Tropical Renditions

"Balance’s book is a major contribution to a flowering of contemporary scholarship on the Filipino diaspora and musical performance.  . . . From DJing and karaoke to performance art and indie Pinoise rock, Balance’s book draws out the rich implications of such musical scenes, and in doing so, shows how Filipino America has been made, and made uniquely meaningful, through music."

~Victor Bascara, Pacific Affairs

"With her careful survey of ethnographic texts and implicit use of ethnographic research techniques, Balance sets a new standard for accounts of popular music culture in performance studies."

~Neal Matherne, Ethnomusicology

"Tropical Renditions offers a script from which to begin rehearsing a multiscalar phonography of place, race, and music that is . . . relentlessly and productively disobedient."

~Anjeline de Dios, Southeast Asian Studies

"A gift to the fields of Asian studies, sound studies, and cultural studies, speaking between and across each in order to posit a theory of sound that is attuned to the affective and sociopolitical contours of the Filipinx diasporic experience. . . . Seminal in its theorizing of the social conditions that dictate how the Filipinx performing body is consumed."

~Casey Mecija, Journal of the Society for American Music