Receiving the Rocca Dissertation Fellowship for the 2023-2024 academic year provided significant support for the research and writing of my dissertation, currently titled “Negotiating Contemporary China-Kenya Relations through Sonic Infrastructures and Musical Imaginaries.” Based on fieldwork research in Nairobi, Kenya, my project explores how China and Kenya’s engagements are performed, developed, and imagined through sonic infrastructures that actively
produce, leverage, and circulate music between the two countries. Challenging simplistic “monster or messiah” narratives often used to describe China’s engagements with Africa, I conceptualize music as a site of negotiation that embraces multivocality, collectivity, and counterpoints through which relational assemblages and power relations are configured. The sonic and musical configurations of China-Kenya relations, I argue, express an imbricated and
heterogeneous cultural reality shaped by inter-imperial histories, third-world solidarities, and colonially rooted market doctrines of neoclassical economics. This project seeks to expand the purview of China-Africa studies, which have traditionally focused on large-scale economic projects and the elites of Sino-African engagements. Instead, I offer an on-the-ground, sociocultural perspective that situates music as more than an ornament of global interactions but a
critical and contested tool that works in concert with economic and political initiatives to pave the pathways between China and Kenya.
I concluded my fieldwork research in Nairobi and returned to Berkeley in June 2023. Since returning, I have begun organizing and analyzing my collected data, including recorded interviews and performances, video recordings of performances and rehearsals, photographs, archival materials, field notes, and other collected materials. Concurrently, I continue to conduct remote research. Such work includes formal and informal interviews with my interlocuters in
Nairobi via phone and WhatsApp and digital ethnography on Chinese and Kenyan apps, websites, and social media platforms. I also continue to collect, organize, and analyze music recordings and video footage that my interlocutors to share with me.
Funding from the Rocca Fellowship, which began in the Fall of 2023, substantially accelerated my research process. It allowed me to access the transcription tool Otter.ai, which has increased my capacity to transcribe recorded interviews that are foundational in supporting the arguments of my dissertation chapters. As of this writing, I have 15 out of 65 interviews transcribed and data coded. The fellowship also helped cover the costs of retrieving digitized copies of 1980s articles in Kenyan newspapers The Standard and The Daily Nation from the Kenya National Archives. These primary source materials will be foundational for my third
chapter, which partly examines an acrobatic arts and music training and exchange program between China and Kenya between 1983 and 1985. Additionally, I have also used the fellowship funds to continue working with local translators in Nairobi, who are helping me translate interviews, documents, and media from Swahili, Sheng, and other Kenyan dialects into English. This translation work will largely contribute to my fourth chapter, which explores the informal
“remixing” of Chinese movies by Kenyan DJs. After an initial period of data review and continued research in the Summer, I began writing the first chapter of my dissertation in August 2023 while simultaneously working as a GSI for the Department of Music. I completed a draft of my first chapter in January 2024. This
chapter focuses on the musical pedagogy of the University of Nairobi Confucius Institute. It pays particular attention to the cultural history and use of the Chinese folk song “Mo Li Hua” to teach Kenyans about the Chinese language and culture. It also focuses on the experiences of a particular student, Ruth Njeri, who was in the institute’s inaugural cohort and has since become a Chinese media figure and informal cultural ambassador between China and Kenya. The chapter argues that Kenyan students in the institute inadvertently play a critical role in performatively reproducing a global China in all its imagined grandeur and unspoken inequities. I will present a paper based on this material at the Annual Meeting of the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Ethnomusicology on March 2, 2024, in Stockton, CA. After the presentation, I will incorporate any feedback and questions into my chapter revisions by mid-March. In the meantime, I have begun outlining the second and third chapters while continuing to work as a GSI for the Department of Music in the Spring 2024 semester. The chapters I am currently working on are about the Chinese-owned and Kenya-based music streaming platform Boomplay, as well as the experiences of Kenyan traditional musicians performing in Chinese theme parks, respectively. I am currently transcribing and coding relevant interviews and
organizing my collected recordings and materials for these chapters with the plan to complete substantial drafts by the end of Spring 2024. Furthermore, I will submit to current calls for proposals to present these chapters in upcoming annual meetings of the Society of Ethnomusicology, the African Studies Association, the American Anthropological Association, and the Global Humanities Conference, all of which will take place in Fall 2024.
