A Legacy of Extremes: Songs and Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

日期： 2025/03/21

時間： 10:00~12:00

地點： 檔案館第三會議室

主持人： 陳柏旭教授（中研院近史所助研究員）

主講人：歐陽小莉Lei X. Ouyang教授（Swarthmore College副教授、台大音樂學研究所客座教授）

主辦單位： 婦女與性別史研究群

※英文演講、中英問答

摘要：
During the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Mao Zedong led the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to utilize the arts as a “cultural army” in an attempt to transform China into a socialist society. Music as Mao’s Weapon: Remembering the Chinese Cultural Revolution (University of Illinois Press, 2022) provides original fieldwork and ethnographic accounts to reveal how the CCP used the arts as a political weapon during the Cultural Revolution and the impacts that continue to resonate today.
Taking the propaganda song anthology New Songs of the Battlefield (戰地新歌) as its focus, the study untangles interactions between politics, childhood, memory, nostalgia, and trauma through an interdisciplinary conversation with music at the center. The book concludes with a look at China in the 21st century to consider the extreme nature of this sensory experience: extreme weaponization of music, dissemination of propaganda arts, and revolutionization of the senses. In this presentation I will examine the long-term impacts of the politicization and weaponization of music, especially during one’s childhood and youth.
The Cultural Revolution is frequently cited as a unique period for its history, politics, and cultural environment. Pushing beyond sound itself (either in its physical vibrations or musical characteristics) to view sound and listening as an embodied experience sheds new light on the particular intensity of the Cultural Revolution as a sensory environment of historic extremes.
 
講者簡介：
Lei X. Ouyang 歐陽小莉 is an Associate Professor of Music and Director of Asian American Studies at Swarthmore College (PA/USA) where she co-directs the Chinese Music Ensemble and teaches ethnomusicology courses centering East Asia and Asian America. Her research examines music and intersections with memory, politics, race and ethnicity, and social justice. Publications include Music as Mao’s Weapon: Remembering the Cultural Revolution (2022), and articles in journals including Asian Music, Ethnomusicology, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, Music & Politics, and MUSICultures. Ouyang is currently a Visiting Associate Professor at National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of Musicology.