Performing Identity: Musical Expression of Thai-Chinese in Contemporary Bangkok

Abstract

The study of Chinese communities in Southeast Asia has mostly emphasized their impact on economic and political arenas. By privileging cultural practices as viable loci for investigation, this paper focuses on music as a site for the exploration of identity formation and notion of Chineseness. Based on ethnomusicological fieldwork conducted amongst Teochew-Chinese in Bangkok, this paper utilizes analysis of amateur Teochew music clubs to illustrate how identity, both cultural and political, is always a hybridized performance that is shaped as much by subjective interpretations of history and essentialized notions of homeland as by the politics of the historical moment.