Jones, Andrew Fredrick, “Popular music and colonial modernity in China, 1900-1937” (1997)

Title : “Popular music and colonial modernity in China, 1900-1937”

Author(s) : Jones, Andrew Fredrick

Year : 1997

Type : Dissertation

Subject : History

Keywords : culture;entertainement;colonial

University : University of California, Berkeley

Language:Name : English

Support : Print

Abstract : 'Modern songs' (shidai qu) were an integral part of Chinese popular media culture throughout the Republican period. Even so, scholars in China and abroad have almost completely neglected this cultural legacy. This dissertation provides a detailed historical account of the development of popular music in China from 1900 to 1937. What emerges from this exploration is a reassessment of both modern Chinese cultural history and recent academic discourse on questions of post-coloniality and transnational culture. The commercial and hybrid character of this music tends to disrupt narratives of Chinese cultural modernity which take the nation-building project of the May 4th literary elite as their ideological and historical fulcrum. An understanding of the intertwinement of this musical culture with the global diffusion of media technology from the turn-of-the-century until the outbreak of World War II, moreover, will help to place contemporary discourse on transnational culture on firmer historical ground. The ways in which music and discourse on music participated in struggles over national culture, class, and gender in a multiply colonized modern metropolis like Shanghai, finally, both corroborate and complicate recent thinking about the nature of colonial culture. In Chapter One, I trace the imbrication of imperialism and nationalism in the constitution of modern Chinese music, arguing that May 4th era musical reformers sought to deploy music as a technology for nation-building. In Chapter Two, I examine the global diffusion of the gramophone and its culture via a study of the recording industry in colonial Shanghai. In Chapter Three, I examine the work of Li Jinhui, a pivotal figure whose trajectory--from ardent patriot and educator to controversial proponent of the hybrid and 'decadent sounds' of urban popular music--challenges many of the commonplaces of scholarship on modern Chinese cultural history. The Leftist music movement that is the focus of Chapter Four placed itself in opposition to Li's brand of sinified jazz by advocating a new mass-mediated aesthetic of 'phonographic realism' in popular music.