Filipino American Music (ft. Christine Balance, Jessica Hagedorn, Patrick Rosal)

In 2016, we hosted the New York launch of Scholar Christine Bacareza Balance’s book Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America, a vital exploration of post-WWII Filipinx literary and musical culture. In this episode of AAWW Radio, we’ll hear Christine read from her book as she asks, “How do Filipinos make music? And what else do these acts of music making do?” Opening for Christine is former AAWW Literary Award winner and Guggenheim Fellowship-winning poet Patrick Rosal, whose poetry and essays channel DJ culture, family history, and community to explore vital questions about race in America. Afterwards, they have a conversation moderated by novelist Jessica Hagedorn, author of Toxicology and former bandleader of The Gangster Choir. Together they discuss Pinoy DJs and turntabling (Shout out to DJ Qbert), the act of disobedient listening, and how immigrant parents remix their lives in order to survive.

Om Podcasten

AAWW Radio is the podcast of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, an NYC literary arts space at the intersection of migration, race, and social justice. Listen to AAWW Radio and you’ll hear selected audio from our current and past events, as well as occasional original episodes. We’ve hosted established writers like Claudia Rankine, Maxine Hong Kingston, Roxane Gay, Amitav Ghosh, Ocean Vuong, Solmaz Sharif, and Jenny Zhang. Our events are intimate and intellectual, quirky yet curated, and dedicated to social justice. We curate our events to juxtapose novelists and activists, poets and intellectuals, and bring together people who usually wouldn’t be in the same room. We’ve got it all: from avant-garde poetry to post-colonial politics, feminist comics to lyric verse, literary fiction to dispatches from the left. A sanctuary for the immigrant imagination, we believe Asian American stories deserve to be told. Learn more by visiting aaww.org Produced by the Asian American Writers' Workshop.