Resounding Afro Asia: Interracial Music and the Politics of Collaboration makes a strong contribution to performance studies, illuminating paradigms of intercultural sonic performance. The opening chapter introduces Roberts's concept of “sono-racialization: the organization of sound into taxonomies based upon racialized conceptions of bodies” (4). The study considers how musicians challenge these essentializing and segregating structures. In theorizing built around four chapters of case studies, the author emphasizes how artists create interracial music in a variety of social and political contexts.

Roberts draws upon a broad spectrum of theories throughout the text, using them as a framework for demonstrating how interracial performance can be both emergent and historically situated. I found the study to be thorough and informative. The author's interpretative formulation of an original terminology, encompassing concepts such as “sono-racial articulation” (95), racial triangulation, sonic identities, and radical interracialism, will certainly open up new areas of discourse within the field of sonic studies. Roberts aims to move music outside of black–white paradigms, and so writes about Afro Asian sonic color lines, fusion, and interracial sound from differently raced bodies, explaining how Afro Asian sounds can be political while also doing aesthetic work. The book's interdisciplinary methodology includes ethnography, critical theory, and performance analysis.

Chapter 1 begins with analysis of images and text from a 1907 racist piece of sheet music titled “The Wedding of the Chinee and the Coon.” Roberts characterizes the work as an early example of music that brings together stories of black and Asian people. It showcases how sounds, artists, and listeners collaborated in “sono-racial triangulation” (23), a process whereby whiteness, blackness, and Asianness are constructed comparatively in relation to tropes of “‘insider/foreigner,’” racial superiority, and/or civic ostracism (4).

In Chapter 2, Roberts builds on this discussion by describing the work of Yoko Noge, a Chicago-based artist who works within racial discourses of blackness and Asianness through her jazz and blues practices. Noge, who calls herself a “cultural ‘sidewoman’” (61), negotiates a relationship to modernity and the West by delinking race from culture. This process, which Roberts says typifies “‘Afro-Asianization’” (61), represents a political, but dynamic, racial and cultural process. I would argue that Noge's work is not overtly political; still, her immersion in music associated with black cultural production might be viewed as a political act by those outside of these circuits. Roberts agrees to some extent, explaining that “her work ‘does’ politics by endorsing and opposing racially triangulating discourses and institutions” (61). Roberts's writing in Chapter 2 also includes insightful observations about Japanese engagement with African American music. Later, the author describes how sonic racial affiliations are received in the Chicago professional music scene. As a practicing musician, Roberts can offer enlightening observations about how artists navigate within a commercial music arena.

The third chapter expands upon earlier discussions by focusing on how artists create interracial community space through music. Here, the author's case study considers the group Funkadesi and its articulation of “one family” (114) in its musical performances. Roberts maintains “cross-cultural musical training works to contest body–culture determinism” (95). By this, the author means that artists in Funkadesi play sounds not usually associated with their ethnic or racial identities. Their cultural fluency manifests in the realm of rhythm as they engage in jam sessions as a cultural learning process. Roberts analyzes spaces where Funkadesi performs, and writes about the artists’ pursuit of mixed audience spaces within a segregated Chicago. The group intentionally creates spaces for demographically dissimilar audience members to come together in celebration of multiculturalism. Even as their music resists tropes of racial triangulation, their marketing reinstates sonic racial and cultural affinities through symbolic markers.

In the fourth chapter, Roberts writes about sonic identity politics. Although the author critiques multicultural policies that relegate diverse art forms to festival settings with minimal funding, Roberts argues that music by the artist Fred Ho challenges identity politics by performing radical interracialism through sound. Ho, “recogniz[ing] the futility of assimilation” (127), works with a cultural canon of sound outside of the Western tradition, offering a new point of reference for sound. Through his Monkey Orchestra and other ventures, he offers a space where “whiteness no longer functions as the aesthetic mold into which nonwhite traditions must squeeze” (130). The author also discusses how Ho's work Deadly She-Wolf Assassin at Armageddon, a martial-arts epic, resists sonic stereotypes.

Roberts's last chapter considers the case of the music video “Addictive,” in which Bollywood sounds and themes from the song “Thoda Resham Lagta Hai” were integrated into a music video without permission or compensation. Rather than viewing this as an exploitative appropriation of musical forms, the author explores it as a case where the discursive coming together of blackness and Asianness has the potential to disrupt racially triangulated discourses. Roberts's interest throughout the volume is in using Afro Asian sonic production as a way to examine interracial expressive arts outside of black–white dichotomies. In the disruption of deterministic links to race through sonic identity politics, Roberts sees racial transgression. The strength of the study is the way in which it expands the emerging field of sonic performance studies by analyzing non-Eurocentric interracial interactions through sound.