We are pleased to host the seventh Inter-Asia Popular Music Studies Group (IAPMS or Inter-Asia Pop) Online Workshop. On Thursday, April 15, Dr. Jian Xiao will give a talk on punk in China and Indonesia.

The event is free. but you need to register in advance: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeaOq-TcU6obMJAezrFK4JeQBuPKb8zLXYTsNAIw_xP_JlKjQ/viewform?usp=pp_url

We will send you a reminder with the instruction to the video conference twice: one day before and one hour before the event. Please find more detail below.

Stay underground? Punk in China, Indonesia and The Big Band

Guest speaker: Jian XIAO (Zhejiang University)

Biography: Jian Xiao (Ph.D. Loughborough University, UK) is the Associate Professor in the school of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University. She has published in International Journal of Communication, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Cultural Critique, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Chinese Journal of Communication, Space and Culture, Journalism Practice and so on. She has also published a monograph, “Punk Culture in Contemporary China” with Palgrave Macmillan. Her research interest is focused on urban politics, new media, and cultural studies.

Abstract: In this paper, I consider local, translocal, virtual punk scenes as “a form of networking”. The talk compares two sets of relationships—first, the Chinese punk scene and the Indonesian punk scene, and second, the pre-internet punk scene spatialised through different venues such as gigs, festivals, zines, and the platformised scene as organised via the online music show The Big Band—to discuss the transformation from an underground network to a platformised communicative network. The development of a punk scene in China can be described as “a form of cosmopolitanism urbanism” due to its involvement with global connections. While the underground network is shaped by the global punk community, I regard its relevant spatial practices as a form of authenticity that infuse local tradition into modernity, and its underground nature as an asset since it brings authenticity and the cultural capital that goes with it. It is argued that that the process of reconfiguring an underground network into a platformised network is based on a process of commercialisation that transforms the bands’ cultural capital based in authenticity into economic capital.