​2016 International Conference on
Sounds, Images, and Texts on China's Periphery

Helen REES (Department of Ethnomusicology, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music)
Topic: Centering the Periphery: Southwest China as Multiple Musical Crossroads
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Abstract:
The establishment since the Second World War of today's Asian nation-states has been accompanied by the development of ideals of centralized citizenship and national belonging, together with firmly demarcated international boundaries. This conceptualization of the physical world and the humans who inhabit it has in many cases solidified a set of simplistic binaries: national center versus periphery; majority ethnic group versus multiple small ethnic minorities, many associated with that geographical periphery; a national standardized language versus local languages and dialects often considered less desirable; and a nationally disseminated cultural canon versus the multiplicity of local cultural forms. In this address, I would like to focus on the musical cultures of one of the classic peripheries of contemporary China, the southwest, with its myriad ethnic groups and historical connections across modern national borders. In particular, I wish to set aside here the dominant discourse of the southwest as predominantly a peripheral Chinese region, and instead think of it as the locus of multiple overlapping cultural centres, peripheries, networks and crossroads. Drawing on case-studies including the musical environments of small Tibeto-Burman ethnic groups, Theravada and Tibetan Buddhist influences, and the extensive multi-ethnic, cross-border network of musico-ritual Dongjing associations, I suggest that we can think of the existence of a large number of musically articulated cultural foci. Each has been the experiential norm of those growing up with it, and each can be considered a cultural centre in its own right, rather than merely an exotic aberration existing outside a national standardized norm.  

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Robert BARNETT (Columbia University)
Topic: Invisibility and Presence: Chinese Motifs in Tibetan Film

​Abstract:
What are the subjects which are not spoken of in the art of the Borderlands? Tibetan film-makers and writers have emerged as a strong force on the cultural landscape in the last twenty years, especially in terms of short stories, poetry and feature films. Their work, however, rarely includes characters who are ethnic Chinese, or even locations that are recognisably Chinese. In this, they are not alone: Chinese-made films and drama series that are about Tibetans also include relatively few Chinese characters apart from starry-eyed lovers in minzu tuanjie romances. The deadhand of political correctness PRC-style and its near-cousin, the workings of exotic fantasy, help explain part of this phenomenon, but leave deeper questions unresolved. What are we being told by these omissions, and are there other silences that we should learn to listen to?
 

 

 

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Frederick LAU (University of Hawai’i)
Topic: Dangerous Margins: Creative Impulses in Hong Kong’s popular Music

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​Abstract:

We were told over and over again that Hong Kong, once called Pearl of the Orient, is a story of the East versus the West, of Asia’s emerging economy, modernization and capitalism, colonization, and materialism. On the other side of the equation, recent discourses on Hong Kong have inadvertently been couched in the negative language of “lack” and sentiment of deficiency. Hong Kong has been seen as an illegitimate child waiting to be disciplined, a stop on the side of a major highway, and a negative space without a center. The central narrative of Hong Kong has been a story of subjugation, a stark contrast from what the place has accomplished and come to represent. In this paper I suggest a paradigm shift that inverts the language of deficiency to capture what Kathleen Stewart calls “the gist of things.” Privileging issues of agency, subjectivity, de Certeau’s notion of tactics, and bringing issues of human creativity back to the discussion of culture is a form of activism that aims to circumvent the troupe of subjugation. I explore moments of Hong Kong’s pop music and the links to its unique geopolitical context. I argue that what underlies Hong Kong’s creative impulses is precisely its locality as a dynamic and indefinable space that has been marked by the optimism of becoming and the anxiety of belonging.

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