Virtual Lecture Series
The Association for Cultural Studies is delighted to announce its Virtual Lecture Series: an ongoing programme of online presentations by cutting-edge cultural studies theorists and practitioners.
The next talk in this series, by Runchao Liu (University of Denver, USA), titled ‘(Un)Hearing race: Oriental riffs, affect, and beyond racializing affects’ (followed by a Q&A), will take place on May 24th, 11 AM MDT/ Mountain Daylight Time (GMT -6) (more information underneath)
To register for this free event, please email: vls@cultstud.org
Please note that email registration is an automated process. If you do NOT receive a reply to your email with the relevant information within an hour, please check your spam folder. If the invitation is not in your spam folder, please email info@cultstud.org for more personal assistance.
Privacy notice: We will use the address you email from to send you an invitation to the talk. The personal details (email address) of those registered are kept for the purpose of event registration only and will not be used for any other purposes. The records will be kept for one month after the registration.
The ACS is the Data Controller of the records collected and is committed to protecting the rights of individuals in line with Data Protection Legislation. Please submit any data subject rights requests or address any complaints or suspected breaches to info@cultstud.org
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 24th, 5:30-6:30 PM BST/ British Summer Time (GMT +1) – Lindsay Balfour (Coventry University, UK), ‘Intimacy, Haunting, and the Digital Future of Hospitality’
Abstracts and links to the recordings of the past talks can be found here
Abstracts of the upcoming talks
Lindsay Balfour (Coventry University, UK) – Intimacy, Haunting, and the Digital Future of Hospitality
June 24th, 2024
5:30-6:30 PM BST/ British Summer Time (GMT +1)
Abstract: In October 2020, the online dating platform Tinder released their campaign, “It’s Your Boo,” a tongue in cheek reference to a disturbing trend, where those who were guilty of “ghosting” prospective online-dating partners were given opportunity to reach out to those they abruptly disregarded months or years ago. Postdigital life remains haunted by promised and failed forms of intimacy with strangers and Tinder’s attempts to bring such ghosts back from the dead speaks to a deep preoccupation with strange and uncanny intimacies, and a reality of living with others, whether human or more-than-human, virtual or material. This talk works through the relationship between haunting, intimacy, and technology in a world where the digital future is very much a source of both relational anxiety and relational opportunity. Digital ghosts, of course, also conjure a kind of intimacy that is immaterial and unseen, reminding us of the forms of risky intimacy engendered by the spectres of contagion, parasitism, dust, and airborne strangers. The talk thus concludes with a move towards intimacy and the autoimmune – represented in the digital age by the figure of the computer virus but now also with other significant cultural meanings, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Undoubtedly, thinking about postdigital intimacies through the concept of spectral strangers offers a new avenue for exploring the implications of virtual technologies on our ethical, social, and cultural life, as well as providing a new way to think the problem of intimacy itself.
Bio: Dr Lindsay Balfour is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) at Coventry University. Her research draws on the philosophical concept of hospitality to consider the relationship between humans and technology, and employs an intersectional feminist and cultural studies perspective to look at digital intimacies. Currently, she is conducting feminist analyses of intimate surveillance and embodied computing including the concept of “tracking” through wearables, implantables, and ingestibles. She is a member of the Postdigital Intimacies Research Network, the author of Hospitality in a Time of Terror (Bucknell UP, 2017), as well as The Digital Future of Hospitality and FemTech: Intersectional Interventions in Women’s Digital Health, both published in 2023, and many other articles and book chapters. Lindsay’s recent projects include working with cross-sector stakeholders to develop interventions for technologically-facilitated gender-based violence, funded by ESRC Impact Acceleration grants.