciations and take-away dialogue. Wang, as a member of the Chinese diaspora, must fight hard not to be pushed back into the place others assign him — the catering industry — in order to claim his right to sing and be heard. The Chinese diaspora faces a particular disadvantage in this regard, since they are not commonly associated with musical talent. Contrast this with the Black diaspora, whose presumed musical inheritance gives them a radically different and more advantageous position in music. More directly put: our ears accommodate, but our hearing discriminates.
This chapter examines diaspora and the politics of being heard — what Stuart Hall called a war of auditory positions. I focus on the case of Chinese popular music. Let me state plainly that diasporic auditory culture extends far beyond popular music, or even music at all. However, my own research experience, together with the dominant body of scholarship on diasporic popular music rather than other sound forms, directs this particular inquiry. I first outline the field and highlight major trajectories: the sense of belonging, hostland context, music production, and the periphery.
Next I elaborate a case from the Chinese diaspora in the Netherlands not just as illustration but to propose new directions for diasporic music studies. I advocate for hope, for an imagined homeland, for looking beyond music alone, and for gender. The figure I follow is a Dutch-Chinese girl — fifteen when we first met in Amsterdam and nearly twenty-six as I write this. She became a professional singer, moving from her Dutch hometown to Shanghai via Hong Kong, and now lives in Taipei. I close by questioning the field itself in the context of technological change, an intersectional perspective, and finally the limits of the discipline.
Triangulating music with time and place
The term "diaspora" originally referred to the dispersal of Jewish people from Palestine around 70 CE and later extended to other populations. Diaspora is always embedded in metaphors of scattering and displacement, with diasporic experience conceptualized as living between homeland and hostland. Those metaphors elevate diaspora into an archetype of identity negotiation, community building, and potential resistance. Two key terms permeate diasporic inquiries: roots and routes. Diasporic experience, for all its hybridity and difference, unsettles fixed and assimilating boundaries — especially nationalist ones — and leans toward recognizing necessary heterogeneity and diversity.
Paul Gilroy's landmark book on the African diaspora proved especially influential here. He triangulates music — Black music, its aesthetics, and its circulation — with place and time to illuminate the dynamics and politics connecting "there" and "here," "then" and "now."
Thomas Solomon traces rising scholarly attention to diaspora in music studies since the 1990s. Diaspora became firmly established as a paradigm for music research. That observation confirms what Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh noted fifteen years earlier: though ethnomusicology traditionally privileged "traditional musics" as its object of study, diasporic music moved to the center of attention. This shift is challenging. Tina K. Ramnarine flags terms such as difference, otherness, and hybridity, which challenge ethnomusicology's assumptions about music mapped neatly onto geographies and societies. It punctures what Mark Slobin identifies as the persistent myth of one society having one music — and the accompanying racial and cultural power structure illustrated by the Gordon controversy. In this sense, diasporic music is inherently vocal, both literally and metaphorically. Its messiness, complexity, and specificity gives political voice to question fixed ideas about place and identity as neat, tidy categories.
Solomon spotlight's two reasons for music's appeal to diaspora populations. First, music is fluid and travels far and wide, easily accessible and usable. Second, music invites pleasurable embodied experience and communal sociability — both resonant for people negotiating between homeland and hostland. These two points line up with major sound studies trajectories: the scientific and technological versus the human and experiential. Vic Seidler foregrounds the latter, linking language and music in a migrant family to the fundamental connection between being listened to and being seen as a person in one's own right.
Doing diasporic music study
Below I delineate four major trajectories for diasporic music study. The list is indicative rather than exhaustive, more crisscrossing than parallel.
Belonging
Seidler's autobiographical account is illustrative. It opens with intimate memories of his Jewish mother, who fled Vienna from the Nazis, and his own childhood in a post-war Jewish refugee community in northwest London. For Seidler, music allows "outsiders" to make themselves at home in the hostland — a "social glue," to borrow a metaphor — though he notes some diasporic members feel no such urge. The vexing issues of belonging, identity, home, and community woven into diasporic experience and memory define the first trajectory. It flows from the embodied experience and communal sociality Solomon identifies.
Angela Moran structures her book on Irish music around performance sites in Birmingham: churches, public houses, and concert halls. She adopts Pierre Nora's definition of sites as places "where memory crystallizes and secretes itself," follows Irish sound to these venues, and probes the diasporic terms of experience, memory, identity, and community, all tied to belonging.
Hostland
How belonging is answered — how diasporic identities and communities are configured by their sounds — must be specified historically and culturally. But the concern is not only how, but also where. Seidler testifies to the primacy of the hostland, that is Britain or London. Solomon cites studies all situated in the hostland: Turkish hip-hop in Berlin, raï in Paris, and Portuguese music in Malaysia, just as Moran works on Birmingham.
This is the paradox of diasporic music studies. The concept of diaspora privileges an imagined homeland, yet most inquiries are set in the hostland. Those studies typically resonate with concerns about cultural diversity, living with difference, and multiculturalism in the host society. Ramnarine, for example, sets her study of carnival performances at the Victoria and Albert Museum within multicultural London. Indeed, Gilroy's title There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack set the framing for many later analyses.
Production
The previous trajectories engage sound's human and experiential dimensions. The third stems from sound studies' other tradition: the technical making of music. For ethnomusicologists, technical skills, instruments, experiments, and quantifiable data become means of charting sound through machines and technology. This approach colors diasporic music studies especially strongly.
Ramnarine's introductory article confines "musical performance" to "music-making." Her interest is less with diasporic music than with diasporic music-making. Contributions probe the ordinariness of creative production — musicians as individual agents, working in everyday environments, making choices that fit themselves and their audiences. Bhangra is another common object that reveals similar attention to music-makers and making. Laura Leante investigates how original Punjabi bhangra mutated into its British-fusion form. She traces street processions, disco performances, musical and lyrical texts, styles and instruments, showing how British bhangra became a tool for migrants to construct diasporic identity.
Periphery
Certain genres and their diasporas receive outsized theoretical and empirical attention. Bhangra is one. Seidler's work is set among a series tracing, for example, Gerd Baumann and Gayatri Gopinath. Raï, originating in Algeria and traveling to the West, is heavily researched in France and as a global sound. The popularity of bhangra and raï in research reflects their great popularity among South Indian diaspora in Europe and North America and among Algerian and Arabic populations in Europe.
Gilroy coins Black Atlantic for the African diaspora, exploring how contemporary Black musical forms reclaim a precolonial past and challenge notions of national culture. Both black music's industrial weight and Anglo-American global dominance frame the predominant interface between Black diaspora and music-focused academic research. The periphery-Western configuration often overlaps with postcolonial power relations: colonized-colonizer. The Irish and Jewish diasporas qualify as exceptions, as do studies on Korean diaspora in Russia, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, and the Chinese diaspora in the Netherlands. The Korean case stands out because postcolonial frames do not apply to it. A study on Chinese diaspora follows its subject away from the West rather than toward it.
From Diana Zhu to Wang Shi'an
I met Diana Zhu in 2006 when she was fifteen during a singing competition final for Chinese diaspora across Europe. Holding in Amsterdam, the winner would receive a trip to Hong Kong for a global event competing against winners from North America and South Africa. Diana was born in 1990 to parents from Shanghai and grew up in a small Dutch town. She dreamed of a music career from early childhood, particularly singing in China. Diana did not win global Chinese contest but signed with Warner Music Hong Kong. In 2009 she moved to Shanghai for preparation; the contract transferred to Warner Music Taiwan. In 2011 Diana relocated to Taipei. The following year she adopted her artist name — Wang Shi'an or Diana Wang — and released a debut album that won her several Taiwan music awards. In 2014 she issued singles and joined reality television shows talent competitions and dramatic programs.
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Hope
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The study of Diana indicates a realignment of concerns from multiculturalism in the hostland to nationalism in the homeland.
Music?
So far I have been discussing the music Diana released, since it was music that guided her from the Netherlands to China—or at least the Chinese market, for her current base in Taipei remains the major supplier of Chinese-language popular music and pop stars. Yet she has done far more than create music. In 2011, I interviewed Diana again after my study was published. Meeting in Taipei, she told me almost right away about her participation in a reality talent show in China the previous year. At a secluded resort outside Beijing, she spent six months with fifteen other young female contestants learning what she considered two crucial lessons: how to face the camera, and how to be obedient. Later, Diana was assigned various “jobs” such as presenting pop charts, interviewing veteran singer-celebrities, and joining a dance competition. To date, she has acted in three online or television drama series.
“You can’t simply be a singer,” explained Terry Leung of Warner Taiwan, who oversaw Diana’s first release. In an interview with me around the time I saw Diana again, he described changes in the market, not only in Taiwan but across Asia, where a singer “has to do TV dramas or films as well” to boost exposure and profile, eventually generating economic returns through product endorsements when music sales alone cannot sustain a career. Diana’s participation in the reality talent show was the boss’s idea, following the same marketing logic, Terry said. What Diana has done and what Terry described stand in stark contrast to one emphasis of diasporic music study: music-making. Far from inquiries into musical style, genre, instrument, and production aspects, Diana’s case highlights the need for diasporic music study to account for the specificities of local cultural production practices—in this instance, Chinese practices—where music-making can hardly be investigated in isolation; rather, as some media scholars argue, it should be placed within a cross-media context and the culture of convergence (Jenkins 2008).
Gender
That music studies cannot center on music alone is particularly gendered. During my interviews with Diana and her producers, her body was always an issue. More precisely, her body was seen as not matching the idealized version of Asian femininity: too fat. When I first saw Diana in Amsterdam, at 1.64 meters, she weighed 60–70 kg, she told me. When I met her again in Shanghai, she weighed 48 kg. Her father later informed me that Warner’s target for Diana was 43 kg. Losing weight was the “most important request” Warner imposed if she was to build a music career in China (Chow 2011: 800). When I met Diana in Taipei, she finished half her fruit tea and described how she measured her food and drinks in “portions.” During the worst period of her dieting, Diana fainted several times and generally felt frail.
That a female singer’s career depends not—or at least not solely—on vocal ability but also, or even more fundamentally, on bodily appeal is especially glaring when compared with how a male colleague is treated. In my study, I compared Diana to Khalil Fong, who, with similar diasporic and musical backgrounds and under the same label at that time, was debuted entirely faceless, without embodiment, so all attention could focus on his voice, musical upbringing, and talent (Chow 2011: 801). Such radically different treatments call for gender sensitivity in diaspora studies, including music. While feminist scholars have long warned against conflating youth cultures with boy cultures (McRobbie 1981), popular music studies and diasporic music studies continue to lean toward the male experience. As an exception proving the rule, Moran flags “gender” as an analytic category in her study of diasporic Irish music, because “women are typically overlooked” (Moran 2012: 13). In the words of Connell and Gibson, “[p]opular music remains an industry permeated by gendered norms and expectations at all levels” (2003: 8). Diaspora and music research must attune itself to gendered dimensions to keep diasporic experience from being flattened into the male kind.
Coda
To close this chapter, I wish to paraphrase Ramnarine’s formulation as the linchpin of doing diasporic music studies. While she refers to ethnomusicologists’ ways of negotiating “the contradictions between asserting the historical specificities of diaspora and avoiding the rigidities of diasporic essentialisms” (Ramnarine 2007: 1), I argue for the need to be specific—historically, locally, gendered, and so on—precisely to demonstrate the diversity of diasporic experience within diaspora. I venture to open up a few paths I consider promising for further exploration. I sketch three.
First, in connection with technological developments. How do diasporas use new technologies such as mobile sonic devices and social networks for musical production, circulation, and consumption? How do these technologies reconfigure diasporic experience, identity, and community in the hostland and/or homeland? Take Michael Bull’s ethnographic study of iPod use, where he shows how such devices are used to privatize and aestheticize urban space (Bull 2013). If that investigation is reframed for a diasporic context, what would the “sonic bubbles” of diasporic members do? How different and how similar to “general” users?
Second, from the perspective of intersectionality. As Leslie McCall explains, “[i]nterest in intersectionality arose out of a critique of gender-based and race-based research for failing to account for lived experience at neglected points of intersection” (McCall 2005: 1780). In other words, researchers should remain alert to intersections of the diasporic (racial/ethnic) not only with gender, as discussed earlier, but also with other demographic categories or identity markers, such as age, class, and so forth. Age is particularly noteworthy given the bias of popular music industries and studies toward young consumers. What objects of study would emerge if one looks beyond young diasporic members’ connection with music? I am immediately reminded of the sonic preferences of some older Dutch-Chinese I know: Chinese opera and Buddhist music (and chanting), both uncharted territories in studies of diasporic music or sound.
Finally, the limits of the field itself. Quoting Franz Kafka’s short story “The Silence of the Sirens,” Chow and Steintrager recover “a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence” (cited in Chow and Steintrager 2011: 3). Given the limited space left here, it is impossible to elaborate on their thinking about the Sirens and their resisters, about female silence and male hearing. I allow myself only to raise the possibility of diasporic silence as an object of inquiry—for instance, when a diasporic member or community is not allowed, encouraged, or willing to speak its “mother tongue,” or listen to music made thereof. From here, the final question is: how far can we talk of “diaspora”? In her essay provocatively titled “Against Diaspora,” Shu-mei Shih takes issue with the study of “Chinese diaspora” (2010). According to Shih, there are at least two problems: on one hand, it is “complicit with China’s nationalist calling to ‘overseas Chinese’ who are supposed to long to return to the homeland”; on the other, it “unwittingly correlates with and reinforces the Western and other non-Western … racialized constructions of Chineseness as perpetually foreign” (Shih 2010: 32). While Shih proposes “sinophone” as an alternative for the Chinese diaspora, the thorny task for “diasporic” studies of music and sound is, I believe, to remain vigilant, informed indeed by the key terms of specificity and diversity, in deciding or balancing emphasis on the former or latter of any hyphenated identity marker.