PROFILE

Nathanel Amar’s research delves into Sinophone subcultures and popular music. His first monograph, Scream for Life: The Invention of a Punk Counter-culture in Contemporary China, was published in French and won the 2023 IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music) book award. Currently, his research centres on the circulation and (re)appropriation of music within the Sinophone world. He guest-edited two special issues of China Perspectives on Sinophone musical world in 2019 and 2020.

Nathanel served as the Director of the Taipei office of the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC) from 2019 to 2023. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong from 2017 to 2019.

Committed to making his research accessible to the broader public, Nathanel maintains a digital archive of alternative music in contemporary China, available at: https://scream4life.hypotheses.org

RESEARCH INTERESTS

• Popular Culture
• Sinophone Studies
• Popular Music
• Cultural Anthropology
• Cultural Studies

PUBLICATIONS (Selected)

Book

Scream for Life. L’invention d’une contre-culture punk en Chine populaire (Scream for Life. The Invention of a Punk Counter-Culture in Contemporary China), Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2022.

Journal Articles

“Beyond Musical, Political and Linguistic Boundaries: The Influence of the Hong Kong Rock Band Beyond in the PRC in the 1990s and its Legacy”. In Howard Chiang and Shu-mei Shih (eds.), Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2024. 281-298.

“Le faussaire du punk chinois. Marc Boulet, les Dragons, et l’invention d’un Orient punk” [“The Forger of Chinese Punk. Marc Boulet, the Dragons, and the Invention of an Oriental Punk”], Revue de Musicologie, 109(1), 2023: 119-140.

“‘We Come from the Underground’: Grounding Chinese Punk in Beijing and Wuhan”, Popular Music, 41(2), 2022: 170-193

“Sonic Plurality in Multicultural Taiwan”, China Perspectives, 130(3), 2022: 77-80.

“Navigating and Circumventing (Self)censorship in the Chinese Music Scene”, China Perspectives, 151(2), 2020: 25-33.

Conference Presentations

“Beyond Musical, Political and Linguistic Boundaries: The Influence of the Hong Kong Rock Band Beyond in the PRC in the 1990s and its Legacy”. In Howard Chiang and Shu-mei Shih (eds.), Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2024. 281-298.

“Your Mom Is My Mother-in-Law” and “Mice Love Rice”: A Moral Panic in the Early Days of Internet Fame”, 2023 Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, Boston, USA, 19 March 2023.

Keynote Speech: “An ethnographic account of a punk social world in Beijing and Wuhan”, 2022 International Colloquium for Music and Society, Graduate Institute of Ethnomusicology, Tainan National University of the Arts, 12 November 2022.

“‘My Mandarin Is Not Good’. Language Nationalism and the Musical Underground in iQiyi’s ‘The Big Band’”, International Association for the Studies of Popular Music XXI Conference, Daegu, South Korea, 8 July 2022.

Interviews

“A Chinese flavor of rap music is flourishing as emerging musicians find their voices”, by Huizhong Wu in Associated Press, 3 May 2024.

“88rising Brings Its ’Asian Coachella’ to China’s Notoriously Tricky Entertainment Scene”, by Chad de Guzman and Koh Ewe in Time, 22 September 2023.

“Shijiazhuang rebrands itself as the Chinese capital of rock ‘n’ roll”, by Zhao Yuanyuan in The China Project, 26 July 2023.

COURSES TAUGHT

• CLIT 7006: Fabrications of Identity, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU