The East Asian Studies Center presents:
Sonicated Blackness in Jazz Age Shanghai, 1924–1954: Jazz, Community, and the (In)visibility of African American Musicians in the Creation of the Soundtrack of Chinese Modernity
Marketus Presswood
Temple University Japan
Abstract: This event will include a film screening of "Yellow Jazz Black Music" and a Q&A with its creator, Marketus Presswood.
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 film and discussion address 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. The film shows 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.
Dr. Marketus Presswood attended Morehouse College where he received his B.A. in History with a focus on East Asian Studies. In 1997, while a student at Morehouse he studied abroad for six months in China. Later, he would move back to East Asia living in Japan for two years and China for eight years. In 2010, He earned a master’s degree in International Public Service Management from DePaul University. His master’s thesis was a comparative analysis of small and large-scale environmental project management in China and India. Marketus completed his doctorate program in Modern Chinese History with an emphasis on both the Republican Era (1912-1949) and the post 1949 era, examining the historiography and oral history of socio-cultural interactions between black Americans and Chinese in the 20th century. His teaching and research interests are Afro-Asian History, U.S. Race Relations, the History of Race and Racism, the African Diaspora in China, 20th century U.S. History, 20th century African American History. Marketus has contributed to mainstream periodicals like The Atlantic-- https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/07/on-being-black-in-china/277878/
If you require an accommodation, such as live captioning, to participate in this event, please contact EASC at easc@osu.edu. Requests made at least two weeks in advance of the event will generally allow us to provide seamless access, but the university will make every effort to meet requests made after this date.
This event is supported by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center.