"Allegations of Chinoiserie: Gu(o)feng, Authenticity, and (Self-)Orientalization in Chen Qing Ling and Its Companion Album" by 墨客hunxi
Describe your topic/chapter in one sentence/one meme/140 characters.
Surprisingly absolutely no one whatsoever, I spend 4k+ words getting way too deep in the weeds regarding the translation choice of one (1) word. Now with bilingual footnotes in Chicago style!
What drew you to this topic?
I got distracted while working on translations of the CQL companion album back in the day and decided to make it everyone's problem.
Who's your favorite character?
How dare you try to make me choose between Lan Xichen and Xiao Xingchen!!!
Favorite line from the text?
To this day, I still really love the first line from the chorus of 《无羁》 Wuji:
煮一壶生死悲欢 / Warm a vintage of life and death, sorrows and joy
祭少年郎 / to commemorate the young men who have passed
Particular shout-out to the lyricist, 冥凰 Ming Huang — now that I've spent a little more time splashing about on the shallow end of Chinese internet fandom, I'm getting a better handle on which lyricists are out for blood.
Hey, so what's this gu(o)feng business?
Aha! Gu(o)feng is my terrible bastardization/smooshing-together of the terms 古风 gufeng and 国风 guofeng (lit. "ancient style" and "national style"). They are two contemporary Chinese music genres that intersect precisely at the confluence of authenticity and aestheticization, tradition and reception, fan production and original work, electric guitar and guzheng and suona and dizi. I can't get too far into it without really getting into it, so instead I will leave you with some links: