Description:

Environmental Humanities Workshop, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, and the Program in Comparative Literary studies present:

Professor Andrew F. Jones (Berkeley, East Asian Languages and Cultures)

“Chrysanthemum Fields Forever: Folk Rock Form and Environmental Sound in Taiwan”

Abstract: The Taiwanese folk-rock music of Lin Sheng-xiang and Chung Yung-feng emerged from the social movements of post-martial law Taiwan, and in particular from local environmental struggles against the effort of the developmental KMT party-state to construct a dam in their hometown. Lin and Chung’s early work with the Labor Exchange Band self-consciously advocated a return to rural roots, local idioms, and to the land. This talk focuses in particular on Lin and Chung’s appropriation of the long-playing record (LP) as a musical, narrative, material, and social form and as a means of organizing, historicizing, and giving voice to local subjectivities, political struggles, and environmental sounds. In their studio-craft and recording practices, Lin and Chung have constructed a radically open and participatory model of folk musical expression, predicated on the auto-ethnographic construction of a rural soundscape. 

Bio: Andrew F. Jones is Professor and Louis B. Agassiz Chair in Chinese at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches modern Chinese literature and media culture. 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), co-editor of a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique entitled The Afro-Asian Century, and translator of literary fiction by Yu Hua as well as Eileen Chang's Written on Water (Columbia University Press, 2005). Recent books include Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Harvard University Press, 2011), and a volume co-edited with Xu Lanjun entitled The Discovery of the Child: the Problem of the Child in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (Peking University Press, 2011). His most recent book Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2020.