AARC Books

Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music

Roshanak Kheshti
2015

Fearing the rapid disappearance of indigenous cultures, twentieth-century American ethnographers turned to the phonograph to salvage native languages and musical practices. Prominent among these early “songcatchers” were white women of comfortable class standing, similar to the female consumers targeted by the music industry as the gramophone became increasingly present in bourgeois homes. Through these simultaneous movements, listening became constructed as a feminized practice, one that craved exotic sounds and mythologized the ‘other’ that made them. In Modernity’s Ear, Roshanak...

Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s

Andrew F. Jones
2020

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...

Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture

Andrew F. Jones
2011

In 1992 Deng Xiaoping famously declared, “Development is the only hard imperative.” What ensued was the transformation of China from a socialist state to a capitalist market economy. The spirit of development has since become the prevailing creed of the People’s Republic, helping to bring about unprecedented modern prosperity, but also creating new forms of poverty, staggering social upheaval, physical dislocation, and environmental destruction. In Developmental Fairy Tales, Andrew F. Jones asserts that the groundwork for this recent transformation was laid in the late nineteenth...

Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age

Andrew F. Jones
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...

Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music

Andrew F. Jones
2010

The first comprehensive study of Chinese popular music in a Western language. Drawing on extensive interviews with singers, songwriters and critics, as well as cultural, sociological, musical, and textual analysis, the book portrays the disparate ways in which China's state-run popular music industry and burgeoning underground rock music subculture represented by Cui Jian have been instrumental to the cultural and political struggles that culminated in the Tienanmen democracy movement of 1989. It also examines the links between popular music and contemporary debates about cultural...

Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy

Hidetaka Hirota
2019

In this groundbreaking work, Hidetaka Hirota reinterprets the origins of immigration restriction in the United States, especially deportation policy, offering the first sustained study of immigration control conducted by states prior to the introduction of federal immigration law. Faced with the influx of impoverished Irish immigrants over the first half of the nineteenth century, nativists in New York and Massachusetts built upon colonial poor laws to develop policies for prohibiting the landing of destitute foreigners and deporting those already resident to Europe, Canada, or other...

Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism

Elaine H Kim
Chungmoo Choi
1997

Dangerous Women addresses the themes of Korean nationalism and gender construction, as well as various issues related to the colonialization and decolonialization of the Korean nation. The contributors explore the troubled category of "woman," placing it in the specific context of a marginalized and colonized nation. But Korean women are not merely configured here as metaphors for an emasculated and infantilized "homeland;" they are also shown to be products of a problematic gender construction that originates in Korea, and extends even today to Korean communities beyond Asia....

Making More Waves: New Writing By Asian American Women

Elaine H Kim
Lilia V. Villanueva
Asian Women United of California
1997

Asian-American women writers of all ages explore a complex range of identities through poetry, fiction, essays, and memoirs, most of which have never been published. The contributors take on little explored topics and expand the limits of ethnic-based identity, resisting stereotypes and breaking silences. Candid and memorable, their essays, stories, and poetry change popular assumptions and engage readers.

#identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation

Abigail De Kosnik
Keith P. Feldman
2019

#identity is among the first scholarly books to address the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our contemporary world. Hailing from diverse scholarly fields, all contributors are affiliated with The Color of New Media, a scholarly collective based at the University of California, Berkeley. The Color of New Media explores the intersections of new media studies, critical race theory, gender and women’s studies, and postcolonial studies. The essays in #identity consider topics such as the social justice movements organized through #BlackLivesMatter, #Ferguson, and #SayHerName;...

East To America: Korean American Life Stories

Elaine H Kim
Eui-Young Yu
1997

In this collection of powerful, candid oral histories, a wide cross section of Korean Americans renders a portrait of a community grappling with racial tensions, class and gender differences, and differing notions of family and home.