Sites and sounds of national memory: performing the nation in China’s decennial National Day celebrations

Abstract

This article examines the roles of music and sound in the televised broadcasts of China’s large-scale National Day celebrations in 2009 and 2019. Reflecting on the role of public spectacle in cultivating national identities and affective bonds to the nation and state, I explore the ways in which the places and spaces of performances of the nation elevate their power, and suggest that sound is a crucial sensory medium through which sites of national memory are coalesced, reinvented, and made meaningful in people’s lives. Drawing on Auslander’s framework for understanding performance in mediatized culture through the rubric of “liveness,” I argue that mediatized emplaced sounds create senses of liveness and presence essential to the performative manifestation of national community, and do so in ways that images alone cannot. Employing Chion’s vocabulary for audiovisual analysis, I offer close readings of the interactions of images, diegetic sounds, voiceovers, and music in several sequences from both the military parades and evening galas in order to sketch more broadly some of the ways that sound, place, and national memory may be intertwined.