Sound of the border: Music, identity, and politics of the Korean minority nationality in the People's Republic of China

This dissertation examines the relationship between music and the construction of identity among the Korean minority nationality ( Chaoxianzu) in the People's Republic of China (PRC). The Korean minority nationality resides predominantly in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, an area in northeast China that borders Russia and North Korea. Considering Yanbian as a borderland where creative and hybrid cultural forms are produced, I pay particular attention to the role of music and musicians in marking and reinforcing Chaoxianzu ethnic boundaries in post-1949 China. Since the establishment of the PRC in 1949, the central government has given minority nationalities the right to maintain and develop their own cultural practices and language. With the institution of this minority nationality policy, the Chaoxianzu have relied largely upon expressive cultures, such as music and the performing arts, to express and construct their identities. In navigating between two great social constraints, i.e., the communist ideology and the minority nationality policy, Chaoxianzu musicians transformed their ethnic music into a form unique to their diasporic community instead of presenting Korean music as it was executed in North and South Korea.; From the 1980s to the present, the musical expression of Chaoxianzu identities has grown more diversified with the new emergence in China of global media, capitalism, cultural interactions, and labor migration movements. Given this new social and aesthetic reality, Chaoxianzu musicians continue to mediate between the expectation of presenting "ethnically correct music" and changing aesthetic dispositions among the musicians themselves and in their own communities.; Shifting socio-political contexts condition the politics of identity by bringing changes in human consciousness, social structure, and cultural practices such as music. Investigating the construction of Chaoxianzu identity by tracing musical invention over the last fifty-five years in Yanbian, I argue that cultural identity is a subjective process, and that, in creating and performing music, the individual determines the kind of identity and the means of its construction. My study asserts that Chaoxianzu music has become a discursive space in which social and cultural identities are articulated and shaped.