【音樂學研究討論 ①】
講者：Mark Hsiang-yu Feng
講題：Sounding Taiwaneseness: Metal Music and Racial Politics in Postcolonial Taiwan
地點：普通506教室
時間：10 /02（五）14:30

演講摘要：

Metal music was introduced and localized in Taiwan under the intersecting conditions of U.S. Cold War militarism and Kuomintang authoritarianism in East Asia during the 1980s. Since the 1990s, Taiwanese metal has increasingly been understood as a post-authoritarian and anticolonial expressive form associated with resistance to Kuomintang Chinese nationalism and with the articulation of Taiwanese cultural and political self-definition. Through musical sound, performance, and embodiment, musicians construct and negotiate a postcolonial sense of Taiwaneseness. This research complicates celebratory accounts of Taiwanese metal as a straightforward medium of postcolonial resistance by examining how musical activism can simultaneously challenge one form of domination while reproducing others. In particular, I investigate how constructions of Taiwaneseness in metal remain entangled with global Whiteness, Orientalism, Han-centered nationalism, anti-Austronesian racism, and the

racialization of Southeast Asian migrant workers. Drawing on critical race theory, I conceptualize Taiwan’s metal scene as a site of racial formation in which historically distinct racial logics produced through East-to-East colonialism since 1683, U.S. militarism and cultural imperialism, Han settler domination, nationalism, and transnational labor migration become sounded, embodied, negotiated, and contested through musical practice. I coin the term “hybrid racial ideology” and develop the complementary concept of “compressed racialized modernity” to theorize these overlapping racial formations. Hybrid racial ideology captures how distinct racial logics coexist, intersect, and become relationally articulated through musical practice, such that resistance to one hierarchy may coexist with implication in another. Compressed racialized modernity describes the historically multilayered condition in which successive colonial regimes, racial hierarchies, developmental capitalism, and transnational labor regimes become condensed within Taiwan’s modernity. This research contributes to ethnomusicological studies of popular music and race beyond U.S. centered models and positions Taiwan as a productive site for theorizing racial formation in East Asia.