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Abstract
Jazz provided the soundtrack for Chinese modernity. To be modern in the Republican era (1919–1949) China, specifically in treaty port cities such as Shanghai, meant listening and dancing to American jazz music. It also engendered and embodied an alternative, nontraditional social space for the interaction of multiracial groups centered-around improvisational music. Mediated through African American jazz music, musicians from around the world collaborated, learned, listened, and played jazz in China. Whether the music heard originated directly from Black musicians themselves or entered the Shanghai soundscape through movies, radio, or the play of white or Asian musicians, the imprint of music created by Black creatives was ever-present. This paper addresses the understudied topic of Black musicians and entertainers in Shanghai during the Republican era. African American jazz musicians and their Black musical aesthetics and traditions engendered and became constitutive of Chinese modernity. This paper argues that the Black cultural production of jazz musicians not only helped fuel the cultural industry of Jazz Age Shanghai, it created alternative social spaces for the practice of a global internationalism and cosmopolitanism, and extended the Black Radical Tradition to Asia. The ubiquity of African Americans in Shanghai also exposed a manifestation of Chinese anti-Blackness from both Chinese Nationalists and Communists elements that would reveal racial fissures that would negatively impact the latter’s relationship with Blackness at the inception of the Sino-Black solidarity movement from the 1930s onward to its collapse in the 1970s.
Notes
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31 Wyatt, The Blacks of Premodern China.
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39 Keller, The Blue Note, xv-xvii.
40 Keller, The Blue Note, 57–58.
41 “Earl Whaley’s Black Band,” Shenbao, 13 October 1934.
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43 Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), xvii.
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47 Keller, The Blue Note.
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50 Darryl Harper, personal communication (Amherst, 9 March 2018).
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55 Robert Walser, Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 44.
56 Schenker, “Empire of Syncopation.”
57 Fang Xin, “‘Jueshi Yinyue de Laiyuan Kaocha’[An Investigation of Dance Music to the Origins of Jazz],” Xianxiang 21 (1937).
58 A query of several online databases as well as the following references led to no information about the true identity of Fang Xin other than the author published around 30 articles from 1927 to 1943. Chu Pao-liang, Twentieth Century Chinese Writers and Their Pen Names (Taibei: Center for Chinese Studies, 1989); Howard L. Boorman, Richard C. Howard, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).
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63 Chang-Tai Hung, Going to the People (Cambridge and London: The Council on East Asian Studies, 1985), 59–60.
64 Hung, Going to the People, 66.
65 Hung, Going to the People, 76.
66 Hung, Going to the People, 76.
67 Field, Shanghai’s Dancing World.
68 Louisa Lim, “‘Survivors of Shanghai Jazz Age Play Anew’.”http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14655091.
69 William Zinsser, “Shanghai Blues,” The New Yorker, 21 September 1981, 152.
70 Andrew F. Jones, “Yellow Music,” in Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 52.
71 Willie Ruff, Mitchell Ruff Duo in Shanghai 1981 (Keplerlabel, 2008), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEuO1Eris0E.
72 Clayton, Buck Clayton’s Jazz World, 76.
73 Samuel A Floyd Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
74 Agence France-Presse, “Chinese Rapper Under Fire for Sexist Lyrics Blames Influence of ‘Black Music’.”http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/2127038/chinese-rapper-under-fire-sexist-lyrics-blames-influence-black.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Marketus Presswood
Marketus Presswood is an Assistant Professor of History at Spelman College. He is the director and writer of the documentary “Yellow Jazz Black Music.”
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