Concentration(s):
- Music History/Theory/Composition
Music Award(s):
- Rose Rosengard Subotnik Prize ’20
- Buxtehude Premium ’19
Music Capstone Project:
- When the Diaspora Returns Home: “Paris by Night” as a Tool for Cultural Preservation and Memorialization
This ethnography-based research aims to understand how Vietnamese people consume “Paris By Night” as a piece of diasporic media. “Paris By Night” is a long-running variety show created by immigrant Tô Văn Lai as a way to “fill a cultural void” after escaping the war. Rooted in my identity as a second-generation Vietnamese-American, this position manifests in complex ways—both an insider and an outsider, colonized and colonizer. Studying abroad in the so-called “homeland” for the four months, I encountered people with varying relationships with Vietnamese culture and the nation’s rapid development. As expansive as these issues may seem, “Paris by Night” offers a means by which we can explore this intricate web. While the colonization of Indochina accounts for some cultural influence, Vietnamese popular music cannot be simply negated as a reactive formation or resistance to the West. Rather, it is a unique force organically produced under the conditions of a localized collective memory and development.
Through interviews with overseas Vietnamese people, local fans, professional musicians, and media scholars, we find that each reads the show differently. I conducted participant observation by singing traditional ballads with my homestay mother for two months. Archival research consisted of watching 12 hours of the show in addition to the 20 years I have watched the show at home. These methods—along with theoretical support from texts primarily in ethnomusicology and development studies—motivate the following questions: How does “Paris by Night” influence Vietnamese cultural identity? How does “Paris by Night” memorialize the War? How does this transnational circulation of music reveal larger themes concerning globalization, imperialism, and the polycentricity of late capitalism?
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