Update: The in-person lecture has been canceled, but the livestream will still be available.
Scott Aalgaard, an associate professor of East Asian studies at Wesleyan University, will discuss folk and protest music through the lens of Japanese performers such as Takada Wataru and Kagawa Ryō in this year’s Kafu Lecture at Kalamazoo College.
Aalgaard will present “Folk Music Revolutionaries: Protest Music in Modern Japan” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 10, in Room 103 of Dewing Hall, 1219 Academy St. A livestream will be available.
The discussion will challenge attendees to step away from thinking about American musical storytellers in the 1960s when they think of protest music to consider what it involves elsewhere. The talk will explore how Japanese folk singers performed amid Japan’s political circumstances in the turbulent 1960s and developed musical projects that challenged limited notions of what “protest” is or can be in the first place.
Aalgaard works on cultural production in modern and contemporary Japan with particular emphases on popular music and literature. His work addresses geopolitics, political economy, regional and social histories, nationalism, fascism and disparate modes of protest and critique, among other topics. His first book, titled Homesick Blues: Politics, Protest and Musical Storytelling in Modern Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023), explores the interplay between music and everyday life and how music is used by artists, fans and others to imagine and re-imagine social, political and cultural life in modern Japan. It is oriented toward understanding the ways in which artists, authors and individual social actors use music to understand the world and envision different possibilities for living in it.
The Kafu Lecture was established in 1982 by an anonymous donor in honor of Nagai Kafu, an acclaimed 20th century Japanese writer. Kafu studied at Kalamazoo College during the 1904-05 academic year. The free, public event is co-sponsored by Kalamazoo College and the departments of East Asian Studies and Music at K. For more information, contact Professor of Japanese Noriko Sugimori at sugimori@kzoo.edu.
