Junting Huang is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. A Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow, he completed his dissertation “The Noise Decade: Intermedial Impulse in Chinese Sound Recording” in 2021. His research focuses on Sinophone literature, cinema and media culture, Chinese diasporic culture in the Caribbean, as well as their intersections with media studies, sound studies, and postcolonial studies. He is also Assistant Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art and a contributor to SpokenWeb, a collaborative research project of literary sound recordings. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in ASAP/Journal, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Sounding Out!, and Sinoglossia.
In 1996, one of Taiwan’s most sampled music recordings also incited one of the world’s most well-known copyright controversies. Performed by Difang Duana and Igay Duana, the “Elders’ Drinking Song” is a traditional chant of the indigenous Falangaw Amis People. It was first recorded by Changhui Xu in 1978, catalogued by the French government in 1989, sampled by the German music group Enigma in 1993, and used for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics commercials. It later appeared in many more commercials, films, and TV shows, all of which aired without acknowledgement. With the help of the Han Chinese, however, the indigenous Amis people eventually brought the case to court and ended with a favorable settlement. Known as the 1996 Atlanta Incident in Taiwan, this event opened new conversations about Taiwan’s identity and its position in the world. Among them, however, the indigenous discourse was often overshadowed by conversations on intellectual property and cultural commodity. Its inter-Asian connections among ethnic groups are also often overshadowed by its global circulation. Throughout the 1990s, other indigenous music artists such as Kulilay Amit (A-Mei) were caught between two nationalist narratives. In Sinophone studies, recent scholarship began to reconstruct a global indigenous discourse from Taiwan. In this paper, I examine such discourse in Duana’s recording. Despite its global reach, I argue that the intermedial circulation of the recording creates a space for thinking indigeneity as an inter-Asian relationship between different peoples and their occupancy of the land. I contend that: sound does not operate as a free-floating entity transcending continental boundaries; instead, sound maps inter-Asian geographical traces and spatial experiences of border, migration, and indigeneity.