University of Oxford China Humanities Graduate Conference 2017
(Extra)ordinary China: Practices of the Everyday
Keynote Speakers
The Tone-Color Revolution: Teresa Teng and the Transistor
Andrew F. Jones (University of California, Berkeley)
11th January, 1:15–2:30pm
In 1980, the pop diva Teresa Teng visited troops on the island of Quemoy (Jinmen), a contested island on the frontlines of the Cold War conflict between the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China. Separated by just six miles of coastal waters, the two sides had developed since the 1950s a powerful infrastructure for sonic warfare, in the form of massive loudspeaker arrays capable of projecting propaganda across the strait, in a practice known as “slogan shouting” (hanhua 喊話). Yet by the time Teng was filmed for a Taiwanese TV special speaking via an imposing “wall of sound” (æ’音牆) to her “compatriots” on the mainland, these fixed structures had already been rendered irrelevant by a new and considerably more flexible technological order, that of transistorized consumer electronics.
In this paper, I examine what we might call a timbral turn in Cold War politics. By the mid-1980s, Teng’s famously sweet voice, riding the influx of inexpensive portable cassette players and TV sets into ordinary homes, had ‘conquered’ the mainland and significantly transformed its soundscape. Consumer electronics quickly displaced the loudspeaker networks of the post-1949 state, domesticating and decollectivizing the consumption of music. Music, in other words, became not so much an instrument of mobilization, but an appliance for what Raymond Williams has called the “mobile privatization” of affective life.
By all accounts, the powerful, even transformative, effect of her music on mainland listeners lay in the lyricism and ‘femininity’ of Teng’s sound, after years of habituation to the clamor and urgency of revolutionary music. In this paper, I will analyze the complex question of vocal and instrumental timbre in its relation to Cold War politics. I will argue that tone color is not simply a matter of aesthetic or ideological preference, even if those preferences have profound political and cultural consequence, and that its analysis should not be limited to the merely adjectival. What precisely makes a sound strident or syrupy? How were particular timbres — whether of political sloganeering or pop balladry — engineered? In what ways were they contingent upon a complex technical assemblage, encompassing the specifications and limitations of audio equipment, the media networks in which these components are embedded, and the listening practices they assumed and engendered?
Andrew F. Jones teaches modern Chinese literature and media culture at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music (Cornell East Asia Series, 1992) and Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Duke University Press, 2001), and the translator of literary fiction by Yu Hua as well as Eileen Chang's Written on Water. His latest book is Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Harvard University Press, 2011).
Shopping, Reading and the Everyday in Chinese Art
Craig Clunas (University of Oxford)
12th January, 10:00–11:15am
This paper will address the everyday activity of shopping in China, but shopping of a very particular and non-everyday kind, for art and antiquities. The diary of Li Rihua (1656-1635), an almost unique account of the quotidian activities of a member of the Ming elite, will be read alongside the numerous advertisements placed by artists in Shanghai newspapers of the Republican period in the late 1920s. This comparison will be used to consider how notions of the traditional and the modern intersect with the experience of the acquisition and ownership of artworks in China’s past.
Craig Clunas is Professor of the History of Art, University of Oxford. Much of his work concentrates on the Ming period (1368-1644), with additional teaching and research interests in the art of 20th century and contemporary China. He is the author of Art in China (1997, second edition 2009) in the Oxford History of Art Series, and his other books include Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (1991); Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (1996); Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (1997); Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming, 1470-1559 (2004); Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China, 1368-1644 (2007); Screen of Kings: Art and Royal Power in Ming China (2013). In 2014, he co-curated the exhibition 'Ming: 50 years that changed China', at the British Museum. His most recent book is Chinese Painting and Its Audiences (2017), based on the AW Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, in 2012. His current research project deals with the transnational history of Chinese art in the short twentieth century, from 1911 to 1976.