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Luis Borromeo was the Philippines's "King of Jazz," who at the height of his popularity created a Filipino answer to the Ziegfeld Follies. Miss Riboet was a world-famous Javanese opera singer who ruled the theater world. While each represented a unique corner of the entertainment world, the rise and fall of these two superstar figures tell an important story of Southeast Asia's 1920s Jazz Age. This artistic era was marked by experimentation and adaption, and this was reflected in both Borromeo's and Riboet's styles. They were pioneering cultural brokers who dealt in hybrids. They were adept at combining high art and banal entertainment, tradition and modernity, and the foreign and the local....
The decolonization of countries in Asia and Africa is one of the momentous events in the twentieth century. But did the shift to independence indeed affect the lives of the people in such a dramatic way as the political events suggest? The authors in this volume look beyond the political interpretations of decolonization and address the issue of social and economic reorientations which were necessitated or caused by the end of colonial rule. The book covers three major issues: public security; the changes in the urban environment, and the reorientation of the economies. Most articles search for comparisons transcending the colonial and national borders and adopt a time frame extending from the late colonial period to the early decades of independence in Asia and Africa (1930s-1970s). The volume is part of the research programme ‘Indonesia across Orders’ of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. Contributors to the volume are: Greg Bankoff, Raymond Betts, Ann Booth, Cathérine Coquéry-Vidrovitch, Freek Colombijn, Frederick Cooper, Bill Freund, Karl Hack, Jim Masselos and Willem Wolters.
Communication against Capital explores the revolutionary communication strategies of the pergerakan merah, the anticolonial "red movement" in 1920s Indonesia. Rianne Subijanto tells the story of ordinary lower-class women and children and people of diverse races and ethnicities who waged their battles against Dutch colonialism within multiple arenas of communication, including political associations, assemblies, printed matter, schools, and shipping lines. Existing communication technologies were repurposed into mechanisms of struggle and used as weapons in anticolonial and anticapitalist resistance. In this process, communist ideas merged with ideals drawn from the Enlightenment to shape the emancipatory spirit of Indonesians. This red enlightenment motivated the production of revolutionary communication strategies of mobilization. Subijanto's innovative work shows that the novel techniques of the pergerakan merah served to shift anticolonial mobilization in Indonesia from warfare to modern forms of communication.
The golden age of Malay film in the 1950s and 1960s was the product of a musical and cultural cosmopolitanism in the service of a nation-making process based on ideas of Malay ethnonationalism, initially fluid, increasingly homogenised over time. The commercial films of the period, and in particular their film music, from national cultural icons P. Ramlee and Zubir Said, remain important reference points for Malaysia and Singapore to this day. This is the first in-depth study of the film music of the period. It brings together ethnomusicological and cultural studies perspectives. Written in an engaging manner, thoroughly illustrated and incorporating musical scores, the book will appeal to dedicated film fans, musicians, composers and film-makers interested in Southeast Asia and the Malay world. But equally, the conceptual framework will be of interest to a broad range of scholars of Southeast Asia, as it brings together ideas of cosmopolitanism and cultural intimacy to narrate a history of nation-making in the region.
This monograph offers the first comprehensive history of the decolonization of the Indonesian economy, a process with a different momentum and timing from the achievement of political independence. It traces the origins of economic decolonization to the late-colonial period, covers developments during the Japanese occupation and the Indonesian Revolution as well as continued operations by Dutch enterprises in Indonesia during the 1950s. The account culminates with the takeover and nationalization of Dutch private enterprises in the late 1950s. The book is based on research in a wide variety of primary sources. Themes discussed include economic policies, the changing position of Indonesian personnel inside Dutch-owned firms as well as the emergence of new Indonesian entrepreneurship. Published in cooperation with the Netherlands Institute of War Documentation (NIOD), as part of the NIOD research program "Indonesia across Orders".
Sonic Modernities analyses the interplay between the production of popular music, shifting ideas of the modern and, in its aftermath, processes of social differentiation in twentieth-century Southeast Asia.
This book is the first to explore tango argentino as translocal practice, with a focus on the European context. Beyond that, the book crosses borders in the use of both qualitative and quantitative methods, ranging from participant observation to statistical data evaluation, including optical motion capture for movement analysis. Most of all, it is an important contribution to the emerging field of choreomusicology, focusing on movement and sound structures, dancers and musicians, and the complex relations between all of these factors that all have their share in shaping tango argentino practice.
The lethality of conflicts between insurgent groups and counter-insurgent security forces has risen markedly since the Second World War just as those of conventional, or inter-state wars have declined. For several decades, conflicts within states rather than between them have been the prevalent form of organised political violence worldwide. Recent conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria have fired interest in colonial experiences of rebellion, while current western interventions in sub-Saharan Africa have prompted accusations of 'militarist humanitarianism'. Yet, despite mounting interest in counter-insurgency and empire, comparative investigation of colonial responses to insurrection and...
This book explains the dynamics behind the economic transformation from the colonial era to the post-independence period in Indonesia and Vietnam. It analyses the different Vietnamese and Indonesian government approaches to the economic legacies of colonialism remaining in these countries after independence. It also demonstrates that despite critical differences between the two nation-states, the Vietnamese and Indonesian leaderships were pursuing similar long-term goals: to create a truly independent national economy. The book discusses the way in which the Indonesian government established complete economic control, resembling the socialist transformation of North Vietnam in the 1950s, and...
Mutual borrowing, fluid transactions and transformations of performances and performers have a long and enduring history in Southeast Asia, but this trend has been heightened and made more vivid in the contemporary period. The omnipresence of global communications has provoked and inspired yet more novel experiments and collaborations between cosmopolitan artists and globally-oriented performers. This volume offers vital insights into recent developments in Southeast Asian performance. It demonstrates the ways in which contemporary artists and performers are increasingly working betwixt the traditional boundaries of the nation and discourses of identity. The essays collected here are testament to ongoing conversations and relations among scholars, practitioners and scholar-practitioners in Southeast Asia and around the world.