Ron Alexander Memorial Lectures in Musicology: Lester Hu, UC Berkeley

Topic: What makes listening “extractive”? Sulfur, jade, and resource-making in 18th-century China

Abstract: This talk poses to music studies what Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel recently raised in literary studies: “What do we talk about when we talk about extractivism?” (2021). Criticizing the metaphorical inflation of “extractions” in the humanities as a quest for relevance to the climate crisis, Szeman and Wenzel warn that equating the “extraction […] of meaning via the reading of literary text” with “mining coal, drilling for oil, and harvesting timber” obfuscates the materiality of the latter that “gives extractivism its conceptual bite.” As music scholars have used the term “extractive” metaphorically in advocating for epistemological decolonization, this paper asks how “extractive listening” can be not just a materialist synonym for hegemony or appropriation but a distinct analytical heuristic of power. Because “natural resources” only exist as such in relation to human activities, resource extractions imply a “cultural and ideological rationale” that turns stuff into depletable resources. Instead of the generic “taking something out” of its own context, extractivism entails resource-making as a form of relation-making: positing the existence of stuff out there that teleologically awaits extraction.

Lester Hu is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies the role of music and listening in state-building in early modern Europe and China and, of late, early medieval Europe and early imperial China. He recently completed his book manuscript Examining Sound: Music, Empire, and Empiricism in Early Modern China. His article “Chinese Ears, Delicate or Dull? Toward a Decolonial Comparativism” in JAMS received the AMS Alfred Einstein Award in 2022.

Admission Information

• Free admission