2020

REINVENTING WESTERN SOUNDS IN THE GLOBAL SINOPHONE

MONOGRAPH (under review), by Gavin Lee.

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Reinventing Western Sounds in the Global Sinophone shed lights on the emergence of new affective orientations and discourses in a comparative study of Singapore and Suzhou, China. Recent work in affect theory has reconceptualized affect from an exceptional state of embodiment to one that underlies heterogeneous global sociality. Affect—encompassing musical affect, “tangential” affects related to but not expressed in music, and musical preferences—provides an in-road to the rethinking of musical agency within the Sinophone soundscape of both Singapore and Suzhou where Western-facing (but not entirely “Western”) sounds frequently drown out others. Through a re-definition of Western sounds produced by Sinophone musicians using postcolonial theories of mimicry (Mbembe, Bhabha), I argue that it is precisely these sounds which destabilize the privileged global position of Western culture. As such, Western sounds constitute one of the primary sites of contestation in the Sinophone world, differing from the North American understanding of these sounds in the mold of “original/copy” or “colonial hegemony.” The intricacies of the global context in which Sinophone sounds emerge are explored through two concepts adopted or adapted from the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, whose theory of deterritorialization is central to globalization studies.