Performing Taiwan: From Ethnography to Practice

The Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley presents a talk by Wendy Hsu on her ethnographic engagement with the erhu-rock band the Hsu-nami and the New-York-based transnational Taiwanese American scene.

Colloquium: Center for Chinese Studies: Institute of East Asian Studies | October 3 | 4-5:30 p.m. |

Speaker/Performer: Wendy Hsu, Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow, Center of Digital Learning and Research, Occidental College

Discussant: Cindy Horng, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley

The speaker will talk about her ethnographic engagement with the erhu-rock band the Hsu-nami and the New-York-based transnational Taiwanese American scene.

The talk will be followed by a panel discussion on the soft power diplomacy of Taiwan's pop culture with the members of the Taiwanese band, A Moving Sound. In the decade since A Moving Sound (AMS) was formed in Taipei by Mia Hsieh and Scott Prairie, the group has released three albums in their native Taiwan. They were featured artists in a special program on Taipei presented by the Lonely Planet television series. Tom Pryor, supervisor of National Geographic World Music, described AMS as "one of the most original outfits working in the world music arena today."