Diaspora as method, music as hope

In November 2013, something unusual happened during the television show Holland’s Got Talent. To begin with, a person with a Chinese background participated in a talent show dominated by white, and to a lesser extent, black bodies. After Wang Xiao, a Chinese research student in the Netherlands, finished his performance, he was greeted with a laughing articulation of “surplise” by a jury member Gordon, a white Dutch singer. The articulation, a stereotyping reference to the presumed Chinese difficulty to pronounce the “r” sound, was followed by more racist remarks, including the most cited “Which number are you singing? Number 39 with rice?”.