UC Riverside

In this dissertation, I explore how Asian American musicians over the last century have turned to the US American musical tradition of drum and bugle corps to situate themselves within broader flows of Asian American history. Drum and bugle corps incorporate marching brass, percussion, and color guard members who perform music arrangements in parades and marching field competitions. Despite their longstanding contributions in this space, Asian Americans have often experienced exclusion from scholarly and community histories of the drum corps tradition. In response, Asian American drum corps musicians have underscored their presence in this scene through critical turns to the archives that constitute a process that I term “marking Asian American time.” What does US band music sound like when the archival contributions of Asian Americans come to the fore? And how might critical archival studies, oral histories, and ethnographic engagements illuminate the connections between historical and contemporary Asian American drum corps? I first trace Asian American drum corps performance to the transpacific politics of interwar Chinese and Japanese American communities. Using a methodology of archival sonification—the intentional, speculative reintroduction of sound into archival encounters—I explore how early Asian American drum corps negotiated the contradictions of their transnational politics through music performance. I then shift focus to the Japanese American concentration camps of World War II, examining how incarcerated musicians from both pro- and anti-US factions performed military music to expand physical and sonic mobilities while protesting their imprisonment. I next compare public history efforts from the Los Angeles Imperial Dragons and the Chicago Nisei Ambassadors, attending to how these organizations both reinforce and challenge normative, colonial archival temporalities. I conclude by exploring the process of musical re-racialization in the Sacramento Mandarins, the last remaining competitive drum and bugle corps from an historically Asian American community. I evince how Mandarins alumni have turned towards self-archiving practices to address the corps’ decreasing Asian American membership and departure from Asian American-themed productions. Ultimately, it is my position that Chinese and Japanese Americans have transformed drum corps into a fundamentally Asian American practice for more than a century.