(Pre-order) China Sounds Across Borders

Tracing the global journeys of Chinese sounds from the nineteenth century to the present, this volume charts a vast sonic territory: from Cantonese opera arias in San Francisco to the “Far East sound” that shaped Jamaican reggae, and from the melodies of pigeon whistles over Germany to the revolutionary anthems of Cold War Italy… How have these sounds—traveling via migration, media, and diplomacy—been heard, adapted, or even rejected in disparate cultural landscapes? What sonic cartographies of empire, diaspora, and modernity do these travels reveal?

Through seventeen case studies spanning Asia, the Americas, and Europe, the book uncovers the myriad ways sounds interpreted as “Chinese” are transformed, contested, and imbued with new meanings as they reverberate across geopolitical and cultural borders. This collection provides a novel auditory history of China’s global entanglements, offering a comparative lens to understand the dynamic role of sound in transnational exchange and the negotiation of cultural identity.

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This collaborative project reveals how sound became a vessel of memory, identity, and renewal. Charting Chinese sonic collaborations and creative adaptations across continents, it offers an insightful meditation on how sound carries history, imagination, and the enduring human impulse without borders.

This rich volume invites readers to listen to Chinese sound worlds as they travel within East Asia, across the Pacific, and around the world. Most of the stories here, all of them compelling micro-histories that nonetheless hang together as a whole, are being told for the first time in English.

This book is a highly welcome contribution to Chinese music studies and related fields. Ranging from the 1870s to the present, the seventeen case studies listen critically to popular and art music, to theater and film, to Maoist radio and pigeon whistles, to new Indigenous music fusions, and to the soundscapes of Chinese participants in the St. Louis World Fair. A much-needed and intellectually rich collection.

This book puts a stop to any notion of a monolithic Chinese sound identity. All seventeen chapters present a variety of case studies in many ways representative and certainly suggestive of persistent patterns as Chinese sounds have travelled across borders.