How We Used to Endure Noise: The Emergence of Auditory Order in Modern China

In this colloquium, Jin Qiu will use Lao She’s 1930s short story Sound Film and other Republican-era novels, diaries, and memoirs to reconstruct early Chinese cinema as a sonically contested public space. Tracing loud talk, commentary, coughing, and audience disputes—practices inherited from opera-theatre culture—they will show how silent spectatorship emerged as a historically produced discipline and how “noise” became newly framed as incivility.