Precarious Voices: The Political Act of Transmission in Feng Menglong’s <i>Mountain Songs</i> Compendium (c. 1610)

At times of political catastrophe, what spaces remain for disenfranchised voices? This essay explores an early seventeenth-century compendium of urban folksongs, compiled by Feng Menglong (1574–1646), to explore a new kind of political action outside the institutions of the state—the act of transmission, that is, the recording of materials from the past or present for the moral cultivation of posterity. When Feng inserts non-elite voices into this process by recording and transmitting their poetry in a textual record that takes account of their regional and oral features, inflected by differences of class and gender, his act is both inclusive and meaningfully political. Feng’s act of transmission sustains voices—including those of the marginalized—whose circumstances otherwise render them precarious. Transmission thus draws attention to the forward-looking acts that can shape future practice and theory, on the basis of the very voices being obstructed by the mainstream realities of their time.