Singing the Immigrant Generation

A Performance and Presentation by Conner Singh VanderBeek

In 1994, farmer and writer Mohinder Singh Ghag (1931-2020) – Conner Singh Vanderbeek's grandfather – co-founded the Punjabi Sahit Sabha (literary society) of Yuba City-Sacramento. What began as a series of informal gatherings in Ghag’s California farmhouse garage blossomed into a cultural and linguistic community. Dozens of immigrant men and women gathered to share the intimacies of their immigrant experiences through sung and recited poetry. Ironically, Ghag’s children and grandchildren could not comprehend the depth of his writings or the Punjabi worldview they expressed while he was alive.

“Singing the Immigrant Generation,” through storytelling, musical composition, and poetic recitation, tries to glimpse into the world Ghag and his colleagues built in California. It is based on Dr. Vanderbeek's own scholarly research on diasporic Punjabi poetry and the interstitial lifeworld it encapsulates between Punjab-born subject and diasporic-becoming subject, which he began following his nanaji’s passing. He engages the compositions of Ghag and his younger sister, Mohinderjit Kaur Thiara, to explore the secret language the two shared amongst themselves and among the Punjabi Sahit Sabha. Interwoven with these poems and their translations are personal stories of Dr. Vanderbeek's family’s engagements with his nanaji’s poetry and new musical compositions based on the texts, forms, meters, and poetic conventions of these Punjabi poems.

Bio:

Conner Singh VanderBeek is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Davidson College. VanderBeek’s research engages Punjabi diasporic art and culture in the United States and Canada, and cultural memory, music, and identity politics in the Sikh diaspora. Their dissertation, titled Talking Over Each Other: Diasporic Punjabi Artists and the Ideologies of Public Arts in Multicultural Canada, interrogates diversity policy in Canadian arts and its relationship to the commodification and tokenization of Punjabi-Canadian artists. VanderBeek also works as a collaborative sound, media, and textile artist and has shown throughout the Greater Toronto Area and Metro Vancouver.