A minority, yet not a minority : playing the erhu in multicultural Australia

![CDATA[Sometime during my teenage years, I experienced a cultural crisis of sorts growing up Chinese in the western suburbs of Sydney. Eventually, I found comfort in a kind of Chinese musical identity by specialising in the erhu (2-stringed fiddle), colloquially known in English as the 'Chinese violin'. Descended from a ‘barbarian’ prototype from north and west of China (Stock 1993: 88), it is now popularly played as part of the 'classical' canon and is often associated with feelings of melancholy and nostalgia. In Australia, this instrument has gradually come into mainstream awareness, primarily through the presence of buskers on the city streets and also through films, concerts and educational music programs that engage with Asian literacy. My lecture demonstration aims to recontextualise the erhu as part of an ever-evolving performance practice and sense of cosmopolitan identity. I will perform my composition ‘Lens: In Meditation’, recorded at the Alkantara Festival (2008) as a movement piece with Australian-Chinese cultural icon William Yang. This performance is then analysed in an autoethnographic way to discuss issues of authenticity and intersectionality in relation to notions of cultural identity (Lustig 2013) and positionally (Pope and Patterson 2019). With its 1000 or so year history in China, how will the erhu develop in multicultural Australia? Will its sounds be forever associated with the Chinese ‘motherland’ in perpetuum? I discuss my observation of Australian- Chinese students at Sydney Conservatorium who feel a primordial urge to learn the erhu. There are also many non-Chinese who are fascinated by this instrument, both within and outside the university system. Could this mean that the erhu may eventually be culturally ‘decoded’ and played simply as another stringed instrument, or will it continue to be part of what I see as a kind of ‘Chinese musical hegemony’ at play within the greater Sinosphere? Scholars of Mexican music and dance regularly wrestle with the dearth of sources and the legacies of centuries of syncretism. Furthermore, national charter myths including that of mestizaje, or racial and cultural mixing, have further cemented syncretic narratives that lump diverse Indigenous communities from the colonial era into a two-part “Indigenous-European” syncretic model. Yet pulling back the shrouds around this history reveals the staggering diversity and the need to consider syncretism between Indigenous communities, not just between Indigenous communities and European colonizers. How can archival and historical sources bring these erased Indigenous communities and cultural practices into focus? And what does such a rethinking of syncretic histories mean for national mythologies that endure in contemporary Mexican music and dance? In this paper, I explore how primary sources and histories can disentangle these invisible Indigenous syncretisms in Mexican music and dance. As a case study, I consider the spread of danzas de conquista, or dances of conquest, that have long been considered emblematic of Indigenous and Spanish syncretism. Drawing on primary sources alongside scholarship on colonial-era Mexican theater, I focus on how the cultural practices of Nahuatl speakers from Central Mexico in particular syncretized with the those of other Indigenous communities. Through these analyses, I consider how twentieth-century syncretic models have inadvertently obscured the diversity of Indigenous music and dance practices embedded in contemporary danzas de conquista. I suggest that these pan-Indigenous elements paired with enduring influences from Nahuatl speakers laid a critical foundation for contemporary nationalist paradigms. I conclude by suggesting that archival and historical research provides a critical medium for reconsidering syncretic models and the power structures they conceal.]]