Diverse Expression: Chinese Identities in 1921-1931 New Zealand through the Lens of Music

Based on musical instruments, newspaper reports, and archival materials, this thesis analyses Chinese music practices in New Zealand from 1921 to 1931 to explore how Chinese musical genres developed in New Zealand settings and how diverse cultural, gender, and political identities were expressed. The analysis is guided by a framework that combines Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (Latour 2005) and Georgina Born's four planes of social mediation (Born 2011). This framework, proposed in Chapter Two of the thesis, traces how musical objects, established genres, norms, beliefs, and environmental factors mediated within musical events to facilitate identity expression across multiple planes. The thesis demonstrates that Cantonese communities in New Zealand continued to practice music genres of the Pearl River Delta, adapting them according to local circumstances. Additionally, through the exploration of Cantonese community music-making alongside the case of Dr T. Z. Koo, the thesis highlights the diverse representations of Chinese culture and how music facilitated these expressions alongside competing political ideals and visions of the Chinese nation and people. Highlighting the complexity and dynamism embedded within the category of the Chinese in New Zealand, my research challenges established definitions of what constitutes "being Chinese". It investigates how Chinese people participated in local events and adapted to local conditions while engaging with practices and discourses across the Chinese-dwelling world; and, how, in so doing, the boundaries of "diaspora" and "local" were traversed. My investigation is situated within nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Cantonese music research, particularly in the under-explored area of Cantonese instrumental genres and their development in the Anglosphere. Contributing to the historiography of the ethnic Chinese in New Zealand, this thesis aims to illustrate the extent to which music can provide a unique angle for exploring historical experiences.