Ethno paper abstract!

Chinese Non-Identified: a case study of Chinese overseas undergraduate students' engagement with national signs in Chinese popular music

If cultural identity is a matter of “becoming,” as Stuart Hall contends, and national identity is (still) an integral part therein, then Chinese overseas undergraduate students nowadays may have little or no national identity in general. They are neither sojourners who long to return to their homeland, as their predecessors once did, nor intended American immigrant who might become part of the diasporic community. This essay examines the engagement with signs of nationhood and statehood in Chinese popular music within an exclusively overseas Chinese student community at University of California, San Diego.

40 questionnaires, five panel interviews, and participation in karaoke events have pointed me to certain popular music videos and their cover versions in the popular singing contest The Voice of China. I focus on Mainland Chinese rock musician Wang Feng, whose style ranges from patriotic pop rock to soft rock with controlled screaming that signals lamentation. Interviewees expressed their sympathy with poor migrant workers after singing or watching Wang’s “Beijing, Beijing,” but none paid attention to signs of statehood that appear as two-second snapshots in the music/karaoke video 13 times. The students’ selective assimilation of texts, images, and sound texture with national signs, I argue, exhibits what ethnomusicologist Christopher Tonelli calls non-identification, encounters with signs that we neither identify nor counter-identify. My study grounds nomad adolescence, previously overlooked, in musical-cultural discourse, and also sheds light on the politics of non-identification that, in this case, prevents progressive possibilities in challenging the national-cultural power of the Chinese statehood.