Course Description

Over the last several decades, East Asian nations have become major hubs of global popular culture. From anime blockbusters like Your Name 君の名は (with its popular soundtrack by the band Radwimps ラッドウインプス), to the multi-billion-dollar culture industries spawned by the Korean wave, and most recently to the attention Taiwanese popular culture has garnered through the victory of Nymphia Wind 妮妃雅·疯 on season 16 of RuPaul’s Drag Race, global awareness of East Asian popular culture has never been higher.

In this moment of global attention to East Asian popular culture, it is worth asking, what are the roots of East Asian popular culture? To what extent does it reflect “traditional” practices, and to what extent does it reflect global cultural flows? What are the social expectations around popular culture in East Asia, and how might they resemble or differ from expectations in other areas of the world?

In this course, we will focus on East Asian popular music in order to address some of these questions. We will do this by viewing East Asian popular music through a variety of analytical lenses. Starting with the earliest examples of “popular music” in East Asia, we will see how complex interactions between traditional roots, multiple experiences of colonialism, and globalization have created the world-leading popular culture for which East Asia is known today. We will also see the ways in which popular musics have alternately been formed by, responded to, amplified, and resisted the socio-political contexts in which they emerged. Finally, we will use many of the case studies presented throughout this course as an opportunity to interrogate the category of “the popular” itself: what does it mean for music or culture to be dubbed popular, how does the label “popular” bear on artistic valuations and cultural hierarchies, and how can (or should) we draw boundaries around the sphere of popular cultural production?

Student Work

By default, all students in this course will collaborate to produce a group-authored blog project on a topic, artist, or work of their choosing. For examples of previous projects, you can visit the Popular Music of East Asia section of the Ethnomusicology @ HMC blog.

Groups may propose an alternate final project format that better suits their interests. Participants in this course may also elect to write a traditional research paper as a means fulfill the HMC Writing Requirement, but should contact me prior to registering.