Circuit Listening

Andrew F. Jones, professor and Louis B. Agassiz Chair in Chinese at the University of California, Berkeley, teaches modern Chinese literature and media culture. He is author of Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age, and Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture. He has also translated two books of fiction by Yu Hua, and a volume of literary essays by Eileen Chang.

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. The East is Red: Towards a Sonic History of the 1960s1. Circuit Listening at the Dawn of the Chinese 1960s2. Quotation Songs: Media Infrastructure and Pop Song Form in Mao’s China3. Fugitive Sounds of the Taiwanese Musical Cinema4. Pirates of the China Seas: Vinyl Records and the Military Circuit5. Folk Circuits: Rediscovering Chen Da6. Teresa Teng and the Network TraceAppendix: “Listening to Songs in the Streets of Taipei” Hsu Tsang-HoueiNotesIndex

"Circuit Listening challenges our understanding of popular music as a Euro-American hegemony by demonstrating how the Sinophone music industries and markets partook of this global circuit through corporate expansion, as well as through local resistance and piracy. It is a long-awaited book on the way global popular music, in all its diversity, circularity, and promiscuity, should be re-historicized and reconceptualized."-Victor Fan, author of Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory"Andrew F. Jones presents a complex transnational circuit with care and panache, explaining why mambo travels, how the Vietnam War created a demand for pirated recordings, and what Mao quotation songs had in common with British rock-and-roll hits. He guides the reader from transistor technology to rural electrification, from voice timbre to smuggling routes. Circuit Listening is cultural history at its richest."-Gail Hershatter, author of The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past"Listening is a feast for film buffs."-Shepherd Express"Jones's grasp and analysis of historical materials is impressive. This is an important source and research model for students of Chinese history."-CHOICE"The book is packed with exacting research and close textual decodings of music and films... for Chinese music nerds, Circuit Listening is an absolute must-have."-Taipei Times