Dayton LEKNER (The University of British Columbia)

This talk explores the political and social transformations of the early years under Communism through a focus on sound, hearing, and voice. Taking the Hundred Flowers and Rectification campaigns as central focus, I ask how these movements and their effect on the social might appear if we set aside (temporarily) political and ideological divisions and tune in instead to acts of audition and sound-making. The experiment is an attempt to uncover aspects of experience in the early PRC that defy descriptions as socialist or revolutionary, and thus connect these experiences with a global history of audition, silence, and sound in the 20th century.