Andrew F. Jones

Andrew Fredrick Jones (born June 24, 1969) is an American sinologist, ethnomusicologist, writer and translator. He is the Agassiz Professor of Chinese Endowed Chair at the University of California, Berkeley and a Guggenheim Fellow. Jones is best known as the author of a trilogy of books on contemporary Chinese music, Like a Knife (1992), Yellow Music (2001) and Circuit Listening (2020), and as a translator of the fiction of Yu Hua and Eileen Chang. He is also the writer of Developmental Fairy Tales (2011), an interdisciplinary monograph on Chinese engagement with evolutionary theory across literature, popular science and 20th-century cultural discourse.

Andrew F. Jones was born on June 24, 1969 in the United States and grew up in northern California.^[1] As a child, he often listened to reggae records bought in Jamaica when he and his parents visited their family; he has since cited this as marking the beginning of his interest in ethnomusicology.^[2] Jones first gained an interest in Chinese history reading about the Communist Revolution, naming Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China (1937) as a particular influence. In 1982, aged 13, he attended a summer exchange program in China and began to learn Mandarin Chinese.^[1]

Jones attended Harvard University, majoring in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and studying Chinese and Japanese literature.^[1] There, he took an interest in British cultural studies, especially the work of Marxist sociologist Stuart Hall. In 1988, Jones won a scholarship to Peking University to study Chinese Language and Literature.^[2] At the Peking, he close read the 18th-century Chinese vernacular novel Dream of the Red Chamber. This time also marked the beginning of his preoccupation with contemporary Chinese music, as he became active in the Beijing rock and roll scene during Cui Jian's rise to popularity. The political and cultural moment in which Jones was a participant culminated in 1989 with the Tiananmen Square incident.^[1] On this subject, Jones wrote a piece of journalism for the Harvard student magazine Perspective, winning Rolling Stone's College Journalism Award in 1990.^[3] The same year, he returned to China to conduct research for his graduating dissertation, which would later become his first book, Like a Knife.^[2]

Jones graduated from Harvard in 1992, publishing Like a Knife the same year.^[2] He then enrolled as a postgraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, but returned for a time to Harvard as an exchange scholar in 1995. There, he was suggested to study Republican-era China by Leo Ou-fan Lee.^[4] Jones graduated from Berkeley in 1997 with a Ph.D. from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.^[5] His dissertation, "Popular Music and Colonial Modernity in China, 1900–1937",^[6] supervised by Lydia H. Liu, would become the basis for his second book, Yellow Music.^[4]

In 1992, Cornell University Press published Jones's first book, Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music. The text is based on interviews given to Jones by both musicians of the tongsu (state-sanctioned popular music) and yoagun (rock music) genres. Like a Knife was the first English-language study on the emergence of yaogun and its dichotomy with tongsu.^[7][8]

Jones's next book,Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age, was published by Duke University Press in 2001. The text explores Yellow Music (Chinese, western-influenced popular music dating from the 1920s to 1940s which would later become Shidaiqu) with reference to the influence of White Russian and Jewish émigrés whom Pathé Records employed in Shanghai at the time. Yellow Music likewise identifies the influence of African American jazz musicians such as Buck Clayton, who began his career as a bandleader in Shanghai, on the emergence of contemporary Chinese music. Jones also writes at length on the musical artist Li Jinhui, explicating his usage of children's music to further his aim of rendering Mandarin Chinese the default national language.^[2]

Out of his research into Li, and other intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement such as Lu Xun, Jones began to write his third book, Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture.^[9] The interdisciplinary text, published by Harvard University Press in 2011, argues that the liberalization of the Chinese economy during the chairmanship of Deng Xiaoping had its intellectual roots in late 19th-century Chinese translations of early works on evolutionary thought, written by figures such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer.^[10] Developmental Fairytales also responds to Huang Yi's text Psychological Understandings of Children's Drawings (1937), challenging his schema of developmental psychology wherein children's drawings are merely representations of a child's development from primitivism to realism.^[9]

The same year, Jones and fellow sinologist Xu Lanjun co-edited The Discovery of the Child: the Problem of the Child in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture [儿童的发现 — 现代中国文学及文化中的儿童问题], published by Peking University Press in Chinese.^[11]

In 2012, Jones was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge's Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). During this time he began work on his fifth book and third text on Chinese contemporary music, Circuit Listening: Electric Folk Music and the Chinese 1960s.^[12] Jones had been urged to write on Red music by his friend, the novelist Yu Hua.^[13] This idea was the basis of the examination of mid-century Chinese music on which Circuit Listening focuses. The text was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2020.^[14]

• In 2012, the Modern Language Association (MLA) awarded Andrew F. Jones's Developmental Fairy Tales (2011) with an Honourable Mention when selecting for the James Russell Lowell Prize.^[15]
• In 2015, Jones was named a Guggenheim Fellow in the field of East Asian Studies.^[8]

Jones is an accomplished linguist with a familiarity of Chinese, Japanese, French and Portuguese as well as Jamaican Patois in addition to his native English.^[1]

• The Afro-Asian Century, with Nikhil Pal Singh, Positions, vol. 11, no. 1 (2003).

Jones is also a translator of the lyrics of Taiwanese singer-songwriter and activist Lin Sheng Xiang,^[8] including the albums Planting Trees (2006),^[16] Village Besieged (2015),^[17] and Kafka on the Rivers-and-Lakes (2022).^[18]

• Andrew F. Jones on Discogs