Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017. vii, 363 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-6986-1.
While there has been an increase in scholarly interest in Asia, less attention has been paid to gender and power in popular music in the region. The editors of this collection, Andrew N. Weintraub and Bart Barendregt, have not only successfully filled this gap but also upped the ante by offering a simultaneously broad yet comprehensive overview of the continent—a considerable achievement considering how contested the definitions of “Asia” are to begin with.
The scholarly perception of the relationship between women and power on the Asian continent has often been too heavily coloured by Western concepts in reading the role of women in society and with the rise of “popular feminism” in the sphere of consumerist culture (if one is to describe it without being too crass). This book reminds us how little is understood historically and contextually of the dynamics of how gender is performed on the Asian continent and its influence on how popular music is produced and consumed by the general populace. This book’s attempt to elucidate the power of agency amongst female singers and entertainers on the continent through case studies exceeds its modest disclaimer (in the introductory chapter) on many levels.
The book’s fifteen chapters are neatly divided into four thematic parts: Triumph and Tragedies of the Colonized Voice: Colonial Modernity, Commodification, and Circulation of Women’s Voices; Modern Stars and Modern Lives: Nation, Memory, and the Politics of Gender; Silenced Voices and Forbidden Modernities: Censorship, Morality, and National Identity; and Body Politics and Discourses of Femininity: Image, Sexuality, and the Body. These four major themes are effective in giving the reader a sense of the various historical, political, and sociological implications that need to be addressed and understood in researching the continent’s wide-ranging issues and women singers and entertainers.
The two co-editors set the tone with their introductory chapter, “Re-Vamping Asia: Women, Music, and Modernity in Comparative Perspective,” by presenting the current Asian cultural, social, and theoretical landscape and the need to problematize Asia as a concept by acknowledging its discursive nature and its interconnected histories, which predate modern nation-states. By taking Asia as a metaphor for the modern condition, the reader is given the opportunity to subjectively observe and take stock of the Eurocentrism of what becoming “modern” entails, and how it has coloured scholarly readings of the particularities of Asia in the past. This chapter provides a broad enough scope to establish the subject matter and what could be further explored in future publications and research. In fact, the individual chapters are succinct yet cover enough material that even the casual reader with an interest in history (in music or the continent) would find them engaging and rewarding.
The following chapters discuss further the countermodernities (and the noted multiplicity of cultural programmes) that these female singers and entertainers embody, which can be taken as further proof of the non-linearity in which modernity itself negotiated itself in post-colonial nation-states. The unifying theme presented in the book is that modernity should be studied from the perspective of the local by following notable local actors (in this case, female popular entertainers) as “social texts” that reflect modernity, music, film, and literature. The varied approaches by which the individual authors discuss and theorize the narratives of these female singers and entertainers further highlight modernity as a discursive construct and an experimental project within Asia and offer new insights on emerging ideas and practices about how female agency negotiates itself in varying degrees of success through music, sound, the voice (literally and as a metaphor) and performance (including performing femininity offstage in mediated forms).
While new and sobering insight is given to major East and South Asian nation-states like China, India, South Korea, and Japan, and there is a cautionary acknowledgement of “Oriental Orientalism” perspectives, the chapters on Southeast Asian nation-states (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines) offer the next frontier in understanding female agency in popular music in this vast continent. The Southeast Asian cases have a specific, compelling set of circumstances: the sheer social diversity, indigenous beliefs and practices, and colonial experiences and post-colonial trajectories. The inclusion of Iran in the book is also important, as exemplified in the case of singer Googoosh. Her narrative exemplifies the ambivalences that exist in the mediated cultural reproduction of stars, something most of the female artists featured in this book have experienced in different contexts. Iran also problematizes the modern project of defining Asia.
The book succeeds in presenting these varied experiences (through the specific national social, cultural, and religious particularities and historical parallels) of modernity through the personal and professional practices of the Asian female singers and entertainers, covering the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial epochs. The Western theoretical landscape and critical approaches, which have been applied in the past to studies of the continent, serve as a fertile ground to deconstruct empirical notions of gender, identity, and politics. In many ways, this book also succeeds in painting a picture of feminism in practice before feminism had a name—a fitting tribute to the women who came and conquered but were left out of the official (patriarchal) national narratives.
Azmyl Yusof
Sunway University, Bandar Sunway, Malaysia