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- All Subjects: travel writing
- Creators: Bhattacharjya, Nilanjana
- Creators: Bokenkamp, Stephen R
Jōjin’s diary in eight fascicles, A Record of a Pilgrimage to Tiantai and Wutai Mountains (San Tendai Godaisan ki), is one of the longest extant travel accounts concerning medieval China. It includes a detailed compendium of anecdotes on material culture, flora and fauna, water travel, and bureaucratic procedures during the Northern Song, as well as the transcription of official documents, inscriptions, Chinese texts, and lists of personal purchases and official procurements. The encyclopedic nature of Jōjin’s diary is highly valued for the insight it provides into the daily life, court policies, and religious institutions of eleventh-century China. This dissertation addresses these aspects of the diary, but does so from the perspective of treating the written text as a material artifact of placemaking.
The introductory chapter first contextualizes Jōjin’s diary within the travel writing genre, and then presents the theoretical framework for approaching Jōjin’s engagement with space and place. Chapter two presents the bustling urban life in Hangzhou in terms of Jōjin’s visual and material consumption of the secular realm as reflected in his highly illustrative descriptions of the night markets and entertainers. Chapter three examines Jōjin’s descriptions of sacred Tendai sites in China, and how he approaches these spaces with a sense of familiarity from the textual milieu that informed his movements across this religious landscape. Chapter four discusses Jōjin’s impressions of Kaifeng and the Grand Interior as a metropolitan space with dynamic functions and meanings. Lastly, chapter five concludes by considering the means by which Jōjin’s performance of place in his diary further contributes to the collective memory of place and his own sense of self across the text.
With over a century of culturally established associations for different musical sounds, the narrative properties of film scoring powerfully influence how societies and cultures perceive themselves through film. Film scoring in mainstream culture functions as a form of social practice in which consumers dictate the market that producers create for, while the ideas and philosophies portrayed in film shape consumer audiences’ perceptions of what their societies look like. A surge of discourse in the 21st century surrounds issues of representation and inclusivity in mainstream media, including what constitutes appropriation versus appreciation in film scores using non-Western music traditions. Recent postcolonial ethnomusicological theory demonstrates that collaboration and co-authorship are inclusive ways that can both avoid the pitfalls of colonialist power structures and also create autonomy for participating marginalized groups. My research examines four contemporary films of the 21st century--Kung Fu Panda 3, Moana, Black Panther, and The Breadwinner--and the collaborations between film composers and source musicians that establish cultural and racial musical narratives. I analyze various musical techniques these composers learned through the collaboration process with contributing source musicians and the resulting musical space each film’s soundtrack created for the representative demographic. This discourse opens other avenues of exploration into how mainstream media and the “global imagination” informs cultural music identities. I conclude my research with examples of film scores appearing outside cinema in social musicality; these examples demonstrate the impact that inclusivity in film scoring has on many areas of mainstream culture, especially in racial representation discourse.