Vulgarity, Sinophone Politics and Cantonese Media in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore
Manuscript
My manuscript Vulgarity, Sinophone Politics and Cantonese Media in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore, which is under revision now, is about the transnational popularity of Cantonese media in relation to global Chinese diaspora. The major research questions I have include: What contributes to the popularity of Cantonese media among global Sinophone audiences? What makes Cantonese, other than Mandarin, a major Chinese-language media with a considerable scope of production (i.e. cinema, television, popular music etc) with global influences? Why media made in Amoy, Hakka, Hokkien, Teochew or many other Chinese regional languages did not attain the same status? These questions are not just about language (i.e. the hierarchy of Chinese languages), but also the history of global Chinese diaspora and geopolitics between the locations where these diasporic communities settled, and where Cantonese media is consumed.
I consider the transnational popularity of Cantonese media a result of the global Chinese diaspora. One handy explanation is that, Cantonese media met the needs of the diasporic communities who craved culturally and linguistic relatable media when living far away from their homelands. But again, to answer the question about “why Cantonese”, we will have to further explore the history of Chinese-language media production to understand how Cantonese became a dominant media industry in and beyond China. In the first chapter of my book project, I interrogated the history of sound cinema and delineated how the Shaw Brothers, originally from Shanghai, initially used Cantonese sound films as an expansion strategy to break out of fierce market competitions in Shanghai, and then established a production-distribution network of Cantonese media in Hong Kong and the Malaya. This production-distribution network has long-lasting influences: this transnational production-distribution network built by the Shaw Brothers nurtured a sense of what I called “sonic familiarity” of Cantonese among Sinophone audiences in Southeast Asia, even they may not necessarily speak Cantonese. The rest of my book project continues to trace the sonic connections of Cantonese media between Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore, investigating how “sound” reveals or converges with language politics and the configuration of diasporic identities. Using the concept "vulgarity" as my intervention, I traced the history of Cantonese, among other Sinophone languages, becoming a vulgarized object and being seen as lowbrow, improper or vulgar when regionalism was discouraged in various contexts.
I consider the transnational popularity of Cantonese media a result of the global Chinese diaspora. One handy explanation is that, Cantonese media met the needs of the diasporic communities who craved culturally and linguistic relatable media when living far away from their homelands. But again, to answer the question about “why Cantonese”, we will have to further explore the history of Chinese-language media production to understand how Cantonese became a dominant media industry in and beyond China. In the first chapter of my book project, I interrogated the history of sound cinema and delineated how the Shaw Brothers, originally from Shanghai, initially used Cantonese sound films as an expansion strategy to break out of fierce market competitions in Shanghai, and then established a production-distribution network of Cantonese media in Hong Kong and the Malaya. This production-distribution network has long-lasting influences: this transnational production-distribution network built by the Shaw Brothers nurtured a sense of what I called “sonic familiarity” of Cantonese among Sinophone audiences in Southeast Asia, even they may not necessarily speak Cantonese. The rest of my book project continues to trace the sonic connections of Cantonese media between Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore, investigating how “sound” reveals or converges with language politics and the configuration of diasporic identities. Using the concept "vulgarity" as my intervention, I traced the history of Cantonese, among other Sinophone languages, becoming a vulgarized object and being seen as lowbrow, improper or vulgar when regionalism was discouraged in various contexts.