Meredith Schweig (Emory University): "Rap Music and the Politics of Historical Storytelling in Taiwan"

In this presentation, Schweig listens to rap songs about historical events in Taiwan as synergetic efforts to imagine new forms of post-authoritarian sociality. She suggests ways of understanding how musical sound sets rap apart as a medium, in addition to film and literature, for speeding the recovery from multigenerational legacies of trauma.

Meredith Schweig completed her MA (2009) and PhD (2013) in ethnomusicology at Harvard University, where she also received her BA (2003) in Music and East Asian Studies. Her research explores twentieth- and twenty-first-century musics of East Asia, with a particular emphasis on popular song, narrativity, and cultural politics in Taiwan and China. An assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Emory, she is currently working on a book about Taiwan's hip-hop scene. A second project in development refracts questions about music, memory, and transmedia storytelling through a study of global pop icon Teresa Teng. She maintains additional research interests in sound studies, sensory studies, translation studies, kinetic sound sculpture, and the museology/musicology nexus.