Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music documents the variety of musics - from traditional Asian through jazz, classical, and pop - that have been created by Asian Americans. This book is not about ''Asian American music'' but rather about Asian Americans making music. This key distinction allows the author to track a wide range of musical genres from Cambodian music drama and karaoke, to Vietnamese pop, Asian-American hip hop and Laotian song.
These diverse styles form a coherent set of questions about what it means for Asian Americans to make music, about the role of performativity in shaping social identities, and the ways in which commercially mediated music can transform individual perceptions of time, space, and society.
The book includes an audio CD of field recordings, made by the author, of several of the