Overview

From the beginning of the sound cinema era, singing actresses captivated Chinese audiences. In Sounding the Modern Woman, Jean Ma shows how their rise to stardom attests to the changing roles of women in urban modernity and the complex symbiosis between the film and music industries. The songstress-whether appearing as an opera actress, showgirl, revolutionary, or country lass-belongs to the lineage of the Chinese modern woman, and her forty year prevalence points to a distinctive gendering of lyrical expression in Chinese film. Ma guides readers through film history by way of the on and off-screen careers of many of the most compelling performers in Chinese film history, such as Zhou Xuan and Grace Chang, revealing the ways that national crises and Cold War conflict shaped their celebrity. As a bridge between the film cultures of prewar Shanghai and postwar Hong Kong, the songstress brings into view a dense web of connections linking these two periods and places that cut across the divides of war, national politics, and geography.

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Reviews

Sounding the Modern Woman is an intriguing and much-needed study of a crucial topic in Chinese media history. Jean Ma introduces the rich and unknown (in the West) pleasures of Chinese musical cinema to a wider audience. Her work brings this cinema's legacy for the first time into full scholarly visibility, and in doing so, helps us understand the global history of an indispensable cinematic genre. This is an important contribution. -- Andrew F. Jones, author of Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture While the songstress is a familiar figure to fans of Hong Kong cinema, this is the first work to offer a clear framework for thinking specifically about how such a character embodies, in many films over several decades, a number of fundamental contradictions: between liberation and oppression, pleasure and danger, fulfillment and loss, Chinese tradition and cosmopolitan modernity, cinematic excess and narrative containment. This book is not only a welcome addition to the burgeoning scholarship on Hong Kong cinema but also will be of more general interest to students of modern Chinese cultural studies, feminist film studies, and ethnomusicology. -- Jason McGrath, author of Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age It is not that often that in a single volume, an author completely revolutionizes the way one looks at a subject. But that is what Ma (art and art history, Stanford) does in this volume, which is one of the most significant feminist historiographies of the past decade... Required reading for anyone interested in film or Chinese culture in general. -- G. A. Foster Choice All in all, Sounding the Modern Woman is well worth close attention. It advances our understanding of the connections between the Shanghai and Hong Kong film industries as well as enriches the historical discourse as it indicates many points of continuity over not only the transition to sound cinema but also the tumultuous war years and the Cold War situation that followed. -- Andrew Stuckey H-Asia, H-Net Reviews Ma's masterly revelation of the fates of very real people and events that led to the making of these mythic icons of vitality, eros, and death, and the ambivalence with which she underscores their eventual fading from contemporary cinematic attention, makes this tome worthy of a place on the curious reader's shelf. -- Shzr Ee Tan Music, Sound, and the Moving Image

Sounding the Modern Woman is an intriguing and much-needed study of a crucial topic in Chinese media history. Jean Ma introduces the rich and unknown (in the West) pleasures of Chinese musical cinema to a wider audience. Her work brings this cinema's legacy for the first time into full scholarly visibility, and in doing so, helps us understand the global history of an indispensable cinematic genre. This is an important contribution. --Andrew F. Jones, author of Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture

Sounding the Modern Woman is an intriguing and much-needed study of a crucial topic in Chinese media history. Jean Ma introduces the rich and unknown (in the West) pleasures of Chinese musical cinema to a wider audience. Her work brings this cinema's legacy for the first time into full scholarly visibility, and in doing so, helps us understand the global history of an indispensable cinematic genre. This is an important contribution. -- Andrew F. Jones, author of Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture While the songstress is a familiar figure to fans of Hong Kong cinema, this is the first work to offer a clear framework for thinking specifically about how such a character embodies, in many films over several decades, a number of fundamental contradictions: between liberation and oppression, pleasure and danger, fulfillment and loss, Chinese tradition and cosmopolitan modernity, cinematic excess and narrative containment. This book is not only a welcome addition to the burgeoning scholarship on Hong Kong cinema but also will be of more general interest to students of modern Chinese cultural studies, feminist film studies, and ethnomusicology. -- Jason McGrath, author of Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age It is not that often that in a single volume, an author completely revolutionizes the way one looks at a subject. But that is what Ma (art and art history, Stanford) does in this volume, which is one of the most significant feminist historiographies of the past decade... Required reading for anyone interested in film or Chinese culture in general. -- G. A. Foster Choice All in all, Sounding the Modern Woman is well worth close attention. It advances our understanding of the connections between the Shanghai and Hong Kong film industries as well as enriches the historical discourse as it indicates many points of continuity over not only the transition to sound cinema but also the tumultuous war years and the Cold War situation that followed. -- Andrew Stuckey H-Asia, H-Net Reviews Ma's masterly revelation of the fates of very real people and events that led to the making of these mythic icons of vitality, eros, and death, and the ambivalence with which she underscores their eventual fading from contemporary cinematic attention, makes this tome worthy of a place on the curious reader's shelf. -- Shzr Ee Tan Music, Sound, and the Moving Image Sounding the Modern Woman is an important examination of the songstress in pre-war Shanghai and post-war Hong Kong film and signals the importance of listening for the gendered meanings of history and popular culture - not just looking for them. -- Catherine Horne Media International Australia

Author Information

Jean Ma is Associate Professor of Art and Art History at Stanford University. She is the author of Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema, and coeditor of Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, also published by Duke University Press.

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