The emergence of modernity has typically focused on Western male
actors and privileged politics and economy over culture. The
contributors to this volume successfully unsettle such perspectives
by emphasizing the social history, artistic practices, and symbolic
meanings of female performers in popular music of Asia. Women
surfaced as popular icons in different guises in different Asian
countries through different routes of circulation. Often, these
women established prominent careers within colonial conditions,
which saw Asian societies in rapid transition and the vernacular
and familiar articulated with the novel and the foreign. These
female performers were not merely symbols of times that were
rapidly changing. Nor were they simply the personification of
global historical changes. Female entertainers, positioned at the
margins of intersecting fields of activities, created something
hitherto unknown: they were artistic pioneers of new music, new
cinema, new forms of dance and theater, and new behavior,
lifestyles, and morals. They were active agents in the creation of
local performance cultures, of a newly emerging mass culture, and
the rise of a region-wide and globally oriented entertainment
industry. Vamping the Stage is the first book-length study of
women, modernity, and popular music in Asia, showcasing
cutting-edge research conducted by scholars whose methods and
perspectives draw from such diverse fields as anthropology, Asian
studies, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, and film studies. Led
by an impressive introduction written by Weintraub and Barendregt,
fourteen contributors analyze the many ways that women performers
supported, challenged, and transgressed representations of existing
gendered norms in the entertainment industries of China, Japan,
India, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
Placing women’s voices in social and historical contexts, the
essays explore salient discourses, representations, meanings, and
politics of “voice” in Asian popular music. Historicizing the
artistic sounds, lyrical texts, and visual images of female
performers, the essays reveal how women used popular music to shape
the ideas, practices, and meanings of modernity in various Asian
contexts and time frames. The ascendency of women as performers
paralleled, and in some cases generated, developments in wider
society such as suffrage, social and sexual liberation, women as
business entrepreneurs and independent income earners, and
particularly as models for new life styles. Women’s voices,
mediated through new technologies of film and the phonograph,
changed the soundscape of global popular music and resonate today
in all spheres of modern life.
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