Ph.D. Candidate, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Voices of a Different Shade
3 pm-5pm CST, November 19, 2021
“Nidome no Amerika miyage / Kawahata Fumiko-san wo tazunete,” Eiga no Tomo, July 1938.
「二度目のアメリカ土産／川畑文子さんを訪ねて」、映画之友 [7月1938年]
Registration Link: https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcvcu6orDoiG9HSKjcaYjDWcpQ8PBWxbSfq
This chapter draft elaborates upon Alex’s dissertation’s broader exploration of Japan’s interwar “voice industry” of radio and commercial recording through a focus on Fumiko “Alice” Kawahata, a Hawai’i-born Japanese American jazz performer who found success in Japan in the mid-1930s as the so-called “amber-colored Josephine Baker” (kohaku iro no Josefin Bēkā). Taking this oft-cited appellation as a point of departure, this chapter asks what the mercurial transits of Kawahata’s vocal persona might reveal about the aural contours of race and diasporic difference at the height of Japan’s late-imperial jazz age.
Presenter: Alexander Murphy is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His research interests center on transnational literature, performance, and media history in twentieth-century Japan, with a particular focus on the aesthetics and politics of the voice during the interwar period.
Respondent: Eilin Rafael Pérez is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Chicago. He specializes in histories of cultural production which emerged out of diplomatic engagement between Korea and the decolonizing world.
