Unruly Shouting and Singing: Listening to Chinese Laborers in Shanghai, 1880s–1930s

Hailed as the “Jazz Mecca” of Asia and the burgeoning media hub of Republican China, the soundscape of turn-of-the-century Shanghai has long been associated with cabarets, dance halls, sound cinema, and phonograph records, evoking a splendidly modern cosmopolitanism made possible by Western technology and culture. Yet this body of scholarship has tended to exaggerate the dominance of Western acoustic influences, silencing the unruly and disruptive sounds of the Chinese “coolie” laborers who made that cosmopolitan lifestyle possible. This paper interrogates the stakes of the sonic encounter between the East and the West by exploring how the singing and shouting of Shanghai’s Chinese workers troubled Anglo-American listeners in the International Settlement, disrupting western and modern sonic norms, and constructing an alternative acoustic ontology. By attending to these voices “from below,” this paper exemplifies an affective method for historicizing sound as a sensory experience uniquely resistant to boundaries and hierarchies, and thus an effective way to recover the agency of subalterns who, if they could not speak (in Spivak’s formulation), could still make sounds resist the dehumanizing tactics of those reliant on their labor.