Sounding Transnationalism

Popular Music in Paris by Night and The Sympathizer

Abstract

As a show that features live cover performances and a nostalgic cabaret aesthetic, and as a form of media often circulated through semi-legal methods, the direct-to-video series starring Vietnamese American singers, Paris by Night (1983-present, 134 episodes) necessitates contextualization with other supposedly imitative or derivative artistic productions in subaltern and diasporic communities. Bhaskar Sarkar, Neepa Majumdar, Stuart Cunningham, and Tina Nguyen have rejected the construction that subaltern popular culture operates as an uncreative copy of implicitly white American popular culture. While maintaining this rejection of aspiration towards whiteness, I suggest that the recovery of transnational belatedness does not necessitate eliminating, but rather recentering aspiration and inspiration. While recognizing the ingenuity of popular media phenomena like Paris by Night, I shift the focus to participation in transnational flows of media rather than assimilation towards American whiteness through popular media. In Paris by Night, and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s critique of the show as fictionalized in the 2015 novel The Sympathizer, I look through the lens of improvisation to characterize piracy and the cultural copy, as well as the aesthetic and political implications that rise out of their simultaneity. These improvisatory qualities recenter the transnational aspirations of Paris by Night in relation to a queer of color global nightlife. I argue that the improvisatory ethos of Paris by Night as an example of nostalgic subaltern global media calls attention to the underemphasized link between queer of color aesthetics and subaltern media circulation while necessarily shifting the focus away from a universalized American popular culture.