|
Showing 1 - 7 of
7 matches in All Departments
Home to approximately one-fifth of the world's Muslim
population, Indonesia and Malaysia are often overlooked or
misrepresented in media discourses about Islam. Islam is a religion
but there is also a popular culture, or popular cultures of Islam
that are mass mediated, commercialized, pleasure-filled, humorous,
and representative of large segments of society. During the last
forty years, popular forms of Islam, targeted largely towards
urbanized youth, have played a key role in the Islamisation of
Indonesia and Malaysia. This book focuses on these forms and the
accompanying practices of production, circulation, marketing, and
consumption of Islam. Dispelling the notion that Islam is
monolithic, militaristic, and primarily Middle Eastern, the book
emphasizes its dynamic, contested, and performative nature in
contemporary South East Asia. Written by leading scholars alongside
media figures, such as Rhoma Irama and Ishadi SK, the case studies
although not focused on theology per se, illuminate how Muslims
(and non-Muslims) in Indonesia and Malaysia make sense of their
lives within an increasingly pervasive culture of Islamic images,
texts, film, songs, and narratives.
Home to approximately one-fifth of the world's Muslim population,
Indonesia and Malaysia are often overlooked or misrepresented in
media discourses about Islam. Islam is a religion but there is also
a popular culture, or popular cultures of Islam that are mass
mediated, commercialized, pleasure-filled, humorous, and
representative of large segments of society. During the last forty
years, popular forms of Islam, targeted largely towards urbanized
youth, have played a key role in the Islamisation of Indonesia and
Malaysia. This book focuses on these forms and the accompanying
practices of production, circulation, marketing, and consumption of
Islam. Dispelling the notion that Islam is monolithic,
militaristic, and primarily Middle Eastern, the book emphasizes its
dynamic, contested, and performative nature in contemporary South
East Asia. Written by leading scholars alongside media figures,
such as Rhoma Irama and Ishadi SK, the case studies although not
focused on theology per se, illuminate how Muslims (and
non-Muslims) in Indonesia and Malaysia make sense of their lives
within an increasingly pervasive culture of Islamic images, texts,
film, songs, and narratives.
Framing timely and pressing questions concerning music and cultural
rights, this collection illustrates the ways in which music--as a
cultural practice, a commercial product, and an aesthetic form--has
become enmeshed in debates about human rights, international law,
and struggles for social justice. The essays in this volume examine
how interpretations of cultural rights vary across societies; how
definitions of rights have evolved; and how rights have been
invoked in relation to social struggles over cultural access, use,
representation, and ownership. The individual case studies, many of
them based on ethnographic field research, demonstrate how musical
aspects of cultural rights play out in specific cultural contexts,
including the Philippines, China, Hawaii, Peru, Ukraine, and
Brazil. Contributors are Nimrod Baranovitch, Adriana Helbig, Javier
F. Leon, Ana Maria Ochoa, Silvia Ramos, Helen Rees, Felicia
Sandler, Amy Ku'uleialoha Stillman, Ricardo D. Trimillos, Andrew N.
Weintraub, and Bell Yung.
Power Plays is the first scholarly book in English on wayang golek,
the Sundanese rod-puppet theater of West Java. It is a detailed and
lively account of the ways in which performers of this major Asian
theatrical form have engaged with political discourses in Indonesia
and shaped technological and commercial conditions of art and
performance in a moderniziing society. Andrew Weintraub focuses on
""superstar"" performers and the musical troupes that dominated
wayang golek during the New Order political regime of former
president Suharto (1966-98). Studies of actual performances
illuminate stylistic and formal elements and situate wayang golek
as a social process in Sundanese culture. Power Plays shows how
meaning about identity, citizenship, and community are produced
through theater, music, language, and discourse. Power Plays is at
the center of a new synthesis emerging among ethno-musicology,
cultural studies, and media studies. Its cross-disciplinary
approach will inspire researchers studying similar struggles over
state authority and popular representation in culture and the
performing arts.
Musical sounds are some of the most mobile human elements, crossing
national, cultural, and regional boundaries at an ever-increasing
pace in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whole musical
products travel easily, though not necessarily intact, via
musicians, CDs (and earlier, cassettes), satellite broadcasting,
digital downloads, and streaming. The introductory chapter by the
volume editors develops two framing metaphors: "traveling musics"
and "making waves." The wave-making metaphor illuminates the ways
that traveling musics traverse flows of globalization and
migration, initiating change, and generating energy of their own.
Each of the nine contributors further examines music-its songs,
makers, instruments, aurality, aesthetics, and images-as it crosses
oceans, continents, and islands. In the process of landing in new
homes, music interacts with older established cultural
environments, sometimes in unexpected ways and with surprising
results. They see these traveling musics in Hawai'i, Asia, and the
Pacific as "making waves"-that is, not only riding flows of
globalism, but instigating ripples of change. What is the nature of
those ripples? What constitutes some of the infrastructure for the
wave itself? What are some of the effects of music landing on,
transported to, or appropriated from distant shores? How does the
Hawai'i-Asia-Pacific context itself shape and get shaped by these
musical waves? The two poetic and evocative metaphors allow the
individual contributors great leeway in charting their own course
while simultaneously referring back to the influence of their
mentor and colleague Ricardo D. Trimillos, whom they identify as
"the wave maker." The volume attempts to position music as at once
ritual and entertainment, esoteric and exoteric, tradition and
creativity, within the cultural geographies of Hawai'i, Asia, and
the Pacific. In doing so, they situate music at the very core of
global human endeavors.
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.
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.
|
|