Runchao Liu (University of Denver, USA) – (Un)Hearing race: Oriental riffs, affect, and beyond racializing affects
May 24th, 2024 
11 AM MDT/ Mountain Daylight Time (GMT -6)

Abstract: Oriental riff, Asian riff, Asian jingle. These are some common monikers of a superficial musical motif that has come to represent East Asia – a cliché melody that most typically features staccato articulation and pitch repetition with occasional pentatonic hints. It is often used in the opening measures or between lyrics of a song as musical ornaments, sometimes accompanied by the sound of hitting a gong, to construct an exotic soundscape. Yet it can vary in terms of tonality, timbre, harmonization, and the exact number of notes. The oriental riff is representative of the heritage of musical orientalism dating back to the nineteenth-century fantastical musical plays in the U.S. and the U.K. and popularized throughout contemporary mediascapes, including but not limited to popular music, operas, films, video games, and cartoons. Given such transhistorical and transnational elasticity, this lecture surveys the competing processes of hearing and unhearing racial identities through examining the (re-)articulation and localization of the oriental riff in popular music, as mobilized by the mutually constitutive relationship between sound, race, and affect. In addition to comparing the adoptions and adaptations of the oriental riff for different audiences, the lecture also discusses how the circulation of the oriental riff in Asia, along with the consideration of the rise of Asian popular cultures on a global scale, complicates the colonialist roots of orientalism, discourses of decoloniality, and transnational cultural logic of racial visibility.

Bio: Runchao Liu (she/they) is an assistant professor in the Department of Media, Film, and Journalism Studies at the University of Denver (USA). Liu’s research focuses on the cultural politics of popular music, sound, and listening for the ways they intersect with social justice, identity, and activism. You may find their writings in Cinéma & Cie, Critical Asian Studies, M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, and edited collections such as Critical Race Media Literacy (Routledge), Sound Affects (Bloomsbury), Handbook of Music and Art (Bloomsbury), and Handbook of Popular Music Methodologies (Intellect). Liu’s current book project explores the intersection of rock music, musical orientalism, and affective politics via examining how a group of Asian American women musicians and influencers debunk the cultural myth of Asian American apoliticism through transforming musical orientalism into a political form of art.

Upcoming VLS events (more details TBA):

June — Lindsay Balfour (Coventry University, UK)

Abstracts and links to the recordings of the past talks can be found here