Yun Emily Wang

This project examines how the mundane “hot noise” of the wet market gives rise to conflicting political imaginaries of democratizing Taiwan. A shapeshifting foil for the multiple modernities that refract Taiwan's inter-imperial negotiations with Japan, China, and the US, the social space of the wet market has been animated by its distinct cacophony since the 1930s. “Sonic Poetics of Disordered Miscellany” situates a sonorous ethnography of hawkers, shoppers, tourists, and city administrators within a vernacular history of the market—assembled from songbooks, popular music, and amateur field recordings—and analyzes the aural aesthetics that structure perceptions of the market as the charming chaos epitomizing “Taiwan.” In so doing, the project asks how national fantasies are grounded, contested, and reconfigured in everyday sensoriality.