What's Up, A-Pop?: Re-Thinking the Relationships between/among Asian and Asian American Popular Music Cultures

On April 20, Columbia Global Centers | Beijing hosted a whole-day symposium titled What's Up, A-pop? Re-thinking the Relationships between/among Asian and Asian American Popular Music Cultures.

This one-day project was initiated by Professor Kevin Fellezs, Associate Professor of Music at Columbia University, and was supported by Columbia University's 2018-19 Global Humanities Projects Grants.

The symposium brought together an international panel of popular music scholars from the U.S., China, Japan, and Korea, who are interested in Asian and Asian American popular music. The assembled scholars presented their latest research and initiated a wider discussion of the formation of contemporary Asian popular music cultures from both historic as well as ethnographic perspectives, widening the scope given to the relationship between Asia and Asian America in a dynamic twenty-first century TransPacific.

Participants included Kevin Fellezs, Associate Professor of Music at Columbia University; Tunghung Ho, Associate Professor at Department of Psychology at Fu-Jen Catholic University; Yusuke Wajima, Associate Professor at Department of Musicology at Osaka University; Takako Inoue, Professor at the Faculty of International Relations at Daito Bunka University; Yan LIU, Associate Professor at the Department of Musicology at Tianjin Conservatory of Music; Toshiyuki Ohwada, Professor of American Studies at Keio University; Adam Kielman, Assistant Professor at Department of Music at Chinese University of Hong Kong; Sota Chu Takahashi, Lecturer at Department of Media and Communication at Fukuoka Jo Gakuin University; and Hyunjoon Shin, Associate Professor at the Institute for East Asian Studies at Sunkonghoe University.

The event also attracted more than 60 attendees to discuss Asian popular music and its development together.