WESTERN MUSIC BY ITS OTHERS: OVERSEAS FILIPINO MUSICIANS AND THE GEOGRAPHIES OF MIGRANT CREATIVE LABOR
type: CreativeWork
description: 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.
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.
author: ANJELINE ELOISA JAVATE DE DIOS
keywords: creative industries, creative labor, migration, music, entertainment
date published: 2015-05-13
date modified: 2026-07-24T03:33:22Z
provider: National University of Singapore
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: National University of Singapore