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Gibbs: Song King: Cocnnecting People, Places, and Past in Contemporary China

Gibbs: Song King: Cocnnecting People, Places, and Past in Contemporary China



Song King: Cocnnecting People, Places, and Past in Contemporary China
(Music and Performing Arts of Asia and the Pacific)
by Levi S. Gibbs (葛融)
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018, forthcoming.

When itinerant singers from China’s countryside become iconic artists, worlds collide. The lives and performances of these representative singers become sites for conversations between the rural and urban, local and national, folk and elite, and traditional and modern. In Song King: Connecting People, Places, and Past in Contemporary China, Levi S. Gibbs examines the life and performances of “Folksong King of Western China” Wang Xiangrong (b. 1952) and explores how itinerant performers come to serve as representative symbols straddling different groups, connecting diverse audiences, and shifting between amorphous, place-based local, regional, and national identities. Moving from place to place, these border walkers embody connections between a range of localities, presenting audiences with traditional, modern, rural, and urban identities among which to continually reposition themselves in an evolving world.

Born in a small mountain village near the intersection of the Great Wall and the Yellow River in a border region with a rich history of migration, Wang Xiangrong was exposed to a wide range of songs as a child. The songs of Wang’s youth prepared him to create a repertoire of region-representing pieces and mediate between regions, nations, and multinational corporations in national and international performances. During the course of a career that included meeting Deng Xiaoping in 1980 and running with the Olympic torch in 2008, Wang’s life, songs, and performances have come to highlight various facets of social identity in contemporary China. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with Wang and other professional folksingers from northern Shaanxi province at weddings, Chinese New Year galas, business openings, and Christmas concerts, Song King argues that songs act as public conversations people can join in on. As song kings and queens fuse personal and collective narratives in performances of iconic songs, they provide audiences with compelling models for socializing personal experience, negotiating a sense of self and group in an ever-changing world.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~damell/department/gibbs.html
https://www.amazon.com/Song-King ... ebook/dp/B076QC5854
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作者简介

Levi Gibbs(葛融)
Assistant Professor (Chinese)
B.A., Wesleyan University (East Asian Studies)
M.A. and Ph.D., Ohio State University (East Asian Languages and Literatures)
  • Joined the faculty in 2013.
Selected Courses
  • Chinese 61.02: Love and Desire in Modern Chinese Literature
  • Chinese 63.02: Traditional Performance in China: Past and Present
  • Chinese 2, 3: First-Year Chinese
  • Chinese 10: Introduction to Chinese Culture
Selected Publications
  • Song King: Connecting People, Places, and Past in Contemporary China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018, forthcoming.
  • "'Forming Partnerships': Extramarital Songs and the Promotion of China's 1950 Marriage Law." The China Quarterly. (Forthcoming)
  • "Faces of Tradition in Chinese Performing Arts." Introduction to a Guest-Edited Special Issue of the Journal of Folklore Research. (Forthcoming)
  • "Chinese Singing Contests as Sites of Negotiation Among Individuals and Traditions." Journal of Folklore Research. (Forthcoming)
  • "Culture Paves the Way, Economics Comes to Sing the Opera: Chinese Folk Duets and Global Joint Ventures." Asian Ethnology 76(1) (2017): 43-63.
  • Review of Reinventing Chinese Tradition: The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism. Journal of American Folklore (Summer 2017) Vol. 130, No. 517: 361-363.
  • Review of Music as Intangible Cultural Heritage: Policy, Ideology and Practice in the Preservation of East Asian Traditions. CHIME Journal 20 (2015): 143-146.
  • "Folksongs" and "Folk Drama and Ritual." In Victor Mair, Mark Bender, Levi Gibbs, Peace Lee, and Fu Haihong, "Folklore and Popular Culture." Oxford Bibliographies in Chinese Studies. Ed. Tim Wright. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures (DAMELL), Dartmouth College
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~damell/department/gibbs.html

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