Helmut F. Stern Faculty Fellow
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"Imperial Vinyl: Race, Exotica and the Cold War"
Imperial Vinyl explores U.S. media representations of the “Third World,” the global bloc of decolonizing nations in Asia and Africa during the Cold War, through the development of the mid-century music genre known as Exotica. Emerging after the Second World War, Exotica was a popular form of ersatz “world music” that featured non-western instrumentation, as well as a broader aesthetic that combined imaginaries of the primitive with the modern and technophilic.
This study argues that Exotica (and its associated visual aesthetic) produced an ahistorical fantasy of the Third World, reanimating age-old racist colonial stereotypes precisely at the same time that saw the explosion of decolonization efforts worldwide and the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement at home. It explores the individual biographies of musicians like Tak Shindo, Yma Sumac, Chaino and one artist in particular—Korla Pandit—to illustrate how artists of color navigated American racial formations through this genre of music. The book uncovers that Exotica produced a “fantasy of containment,” an imaginary which effectively used the tropes of exoticism to contain both the looming threat of the postcolonial nation and the anxiety of racial integration and citizenship in the Cold War.
Manan Desai is an Associate Professor of American Culture and Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies.
