Abstract
This article examines Diane Paragas’ film Yellow Rose (2019) for its capacity to offer important insights into the reparative utility of music for a child separated from a parent due to deportation. While the film depicts the brutality of contemporary U.S. migration policies, Yellow Rose is also a story about the role of aesthetic expression in childhood’s diasporic imaginaries. The film teaches us about the agentic potential of music as a mode of dealing with the trauma of forced separation. In particular, the genre of American country music is affectively instrumentalized by the film’s young, Filipinx protagonist. In deepening my argument, I work with the film to explain that the kinship between Rose and a genre of music that is hegemonically associated with whiteness produces a “queer sonic” that serves as conduit for the emergence of contingent networks of care and methods of survival. I propose that queer sonic expression, or the unassimilable qualities of sound and genre, is a site where we can broaden racialized imaginings of Filipinx childhood, as it offers an opportunity for reparation.
Highlights
This article examines Diane Paragas’ film Yellow Rose (2019) for its capacity to offer important insights into the reparative utility of music for a child separated from a parent due to deportation
Crawley (2014) suggests that sound destabilizes what we think we might know about social constructions of identity
The performance of music serves as an artistic process that can upend the burdens of representation and insistences on cultural authenticity
Summary
Queer theory draws inspiration from the experience of being marginalized for non-normative sexuality and gender in order to create methodology with which to analyze and critique normativity. She is aware of this dissonant entanglement which does little to temper her fantasies of addressing an audience that might 1 day celebrate her queer presence on country music stages She projects these feelings into a melody that sounds akin to the Filipinx song her mother would sing and comfort her with called, “Dahil Sayo” (Velarde, 1938). The sound of her voice and the affects that surface throughout her performance reflect the reparative work of music, and a politics of presence that contests and reimagines her racialized subjectivity On this stage, Rose is the creative force that controls her cast of white back up players subverting the American teleology of racial order. Sound enables a queer intimacy that doesn’t forego the brutality of their separation (Rose is deserving of her mother’s presence), but instead offers affective and material resources that help to bridge the gap, if temporarily
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