The Poetics of Communication: A Study on the Shibaoshan Song Fair of the Bai People in Southwest China

Departing from text-centered perspectives and based on performance-centered approaches in folkloristics, the poetics of communication considers verbal art as an oral performance and communicative event. In this light, this talk will seek to combine two interrelated paradigms in approaching the Shibaoshan Song Fair as a living oral tradition: 1) ethnographic analysis of ballad singing in the situated context; and 2) cultural interpretation of the Song Fair as a speech event. As a theoretical model, the poetics of communication pays attention to the ethnopoetic process of oral performance and the socio-cultural function of the contextualized communicative event, trying to introduce new cross-disciplinary perspectives to the contemporary methodology of research on oral traditions.

 

Zhu is a Bai ethnic minority from Dali, Yunnan Province, southwest China. He received his M.A. in Ethnic Literature from the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2007, and Ph.D. in Folklore from Minzu University of China in 2014. As an Associate Research Fellow, he currently works for the Institute of Ethnic Literature at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He also serves as Deputy Secretary General and Executive Board Member of the China Folklore Society. His main publications include The Kirgiz People in Wuqia County, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region: An Ethnography (co-authored, Yunnan University Press, 2004); Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth (co-trans, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2006);Conventions for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage under UNESCO: Selected Texts (co-edited, Foreign Languages Press, 2012); and Verbal Art as Communication: A Research on Shibaoshan Song-Fair of the Bai people in Jianchuan (China Social Sciences Press, 2015).

 

This event made possible in part by the OSU Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center.