Susan Miyo Asai, Ph.D. '88

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A new book by Susan Miyo Asai, Ph.D. '88, "Sounding Our Way Home: Japanese American Musicking and the Politics of Identity," explores a generation-spanning history of music making and the sense of belonging it engenders.

From the book's website,

Asai addresses the politics of music, interrogating the ways musicking functions as a performance of social, cultural and political identification for Japanese Americans in the United States. Musicking is an inherently political act at the intersection of music, identity and politics, particularly if it involves expressing one’s ethnicity and/or race. Asai further investigates how Japanese American ethnic identification and cultural practices relate to national belonging. Musicking cultivates a narrative of a shared history and aesthetic between performers and listeners. The discourse situates not only Japanese Americans, but all Asians into the Black/white binary of race relations in the United States.

Asai earned her doctorate in music and is professor emerita of ethnomusicology at Northeastern University, with expertise spanning Japanese traditional performing arts, Japanese American music and identity formation, and the intersection of Asian American and African American music and politics. She is coeditor of "At the Crossroads: Music and Social Justice" and author of "Nōmai Dance Drama: A Surviving Spirit of Medieval Japan." She has contributed to numerous edited volumes, including "The Music of Multicultural America: Performance, Identity, and Community in the United States," published by University Press of Mississippi.