Jazz in Colonial Asia

Jazz in Colonial Asia: Race and the Politics of Labor in an Empire of Syncopation is the first book to offer an expansive account of the rise of Asia’s jazz scene and the first to reveal the critical role of Filipino laborers in the global spread of U.S. popular culture. This book makes vital contributions to global popular music and jazz histories by examining how race shaped daily life, political movements, and musical meaning in colonial Asia. It explores the contradictions and ambiguities of jazz as a mode of imperial labor in 1920s colonial Asia through five chapters, each of which focuses on a group of workers who enabled this vast economy of syncopated music and dance.This book also addresses how concepts of Blackness developed in colonial settings through both musical discourse and the presence of African American performers, revealing the interconnections between racial ideologies, colonial projects, and popular music industries in the early twentieth century. Jazz in Colonial Asia: Race and the Politics of Labor in an Empire of Syncopation will be of interest to students of jazz and global popular music, and contributes to research in the intersections between race, music, and empire.