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The Department of Music’s Valente Lecture series presents a conversation between Nobuko Miyamoto, a legendary figure and activist in Asian American arts and culture, and ethnomusicologist Deborah Wong, professor of music UC Riverside. Wong is the editor of Miyamoto’s forthcoming memoir Not Yo’ Butterfly: My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love, and Revolution.  

The event’s format will feature Miyamoto and Wong talking and sharing some of Miyamoto’s songs, music videos, and community experiments. Wong will ask Miyamoto questions and will offer prompts into Miyamoto’s key ideas, including social justice lessons from Asian America, intercultural coalition-building, allyship between women from different communities, and environmentalism as a WOC issue. More broadly, the conversation will address violence against Asian American women. Hearing directly from women of color is essential to understanding the history of women in the US, and WOC artists consistently offer inspiring and practical strategies for social justice work. Miyamoto focuses on Asian American self-determination through music and dance, and she will offer an informal, stirring, moving, and deeply personal account of how music offers strategies for allyship and coalition-building, often as a kind of radical – or even revolutionary – dreaming.

Born in 1939, Nobuko Miyamotois a legendary figure in Asian American arts and culture. She was at the center of the Asian American Movement in the 1970s and is the beating heart of the Asian American arts scene in Southern California. As a musician, dancer, activist, and community-builder, she is a well-known figure of historical significance as well as an active, living example of what it means to direct the arts toward social justice for communities of color. Miyamoto is artistic director of the grassroots non-profit organization Great Leap. Her album 120,000 Stories will be released by Smithsonian Folkways in late January 2021.

Miyamoto’s life began with incarceration as a child with her Japanese American family at the Santa Anita Assembly Center. She went on to have a career as a dancer on Broadway in West Side Story and Flower Drum Song. She came to political consciousness in New York City in the 1960s-70s with the Black Panthers and Yuri Kochiyama and became a musician, activist, and as an Asian American woman used her voice as a response to Asian American audiences hungry for presence.

The personal and the political have always been one and the same for Miyamoto, from having a son with a Black activist to creating an Asian American nonprofit arts organization in Los Angeles. After the 1992 LA Uprising, she redirected her to work toward connecting that city’s diverse communities and ethnic neighborhoods. Miyamoto is humble yet intensely aware. She has had spectacularly difficult experiences yet remains markedly forward-looking and optimistic. Her worldview is gentle, nonviolent, and inclusive yet clear-eyed and unromantic. Her account of her own experiences is often whimsical when she describes how she forged her own path repeatedly, responding to fraught circumstances with principled ideas about how to create community.

Deborah Wong has done extensive research on the musics of Asian America and Thailand and has written three books: Louder and Faster: Pain, Joy, and the Body Politic in Asian American Taiko (2019, University of California Press), Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music, and Sounding the Center: History and Aesthetics in Thai Buddhist Ritual. She is a past President of the Society for Ethnomusicology. She holds positions on several editorial boards and is a curator for the new Asian Pacific America Series for Smithsonian Folkways. Very active in public sector work in the arts at the national, state, and local levels, she recently completed a term as the Chair of the Advisory Council for the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and formerly served on the board for the Alliance for California Traditional Arts for a decade. She played taiko for a long time and still follows the scene. Wong believes in the importance of grassroots action and has learned that those who show up make the decisions…. and can make the difference. She has seen that musicians, performers, and artists are often the prophets and the changemakers.

Free, online only via advanced registration on Zoom
Made possible by the William E. Valente Endowment