Going ‘Glocal’: Lao Music in
Transnational Spaces
Adam Chapman, Ph.D.
Australian National University
Australia
Over the past five years a transnational music industry has emerged across the
communities of the Lao diaspora. Still in its infancy, this industry
encapsulates the changing nature of transnational exchanges between Lao
communities across the globe through its utilization of the Internet, digital
technologies and frequent overseas travel. The drive for much of the activity in
this fledgling industry comes from a local level with individual musicians and
small recording/distribution companies working to develop their niche market:
“Lao music”. This local activity draws from, and feeds back into, a global Lao
community extending through North America, Europe, Australasia and Southeast
Asia. Through these reciprocal communicative processes music becomes a focal
point for contesting, reconfiguring and reconstructing Lao identity and
establishing a home away from home.
This presentation is part paper and part virtual tour through Lao digital places
and spaces filled with sounds, images and words. Traveling through these
transnational ‘splaces’ opens up insights into the ways that concepts of ‘the
local’ and ‘the global’ are collapsing inwards as the communities of the Lao
diaspora redefine Lao-ness, khuam pên laaw. The term “glocalization” (Robertson
1994) has been used to describe such processes of conflation, however, they may
also be described as the dynamic fluctuations between fixity and fluidity in the
material and discursive processes involving Lao communities (Connell and Gibson
2003:9-10).