GOSPEL SINGING IN THE VALLEY: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE HYMNODY AND CHORAL SINGING OF THE LISU ON THE CHINA-BURMA/MYANMAR BORDER

This dissertation is an ethnomusicological study of contemporary musical practices of the Christian Lisu in Nujiang Prefecture in northwest Yunnan on the China-Myanmar border. Among all the changes that the Nujiang Lisu have experienced since the twentieth century, the spread of Protestant Christianity throughout Nujiang’s mountainous villages has existed for the longest time and had one of the greatest effects. Combining historical investigation and ethnographic description, this study uses the lens of music to examine the impact of this social change on the Lisu living in this impoverished frontier region. The Lisu characteristics have never been vital in the music written by the Christian Lisu in Nujiang. Compared with the practices described in other ethnomusicological writings on Christian music around the world that I have read, this absence of incorporation of indigenous musical elements is unusual. There are probably many other cases similar to that of the Lisu, but few ethnomusicologists have paid attention to them. I aim to elucidate this particular scenario of Lisu Christian music in relation to three social and cultural forces: the missionary legacy of conventions; the government’s identification of the Lisu as a minority nationality and its national policies toward them since the 1950s; and the transnational religious exchange between the Christian Lisu in China and Myanmar since the late 1980s. My examination focuses on two genres which the Lisu use to express their Christian beliefs today: ddoqmuq mutgguat, derived from American northern urban gospel songs, the basis of the Lisu choral singing; and mutgguat ssat, influenced by the Christian pop of the Burmese Lisu, with instrumental accompaniment and daibbit dance and preferred by the young people. Besides studying these two genres in the religious context, I also juxtapose them with other musical traditions in the overall Nujiang music soundscape and look at their role in local social interactions such as those between sacred and secular, and majority and minority. This dissertation demonstrates that the collective performances of shared repertoires have not only created a sense of affinity for the Nujiang Christian Lisu but also have reinforced the formation of Lisu transnational religious networks.

Bodies on the Line: Violence, Disposable Subjects, and the US-Mexico Border Industrial Complex

Bodies On the Line: Violence, Disposable Subjects, and the Border Industrial Complex explores the construction of identity and notions of belonging within an increasingly privatized and militarized Border Industrial Complex. Specifically, the project interrogates how discourses of Mexican migrants as racialized, gendered, and hypersexualized “deviants” normalize violence against border crossers. Starting at Juárez/El Paso border, I follow the expanding border, interrogating the ways that Mexican migrants, regardless of sexual orientation, have been constructed and disciplined according to racialized notions of “sexual deviance." I engage a queer of color critique to argue that sexual deviance becomes a justification for targeting and containing migrant subjects. By focusing on the economic and racially motivated violence that the Border Industrial Complex does to Mexican migrant communities, I expand the critiques that feminists of color have long leveraged against systemic violence done to communities of color through the prison industrial system. Importantly, this project contributes to transnational feminist scholarship by contextualizing border violence within the global circuits of labor, capital, and ideology that shape perceptions of border insecurity. The project contributes an interdisciplinary perspective that uses a multi-method approach to understand how border violence is exercised against Mexicans at the Mexico-US border. I use archival methods to ask how historical records housed at the National Border Patrol Museum and Memorial Library serve as political instruments that reinforce the contemporary use of violence against Mexican migrants. I also use semi-structured interviews with nine frequent border crossers to consider the various ways crossers defined and aligned themselves at the border. Finally, I analyze the master narratives that come to surround specific cases of border violence. To that end, I consider the mainstream media’s coverage, legal proceedings, and policy to better understand the racialized, gendered, and sexualized logics of the violence.