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In east Javanese dance traditions like Beskalan and Ngremo, musicians and dancers negotiate gender through performances where males embody femininity and females embody masculinity. Christina Sunardi ventures into the regency of Malang in east Java to study and perform with dancers. Through formal interviews and casual conversation, Sunardi learns about their lives and art. Her work shows how performers continually transform dance traditions to negotiate, and renegotiate, the boundaries of gender and sex--sometimes reinforcing lines of demarcation, sometimes transgressing them, and sometimes doing both simultaneously. But Sunardi's investigation moves beyond performance. It expands notions of the spiritual power associated with female bodies and feminine behavior, and the ways women, men, and waria (males who dress and live as female) access the magnetic power of femaleness. A journey into understudied regions and ideas, Stunning Males and Powerful Females reveals how performances seemingly fixed by tradition are instead dynamic environments for cultural negotiation and change surrounding questions of sex and gender.
Denise Gill analyzes how the melancholies intentionally cultivated by Turkish classical musicians, typically dismissed as the remnants of Ottoman nostalgia, emerge as reparative, pleasurable, and spiritually redeeming. Melancholic Modalities intervenes in debates about music and affect, and offers new, innovative methodologies of rhizomatic analysis and bi-aurality for researchers.
The Muslim-majority nations of Malaysia and Indonesia are known for their extraordinary arts and Islamic revival movements. This collection provides an extensive view of dance, music, television series, and film in rural, urban, and mass-mediated contexts and how pious Islamic discourses are encoded and embodied in these public cultural forms.
What can the lived experiences of performing artists in Java, Indonesia tell us about the production and negotiation of gender and local identity? Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Malang, East Java, author Christina Sunardi demonstrates ways individual performers have navigated cultural norms of masculinity and femininity to produce gender and place-based identity on- and offstage. Focusing on dancers who have participated in the performance of cross-gender dance, Fashioning Femininities, Making Masculinities provides insight into the lived experiences of men and waria performing female-style dance and women performing male-style dance. Exploring onstage-offstage gender negotiations, gender fluidity, gender pluralism, and spirituality, this book is ideal reading for students of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Ethnomusicology, Dance Studies, Performance Studies, Southeast Asian Studies, and Cultural Anthropology.
This major essay collection takes a fresh look at how differences among people matter for music and musical thought.
The Color of Creatorship examines how copyright, trademark, and patent discourses work together to form American ideals around race, citizenship, and property. Working through key moments in intellectual property history since 1790, Anjali Vats reveals that even as they have seemingly evolved, American understandings of who is a creator and who is an infringer have remained remarkably racially conservative and consistent over time. Vats examines archival, legal, political, and popular culture texts to demonstrate how intellectual properties developed alongside definitions of the "good citizen," "bad citizen," and intellectual labor in racialized ways. Offering readers a theory of critical ra...
Women in Asian Performance offers a vital re-assessment of women's contributions to Asian performance traditions, focusing for the first time on their specific historical, cultural and performative contexts. Arya Madhavan brings together leading scholars from across the globe to make an exciting intervention into current debates around femininity and female representation on stage. This collection looks afresh at the often centuries-old aesthetic theories and acting conventions that have informed ideas of gender in Asian performance. It is divided into three parts: erasure – the history of the presence and absence of female bodies on Asian stages; intervention – the politics of female intervention into patriarchal performance genres; reconstruction – the strategies and methods adopted by women in redefining their performance practice. Establishing a radical, culturally specific approach to addressing female performance-making, Women in Asian Performance is a must-read for scholars and students across Asian Studies and Performance Studies.
In the last decade of the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first, Israelis and Palestinians saw the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords, the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the escalation of suicide bombings and retaliations in the region. During this tumultuous time, numerous collaborations between Israeli and Palestinian musicians coalesced into a significant musical scene informed by these extremes of hope and despair on both national and personal levels. Following the bands Bustan Abraham and Alei Hazayit from their creation and throughout their careers, as well as the collaborative projects of Israeli artis...
"This monograph explores the relationship between Islam and Marxism in the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) and Indonesia from the publication of the first Communist periodical in 1915 to the beginning of the anti-communist massacres of 1965-66. It explores various permutations of how Muslim identity and Marxist analytical frameworks coexisted in the minds of Indonesian nationalists, as well as how individuals' Islamic faith and ethics shaped their willingness to employ Marxist ideas. Such confluences have long been obscured by state-driven narratives which demonize Marxism and posit the mutual exclusivity of Islam and Marxism. By examining Indonesian-language print culture, including newspaper...
The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (AJISS), established in 1984, is a quarterly, double blind peer-reviewed and interdisciplinary journal, published by the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), and distributed worldwide. The journal showcases a wide variety of scholarly research on all facets of Islam and the Muslim world including subjects such as anthropology, history, philosophy and metaphysics, politics, psychology, religious law, and traditional Islam.