WESTERN MUSIC BY ITS OTHERS: OVERSEAS FILIPINO MUSICIANS AND THE GEOGRAPHIES OF MIGRANT CREATIVE LABOR

Abstract

This thesis provides a labor and cultural geography of creative production at the global periphery. Using qualitative data collected from 2012-2013 in the Philippines, Macao, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, the research presents the creative sector of live music performance in hotels, theme parks, and cruise ships as a complex migrant labor economy, one in which Overseas Filipino Musicians (OFMs) emerge as a numerically significant yet systematically marginalized niche of creative workers. The research investigates how the periphery is produced and maintained via three production sociospatialities: the production of live music entertainment as an embodied and emplaced product, the reputational and interracial hierarchies of musicians as migrant creative workers; and the third-party management of OFMs? labor mobilities. I argue that the value of migrant creative workers such as OFMs is ultimately configured as a flexible resource for the precarious post-Fordist conditions of transnational service and creative work.