BiblioVault - Books about Jones, Andrew F.

The Afro-Asian Century, Volume 11

Andrew F. Jones and Nikhil Pal Singh, eds.

Duke University Press

The Afro-Asian Century begins the task of excavating a multitude of Afro-Asian connections and collaborations in the twentieth century. With few exceptions, area studies and cultural studies have neglected or underestimated the significance of transethnic and transnational exchanges between African and Asian peoples.

By bringing instances of Afro-Asian traffic in the realms of politics, economics, and culture to the foreground, this collection maps an alternative global circuit. The issue examines the non-Eurocentric form of cosmopolitanism that emerged from creative encounters of racialized people in Jazz Age Paris, the Harlem Renaissance, and colonial Shanghai. It reconceptualizes the Indian Ocean as a crucial site for Afro-Asian cross-pollination and investigates the cinematic culture of kung fu as a global discourse of Afro-Asian anti-imperialism.

Contributors. Brent Edwards, Andrew F. Jones, Yukiko Koshiro, Bill Mullen, Vijay Prashad, William Schaefer, Nikhil Pal Singh, Françoise Vergès, Daniel Widener

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Circuit Listening

Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s

Andrew F. Jones

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

How the Chinese pop of the 1960s participated in a global musical revolution

What did Mao’s China have to do with the music of youth revolt in the 1960s? And how did the mambo, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan sound on the front lines of the Cold War in Asia? In Circuit Listening, Andrew F. Jones listens in on the 1960s beyond the West, and suggests how transistor technology, decolonization, and the Green Revolution transformed the sound of music around the globe.

Focusing on the introduction of the transistor in revolutionary China and its Cold War counterpart in Taiwan, Circuit Listening reveals the hidden parallels between music as seemingly disparate as rock and roll and Maoist anthems. It offers groundbreaking studies of Mandarin diva Grace Chang and the Taiwanese folk troubadour Chen Da, examines how revolutionary aphorisms from the Little Red Book parallel the Beatles’ “Revolution,” uncovers how U.S. military installations came to serve as a conduit for the dissemination of Anglophone pop music into East Asia, and shows how consumer electronics helped the pop idol Teresa Teng bring the Maoist era to a close, remaking the contemporary Chinese soundscape forever.

Circuit Listening provides a multifaceted history of Chinese-language popular music and media at midcentury. It profiles a number of the most famous and best loved Chinese singers and cinematic icons, and places those figures in a larger geopolitical and technological context. Circuit Listening’s original research and far-reaching ideas make for an unprecedented look at the role Chinese music played in the ’60s pop musical revolution.

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Yellow Music

Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age

Andrew F. Jones

Duke University Press, 2001

Yellow Music is the first history of the emergence of Chinese popular music and urban media culture in early-twentieth-century China. Andrew F. Jones focuses on the affinities between "yellow” or “pornographic" music—as critics derisively referred to the "decadent" fusion of American jazz, Hollywood film music, and Chinese folk forms—and the anticolonial mass music that challenged its commercial and ideological dominance. Jones radically revises previous understandings of race, politics, popular culture, and technology in the making of modern Chinese culture.
The personal and professional histories of three musicians are central to Jones's discussions of shifting gender roles, class inequality, the politics of national salvation, and emerging media technologies: the American jazz musician Buck Clayton; Li Jinhui, the creator of "yellow music"; and leftist Nie Er, a former student of Li’s whose musical idiom grew out of virulent opposition to this Sinified jazz. As he analyzes global media cultures in the postcolonial world, Jones avoids the parochialism of media studies in the West. He teaches us to hear not only the American influence on Chinese popular music but the Chinese influence on American music as well; in so doing, he illuminates the ways in which both cultures were implicated in the unfolding of colonial modernity in the twentieth century.

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