Building Interracial Youth Power through P’ungmul Drumming

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

4:00 – 5:30 p.m.

Logan Center 802

 

Please join the Sound and Society Workshop on Wednesday, December 4th, as we welcome Joseph Maurer (PhD Candidate, Ethnomusicology), who will be presenting a draft of the seventh chapter of his dissertation, entitled “Building Interracial Youth Power through P’ungmul Drumming.” He describes the paper as follows:

 

Chicago is home to an expansive array of out-of-school and community-based youth music education programs. Many of these programs are based in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations, and over two dozen of them focus on music traditions associated with immigrant communities—for example, mariachi, Irish fiddling, or Indian dance. The media discourse around these programs is characterized by celebration of safe multicultural heritage. Young students are implicitly portrayed as assimilated Americans—often 2nd-generation—who participate in these programs as a way of performing cultural heritage and connecting with their parents or grandparents. This paper demonstrates that such programs have the potential to serve a more complex role in young people’s social and political development. Through a case study of HANAsori, a youth p’ungmul ensemble at Chicago’s HANA Center, I argue that the intersection of music education and community organizing enables HANA to create a cohesive group identity and shared set of skills for a multiracial group of immigrant and 2nd-generation youth from different neighborhoods and high schools across the city. The young people are then able to mobilize this solidarity and skillset to achieve political goals that are relevant to them.

This paper draws on seven months of participant observation and interviewing with high-school-aged young people and youth organizers at HANA Center, a Korean American community resource and cultural center. One of the center’s primary sources of youth recruitment is their drumming programming, which is funded by After School Matters, a city-wide umbrella organization for arts and culture. Most of these young people are not Korean, but many of them are immigrants or second-generation Americans—predominantly Latinx or Asian Americans, with a few African Americans and African immigrants. The youth drumming program combines instruction in the four instruments of p’ungmul (Janggu, Buk, Kkwaenggwari, and Jing) with community organizing and leadership development—for example, Know Your Rights training. The musical and nonmusical skills that young people develop through these workshops enable them to transition seamlessly into HANA Center’s other youth organizing activities, such as organizing a community forum to pressure local aldermanic candidates on the issue of sanctuary, fundraising for DREAMer scholarships, and drumming at public marches and rallies for immigrants’ rights.

This paper brings together and builds on work in several fields. McBride’s analysis of nonprofit music education structures in Chicago (2015) serves as a contextual foundation. Recent work on the nonprofit industrial complex (INCITE! 2017) provides a national context for the local economic aspects of my analysis, in which I argue that HANA Center strategically engages non-traditional funding sources (e.g., arts partnership grants) to support multiracial youth development. I build on Lee’s authoritative ethnomusicological study of the global spread of SamulNori (2018) as well as scholarship on U.S.-based pungmul practices (Kim 2011; Kwon 2001) to explain the innovative aspects of HANA Center’s drumming ensemble. Building on recent research into the developmental effects of group drumming (Bensimon, Amir, and Wolf 2008; Dickerson et al. 2012; Fancourt et al. 2016; Ho et al. 2011; Venkit, Godse, and Godse 2013), I argue that p’ungmul is a particularly effective vehicle for interracial youth solidarity building. In addition to advancing an academic argument, this paper is intended to communicate HANA Center’s youth organizing model and suggest ways that immigrant rights organizations can creatively mobilize music education as a tool for organizing and building youth power.

Click to download the paper here (please do not share or circulate).
Please note also that we will be meeting from 4:00 – 5:30p.m., which is earlier than our normally scheduled time. As always, refreshments will be served. Please feel free to contact either Anna (abgatdula@uchicago.edu) or Alex (murphya1@uchicago.edu) with any questions or concerns. Persons who need assistance should notify the coordinators in advance.

 

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