Review: Chinatown Opera Theater in North America, by Nancy Yunhwa Rao

Abstract

Book Review| December 01 2018 Review: Chinatown Opera Theater in North America, by Nancy Yunhwa Rao Chinatown Opera Theater in North America, by Nancy Yunhwa Rao. Music in American Life. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017. xiv, 415 pp. Jonathan P. J. Stock Jonathan P. J. Stock JONATHAN P. J. STOCK is Professor of Music at University College Cork. An ethnomusicologist with a particular interest in Chinese society, he is the author of Huju: Traditional Opera in Modern Shanghai (Oxford University Press, 2003) and a recent article on the bromance in Chinese popular music in the Journal of World Popular Music. He is coeditor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the Music of China and of the Chinese Diaspora. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2018) 71 (3): 847–851. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2018.71.3.847 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jonathan P. J. Stock; Review: Chinatown Opera Theater in North America, by Nancy Yunhwa Rao. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2018; 71 (3): 847–851. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2018.71.3.847 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search Nancy Yunhwa Rao's monograph Chinatown Opera Theater in North America offers a striking new account of opera in 1920s North America. Her contribution is to set aside conventional cultural and geographical ties to continental Europe, drawing instead on the traces of a trans-Pacific network characterized by the flows of Chinese performers and audiences, the associated intangible and material culture of opera performance, and the structural impacts of migrant life and its key impediments—racism, exclusion, and commercial rivalry. Rao's primary topic is the genre of Cantonese opera, which she explores through archival study and musical and social analysis. Such a project is significant in historical terms, not to mention timely, in light of the antipathy that the United States is currently expressing toward its nonwhite populations. As Rao notes, Chinese migrants inhabited a “constant state of not being seen” by the dominant Euro-American settler population (p. 8). The recuperation of their... You do not currently have access to this content.