Hmong Studies Journal, Volume 14, (2013-12). pp. Jan-64.
Language:
English
Abstract:
This paper focuses on the iconic Hmong musical instrument, the qeej, and its presence in cyberspace on YouTube videos. Hmong in the west now engage in an implicit auto-ethnography using this technology presenting new constructions of themselves to themselves as well as to other, non-Hmong people. These constructions contribute to both literate and oral representations of pan-Hmong identity. Ethnomusicological interpretations and analyses of musical traditions have, in the past, usually been embedded in notions of identity defined by a sense of place, space, and time, and of belonging to a specific sociomusical environment. For a diasporic, refugee group such as the Hmong, sense of place is retained in the memory of or nostalgia for a place whose imagined reality is preserved in stories and song texts. The fluid and changing experience of present spaces, places and scapes in which diasporic Hmong find themselves interlocks with an imagined past in China and Laos and a present in which westernised Hmong engage in tourism to China and Southeast Asia seeking their cultural and geographical roots. In the diaspora to western countries, the Hmong have exploited the potential of emerging technologies, from the telephone to audio and video cassettes, as tools that enable long-distance oral communication. Cyberspace has entered the Hmong communicative repertory of mechanisms for maintaining "we Hmongness" in a global context and YouTube is a significant medium in the contemporary context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]