Book Description

With real-life stories, this collection “focuses on the role of music in the often-delicate negotiations surrounding weddings in immigrant communities” (Ellen Koskoff, author of A Feminist Ethnomusicology). Music in the American Diasporic Wedding explores the complex cultural adaptations, preservations, and fusions that occur in weddings between couples and families of diverse origins. Discussing weddings as a site of negotiations between generations, traditions, and religions, the essays gathered here argue that music is the mediating force between the young and the old, ritual and entertainment, and immigrant lore and assimilation. The contributors examine such colorful integrations as klezmer-tinged Mandarin tunes at a Jewish and Taiwanese American wedding, a wedding services industry in Chicago’s South Asian community featuring a diversity of wedding music options, and Puerto Rican cultural activists dancing down the aisles of New York’s St. Cecilia’s church to the thunder of drums and maracas and rapping their marriage vows. These essays show us what wedding music and performance tell us about complex multiethnic diasporic identities, and remind us that how we listen to and celebrate otherness defines who we are.