Accordion or Piano?: Working Class Musicking as Micropolitics in The Piano in a Factory (2010).
This article explores how The Piano in a Factory (Gang de qin, 2010, directed by Zhang Meng) stages a form of workers' transnational musical micropolitics through its layered soundscape. Animated by the timbres of accordion and piano and by a repertoire that blends folk, revolutionary, and popular m...
| Publicado en: | Afterimage Vol. 53; no. 3; pp. 70 - 92 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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University of California Press
Sep2026
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=196787147&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 196787147 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 03007472 ATF jtl: Afterimage issn: 03007472 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Sep2026 vid: 53 iid: 3 pid: 414 pub: University of California Press artinfo: ui: 196787147 10.1525/aft.2026.53.3.70 ppf: 70 ppct: 22 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 1.8MB tig: atl: Accordion or Piano?: Working Class Musicking as Micropolitics in The Piano in a Factory (2010). aug: au: Zhang, Ling sug: keyword: a socialist sensorium amateur musical culture musicking the accordion the piano The Piano in a Factory working-class micropolitics ab: This article explores how The Piano in a Factory (Gang de qin, 2010, directed by Zhang Meng) stages a form of workers' transnational musical micropolitics through its layered soundscape. Animated by the timbres of accordion and piano and by a repertoire that blends folk, revolutionary, and popular music, the film transforms music into a critical medium through which laboring subjects negotiate value and dignity in postsocialist China. Set in the early 2000s amid the privatization of state enterprises and mass layoffs, the film renders audible the socioeconomic trauma of neoliberal restructuring. The narrative centers on Chen Guilin, a laid-off worker who, alongside former coworkers, builds a piano from scrap metal to secure custody of his daughter. This improbable act of collective labor embodies China's passage from state socialism to partial market capitalism (or "socialism with Chinese characteristics"), a transition that commodified life and recoded labor from collective vocation to precarious survival. Within this shift, music offers a language for registering the changing valuation of labor and human worth. The film's sonic dialectic between accordion and piano crystalizes this critique. The accordion evokes socialist international traditions and collectivist memory; the piano signifies cosmopolitan status and privatized desire. Their contrapuntal interplay articulates a struggle over class identity, expressing not merely nostalgia but a longing for structures in which labor retains symbolic and affective value. The article traces the political histories of these instruments, examines the affective force of workers' music-making, and reads the symbolic convergence of music-making and instrument crafting as a sonic homage to socialist labor. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Afterimage is the property of University of California Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Afterimage holder: University of California Press dt: @attributes: year: 2026 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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