The proliferation of the American music business has created a power elite which shapes and controls the popular music industry. For American blues and jazz musicians in the 20th century, becoming an expatriate served as an alternative to that subjugation. That alternative existed in the 1990s in some degree, though Europe too has fallen under the influence of American marketing of artists popular in the United States. This dissertation discusses the community of American expatriate jazz musicians currently living in Paris. These musicians derive the bulk of their income working in Parisian nightclubs and restaurants. Paris is often the focal point of a myth that Europe celebrates its blues and jazz musicians. The myth's logical conclusion is that expatriate American musicians find easy success in Europe. The community of working American musicians in Paris, however, must struggle to live, thereby replicating the existence of many of their counterparts in America. For a musician to now increase their European stature, and to increase their personal stature and fulfillment as a musician, building a career in the States prior to relocating to Europe is a more practical career plan. In the present, nightclub capitalism is international in scope and contributes to the shaping of the careers and, more fully, the lives of American expatriate jazz musicians.

<p> Following the 1975-1979 genocide, Cambodian exiles in the U.S. recreated cultural institutions through music. Music remains significant in rebuilding cultural life in diasporic Cambodian communities. Live bands perform contemporary and classic ballads during Cambodian New Year in April, at wedding parties and in restaurants on weekend nights. Live rock bands continue to dot community celebrations as survivors collectively create musical repertoires and schedule practices to perform at festive community events. Despite the ubiquity of live musical performance in Cambodian communities, this aspect of Cambodian American cultural formation has been scarcely addressed in the literature. This Thesis addresses the deficiency in the literature through ethnographic fieldwork with a Southern California rock band called the Soriya Band, comprised of three guitarists, a keyboardist, a drummer and two vocalists who are all first generation Cambodian survivors. Music persists as a vehicle for cultural creation and change for Cambodian American refugee-survivors. </p>

<p> This study examines how Vietnamese Americans perform identities that acknowledge their statuses as diasporic Vietnamese to construct and maintain specifically Vietnamese American communities. I argue that music, especially public forms of musical expression within mass media and locally staged cultural performances, is a crucial way for Vietnamese Americans across the diaspora to transmit markers of cultural knowledge and identity that give them information about themselves and the "imagined community" constructed through their linked discourses.</p><p> The argument is organized around two main ideas that focus on broad cultural patterns and locally situated expressions, respectively. First, music produced by the niche Vietnamese American media industry is distributed across the diaspora and models discourses of Vietnamese identity as different companies provide different visions of what it means to be Vietnamese and perform Vietnamese-ness on stage. I analyze the music variety shows by three different companies (Thuy Nga Productions, Asia Entertainment, and Van Son Productions) to argue that Vietnamese American popular media should not be seen as representing a single monolithic version of Vietnamese-ness; rather, each articulation of Vietnamese identity is slightly different and speaks to a different formulation of the Vietnamese public, producing a discursive field for diverse Vietnamese American identity politics.</p><p> Secondly, I show how identity is always performed in particular places, illustrating that Vietnamese Americans performing music in different places can have vastly different understandings of that music and its relationship to their identities. Using a Peircian semiotic framework, I articulate a theory of place-making in which places become vehicles for the clustering of signs and meaning as people experience and interpret those places and make meaning there. As people's experiences imbue places with meaning, people coming from similar cultural backgrounds may gain different attachments to those places and one another and thus different understandings of their identities as Vietnamese. I use two contrasting examples of Vietnamese American communities in Indianapolis and San Jose to show how people in each place construct entirely different discourses of identity surrounding musical performance based upon their positionality within the diaspora.</p>

<p>From its roots in Richie Valens's "La Bamba" riffs, garage rock, and the Ramones to hardcore and the cultural front of the anti-globalization movement, Latina/os have played a significant role in punk music, fashion, identity, and politics. In the 1970s and 1980s, in context of the transformative effects of neo-liberal economic globalization on the United States I Mexico borderlands, working class Latina/o youth from the barrios of Los Angeles to Tijuana's colonias were instrumental in shaping punk's subcultural identity. Though separated by national borders, Latina/o socio-economic conditions and experiences with the police state increasingly mirrored each other. By the 1990s, accessing Latina/o cultural sights and sounds as markers of punk's oppositional identity, these organic intellectuals fostered a transborder civic imagination and alternative critical space within punk that intersected with the radical politics of the indigenous Ejercito Zapatista de Liberaci&oacute;n Nacional (E.Z.L.N.) inciting the anarchist inspired anti-globalization politics in punk culture. </p>