Andrew Jones - "The Far East Sound in Jamaica" (Sept. 19, 7:30PM)

The Program in Chinese Literature and Culture and the Center for Ethnomusicology Jointly Present:

The 'Far East Sound' In Jamaica

Andrew F. Jones

Thursday, September 19, 2019, 7:30 p.m. 

Dodge Hall, 2960 Broadway, New York, NY 10027

Room 622 

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

This lecture by Andrew Jones revolves around a cohort of Hakka Chinese entrepreneurs, record producers, and studio musicians who played an outsized role in shaping Jamaica's most important cultural export, reggae music. Chinese-Jamaican producers like Clive Chin and Herman Chin-Loy not only recorded and marketed some of the first examples of the vastly influential and innovative genre of studio remixes known as dub music, but also contributed to the rise of a new and historically plangent subgenre in reggae called the "far east sound." This presentation will explore how "China" sounded in the seemingly unlikely setting of a newly independent Afro-Caribbean island nation, and what this genre of music might tell us about imperial history, migrations of labor and capital, music technology, and the sonic shaping of a postcolonial “home.”

Andrew F. Jones is Louis B. Agassiz Professor of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California at Berkeley and teaches modern Chinese literature and media culture. He is the author of three books on music: Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age, and the forthcoming Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s. He has also written Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture, and translated literary works by Yu Hua and Eileen Chang. 

Co-sponsored by Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and Institute for Comparative Literature and Society