Conference Agenda

This paper examines the career of Yi Nanyŏng (1916–1965), a pivotal figure in Korean popular music during the Japanese occupation (1910–1945) whose artistic choices complicate conventional binaries of resistance and collaboration. Best known for her 1935 hit Mokp’o ŭi Nunmul (Tears of Mokp’o), widely embraced as a symbol of Korean suffering, Yi’s career reveals a nuanced negotiation of colonial subjectivity. While her music deeply resonated with Korean audiences, she rebranded herself in Japan as Oka Ranko, re-releasing Tears of Mokp’o as Wakare no Funauta (Farewell Boat Song) in 1936. Moreover, as Tears of Mokp’o became foundational to t’ŭrot’ŭ, a genre often scrutinized for its ties to Japanese enka, Yi’s legacy remains contested in postcolonial Korea. The persistent collaborator-versus-resistor binary has overshadowed the complexities of her career, restricting a deeper understanding of the everyday lives of colonized musicians.

However, drawing on archival research and musical analysis, I argue that Yi’s career exemplifies the strategic negotiations employed by colonized artists to navigate imperial constraints while preserving cultural identity. My comparative study of her Korean- and Japanese- language recordings reveals how Tears of Mokp’o embodies han–a deeply embedded Korean affect of sorrow–through Yi’s use of melisma, vocal breaks, and dynamic phrasing. Her vocality intentionally evokes what Wilbourne (2015) describes as "virtuosic vocal failure," a technique that, as Bloechl (2021) argues, can create a space for empathy. I argue that her vocality allowed Yi’s voice to resonate with both colonized Koreans and contemporary Koreans. In contrast, her 1936 recording subdues these expressive elements, flattening han into sentimentality and aligning with Japan’s imperial strategy of stripping it of subversive potential. The adapted lyrics neutralize its affective weight, reframing it as a conventional love ballad rather than an expression of historical suffering.

Ultimately, I argue that Yi’s recordings during the Japanese occupation reflect the multi-strategic responses of colonized individuals, revealing how artists actively negotiated the constraints of empire. Furthermore, I explore how figures like Yi, while operating within imperial structures, unintentionally created gaps in colonial strategies that enabled reinterpretation, subtle resistance, and the preservation of cultural identity among colonized subjects.

Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995) was a composer, radio engineer, and philosopher who invented the musical genre known as musique concrète. While Schaeffer’s influence on the academic field of Sound Studies and on twentieth-century musical composition is well-known, his more than three decades spent working for the French colonial radio are less appreciated. Indeed, Schaeffer even held a leadership role in the Société de radiodiffusion de la France d’Outre-Mer (SORAFOM) in the late 1950s, which oversaw radio broadcasting in France’s overseas territories. While at the SORAFOM, Schaeffer founded the Studio-École, a radio training school in Paris for African technicians, broadcasters, and producers that was active from 1955-1969. This paper contextualizes Schaeffer’s involvement in these radiophonic projects within the broader history of French radiophonic expansion and strategy in its colonial territories. The Poste Colonial, founded in 1931, was France’s first international colonial broadcasting service, and this overseas radio network endured under different names even after its former colonies declared independence in the 1960s, until it was eventually consolidated in 1975 into what is still known as Radio-France-Internationale.

Building upon existing engagement with the origins and evolution of Schaefferian thought by scholars such as Kane (2014), Valiquet (2017), Stalarow (2018), Ridout (2020), and Bay (2024), this paper offers a fuller genealogy of terms like “acousmaticity,” “reduced listening,” “musique concrète,” and “musique expérimentale.” I analyze writings, compositions, and archival documents from the radio and Schaeffer’s personal archives to argue that many of the most fundamental ideas, techniques, and sounds that underpin Schaeffer’s compositions and writings developed from his extensive projects for the colonial radio in Africa. These concepts remain influential in musical experimentalism and the field of sound studies. Understanding the influence of African colonial radio on Schaeffer’s theories about sound not only provides needed context and clarification for these influential concepts, but it also augments our understanding of the history of the European avant-garde, demonstrating the expansive global histories that underpin seemingly universal concepts.

In August 1881, Deadwood’s most notorious opera house and brothel, the Gem, paused its usual cacophony of “ribald song…and smutty jest,” as early white settler Annie Tallent described it. Instead, hundreds of residents gathered to witness what the Black Hills Daily Pioneer advertised as “Red Cloud’s Show.” The longtime Oglala Lakota leader had come to town with his family to perform an Omaha Dance, a “War Dance,” and deliver a speech. But the circumstances that brought him to the Gem complicate easy interpretations of this event. His engagement at the Gem was secured by Samuel Fields, a formerly enslaved man turned local orator and saloon proprietor.

This paper argues that Red Cloud’s performance was a site of Indigenous “survivance”—a term coined by Anishinaabe theorist Gerald Vizenor to describe the use of wry storytelling to assert Indigenous presence and agency in the face of settler colonial violence. But more than that, it was a performance made possible by the cultural intimacy boomtowns like Deadwood fostered. Boomtowns were defined by economic instability, transience, and social permeability, forcing residents—miners, sex workers, saloon keepers, and entertainers—into constant proximity across racial and class lines in contrast to the stark segregation of larger cities. This intimacy created spaces where unexpected performances, alliances, and disruptions emerged, shaping the town’s sonic and political landscape in ways that resist the grand narratives of white frontier conquest.

Through Lakota oral histories, archival newspapers, settler remembrances, and legal records, I analyze Red Cloud’s performance as a strategic intervention within the entertainment economy of the Black Hills. I also examine the role of Samuel Fields as a broker in the racial economies of Deadwood’s vice district, highlighting how Black and Indigenous figures traversed settler structures. By situating Red Cloud’s performance within the unique sonic and social configurations of boomtowns, this paper expands our understanding of how rural vice districts—often dismissed as lawless and peripheral—were in fact central to shaping the cultural politics of the West.