Acoustics of Crisis: The Transnational Making of Auditory Culture in Revolutionary China, 1937-1976

Abstract

The dissertation examines the transnational origins and intermedial making of Chinese auditory culture from 1937 to 1976. The four decades, I argue, witnessed the advent of the age of sound with the global dissemination of media infrastructure, which propelled a paradigmatic shift to the primary mode of cultural production from print culture to sound media. This period further corresponds to the most tumultuous age in modern Chinese history of intensely fought hot wars and the global Cold War, national revolutions and the Cultural Revolution. Together, sound technologies and war and revolutionary experiences inform the creation of a discrete mode of auditory culture in modern China that I propose as “acoustics of crisis.” It designates diverse artistic experiments in revolutionary China that aimed to explore the expressive and affective potential of sound in response to cultural, political, and perceptional crises. From there, conceptions of subjecthood and nationhood were formulated anew. Methodologically, the dissertation is inspired by the emerging field of sound studies. I understand sound as both sonic expressions and networks of resonance to investigate the aesthetic, political, sensorial, and material dimensions of Chinese auditory culture. Sonic expressions refer to a broad range of artworks widely circulated in mid-twentieth-century China that possess a distinctive sonic quality, such as poetry, musical cinema, and intermedial theatre, in which artists laboriously experimented with the aesthetic expressivity of sound to affectively agitate the spectators in crisis-ridden times; networks of resonance highlight the development of nationwide media infrastructure and the heterogeneous listening practices cultivated therein. These networks played a central role in Chinese political revolutions, from disseminating revolutionary messages to cultivating collective sensorium. In addition to making audible the sonic turn in modern Chinese culture, I further contextualize this emerging auditory culture within transnational histories of the anti-Fascist international, the decolonizing movements of the Global South, and Cold War in Asia. The excavation of these circuits of intercultural networks illustrates the polycentric circulation of auditory aesthetics across vast geographical spaces and brings to light contending visions of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and internationalism. The dissertation consists of an introductory chapter and four content chapters, examining sonic artifacts corresponding to four major wars in modern Chinese history: the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) that mobilized the entire nation in war efforts against Japan, the Civil War (1947–49) leading to the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the Korean War (1950–53) that halted China’s transition to a post-revolutionary society, and the global Cold War looming large in the Maoist years. Chapter Two focuses on the modernist mediation and imagination of China’s wartime soundscapes. Chapter Three investigates the cultivation of socialist sonority in socialist sound documentary in the 1950s. Chapter Four traces the convergence between lyricist sensibility and revolutionary enthusiasm through the lens of music in revolutionary war films. The last chapter explores the audiovisual and corporeal construction of internationalism in Maoist theatre.