Dr Anjeline de Dios Assistant Professor Department of Cultural Studies Lingnan University From Manila, Philippines, Anjeline de Dios is a cultural geographer  and singer/chant performer with an interest in geographies of  music, migration/mobility, and cultural/creative labour. She is  currently Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. All are welcome Enquiries: please email to searc@cityu.edu.hk 東南亞研究中心 9 April 2018  (Monday) 4:00‐5:30pm B5‐417, AC1 Yeung Kin Man Academic Building Abstract Long admired and derided for her fluent mimicry of Western musics, the singing Filipino is emblematic of both the postcolonial reckoning with hybridity, and the neoliberal transformation of cultural production into precarious work. But might there be other ways to make sense of Philippine vocal performance beyond valorisations of and injunctions to cultural distinctiveness and individual virtuosity? In this paper- performance, I meditate on the intimate practices of singing and listening "while Filipino," and propose that vocal performance serves as a unique and important site of reckoning with multiple subjectivities. I present two instances of critical reflection. In the first I consider the findings of my research on migrant Filipino musicians, whose singing, valued for the imitative and affective capacities of entertainment, is framed by larger infrastructures of labour migration and colonial cultural history. In the second, I share/sing insights as a performer and facilitator of improvised chant with Manila-based artists in contemporary dance and music. I propose that the musical labour of song ambivalently positions the Filipino to be for herself and yet always for others. Such ambivalence becomes clear in transnational contexts where, firstly, music as entertainment has become one in a cadre of migrant service jobs where Filipinoness is racially coded as high-quality but subordinate labour; and music as art from the global South has discursively mark(et)ed the aesthetic and cosmopolitan value of Filipino culture in the global imaginary. In both instances, I focus on listening as a key dynamic through which these tensions are both incompletely resolved. I argue that it is through singing/listening that we can make new sense of authenticity's role in contemporary Philippine subjectivities, generating anxieties and aspirations in different contexts of performance and/as labour, and revealing these cultural subjectivities as multi-sited, polyvalent, contradictory, and vital. Singing While Filipino: Reflections on Authenticity and Musical Labour