We are pleased to announce that Chinatown Opera Theater in North America by Nancy Yunhwa Rao has won the 2019 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Outstanding Achievement in Humanities and Cultural Studies: Media, Visual, and Performance Studies.

The award committee said “Rao’s accessibly written book distinguishes itself through its careful, thorough, and multilingual research into Chinatown opera. The impressive scope of the project includes the United States, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, and Hawai’i, bringing disparate national sites into conversation with one another. The work successfully renders audible and visible the voice and music of Chinatown theaters across North America and allows readers to understand the role of Chinatown opera theaters in making of the Orientalist imaginary. By chronicling performance practices in detail, the book not simply reorients our understanding of this cultural phenomenon but it also offers a means to see how Chinatown Opera often conditioned notions of Chinese belonging and citizenship within the wider scope of geographic North America and beyond.”

The award will be given at the AAAS annual conference in Madison, Wisconsin, April 25-27, 2019.

The book is part of the series Music in American Life.

The book has also won a Certificate of Merit for Best Historical Research in Recorded Country, Folk, Roots, or World Music, Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), 2018, and the Music in American Culture Award, American Musicological Society (AMS), 2018.

Congratulations, Nancy, on your achievement!