ABSTRACT
Globalization and Asian American are two important concepts in popular and academic literature indicative of long-established relations, attachments, and encounters. As a term, globalization did not appear in public and intellectual discourses until the mid-20th century. Yet, everyday “notions and images of ‘the global’ and the ‘globe’” have been popular from early in that same century, as the modern media and communications industries were becoming acutely aware of their own globalizing networks serving mass audiences.1 At the turn of the 20th century, popular music technologies, such as the phonograph and radio, directly served the purposes of U.S. and European wars and colonialism overseas, through anthropological recordings and the dissemination of Western pop music and culture.2 These earlier “world music” recordings of traditional/folklore music from around the globe set the stage for live performances in the U.S., such as the Chop Suey and hula circuits of performance.3
