Musical resistance and musical bodies in the making: A worker-band from southern China

Abstract

This study explores the role of the body in the making of a migrant worker-band and the potential for musical production and performance activities to reshape workers’ cultural subjectivities. A framework of reflexive embodiment is used to understand how musical production and performance activities shape the cultural subjectivities of migrant workers through three bodily processes: body as text/text as body, body as instrument and body in performance. By highlighting the bodily dimension, this article seeks to broadly engage with and advance scholarship on the nexus between cultural practices and the formation of working-class subjectivity, and to specifically enrich our understanding of the migrant workers in contemporary China. This alternative musical practice is a form of ‘musical resistance’ that is not only culturally remaking working-class bodies but also providing cultural resources for the solidarity of the working-class community.