2009 Pop Conference Bios/AbstractsVan TruongVan Truong is a doctoral candidate in the American Studies Program at Yale University. Her research interests include comparative ethnic studies and transnational cultural studies, particularly related to issues of migration, theories of diaspora, popular culture, and performance. She's currently writing a dissertation on emergent forms of "migrant memorywork" in literature, art, and music.
Panel(s):Background NoiseFriday, April 17, 2009, 9:00 - 10:45
Abstract:"
Lost and Found: Re-Covering Loss in Migrant Sad Songs"
This paper focuses on migrant sad songs that reconnect us to lost people/places/objects. It is about the melancholic work of re-membering that these songs help us do. The sad song presents us with the timespace to engage with what's been lost, to sit with the echoes and shapes of lost bodies—to learn from their long absences about how to continue with what remains after the trauma of migration. These traumas— the violent experiences of various crossings (across oceans, rivers, deserts, and militarized borderspaces)—have created fissures and gaps in history and memory across which migrants have meaningfully re-composed their lives through song.
The space of the migrant sad song is more than just a space of nostalgic lamentation. The migrant sad song might just be the privileged space for understanding what I'm calling a "utopics of melancholia"—a timespace of possibility for the "return" of lost bodies/places/objects. The aural space wherein what has been lost is not just sung about, but actually inhabits the space and is embodied by the voice that is singing; in the words being sung, but also in the aural body of the lost object that is "found" by the listener—in the pulse of the organ, the wail of the trumpet, the breath of the accordion. This paper is an attempt to rethink how we talk about loss and trauma through the migrant sad song. I will be exploring these ideas through the likes of Khanh Ly, Trinh Cong Son, Dao Strom, Dengue Fever, Arcade Fire, Bloc Party, Bon Iver.
PANEL ABSTRACT:
The O.E.D. has background as "the ground or surface lying at the back of or behind the chief objects of contemplation;" "a less prominent position, where an object is not readily noticed;" and "adventitious signals or effects in the reception or recording of sound." The background is at once a place hidden behind an apparent real deal, an entity that can seemingly come from nowhere, and a nuisance to the recording process. By way of these rich definitions, this panel breaks away from the talk of erasure so readily relied upon to reflect on women's bodies in pop music. We do not assume their absence to ask: "where
were they?" Instead, we assume their presence to ask: "where were they?"
This panel argues for the background as a condition of living, a creative strategy, and a place of righteousness. Sneaking through popular culture's back doors, the performers we consider have shaken up sacred institutions, from Pentecostal churches to the cherished spots of rock's front-men to the conventions of variety shows. We look to their performances to consider how the Fly Girls taught a generation to bust a move and the procedures by which The Ikette became Tina Turner. We move past those front-and-center to see Lisa Fischer virtuosically singing over, not under Mick Jagger, and to pray with holy women on the other side of the pulpit. And finally, we'll listen to the background of America, to all those unnamed migrants who have gone lost in the crossing but found in song.
