Organizer: Christine R. Yano, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Chair: Carolyn S. Stevens, University of Melbourne
Discussants: Peter Manuel, City University of New York; Ricardo Trimillos, University of Hawaii, Manoa
This panel seeks to address issues of identity and place in Asia through its popular performing arts. The diasporic communities proliferating in the region, as well as political upheavals and turnovers, pose challenges to identity formation. The question of where to draw boundaries and how becomes a site of constant negotiation between larger hegemonic structures and smaller regional units. Even within those units, divisions of gender, age-grading, ethnicity, class, and sexuality constantly disrupt the homegenizing ethos of identity. Within this context, the concept of local—constructed differently in different places and times—has often been invoked to transcend these divisive factors. Asian popular traditions make extensive use of juxtaposition of elements from diverse sources, intertexturality, and pastiche—what Peter Manuel has called "postmodern aesthetic devices." In Hong Kong and Java, there is an ongoing dialectic between local and national popular performing arts, which have separate but overlapping languages, styles, packaging, and audiences. Some performers are able to cater to both local and national audiences by developing different musical and presentational modes for each. In Japan, some forms of local have become the national in a project which nationalizes the folk within certain popular music genres. Although many of these traditions are highly reliant on Western musical styles, instruments, and sometimes melodies themselves, they also represent complex intra-Asian and intra-cultural interactions. The papers in this panel examine ways in which these interactions take place within the social, economic, and political frameworks to redefine the local in the commercial world of Asian popular performing arts.
Christine R. Yano, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Enka, Japanese popular ballads with roots in the early twentieth-century, has been called "song of Japan," expressive of "the heart/soul of Japanese." This national culture builds upon a sense of homelands by invoking the concept of furusato (hometown). Since the 1970s, that concept has been nationalized as a powerful means of advancing a sense of identity at both the regional and national levels. Furusato makes national citizens of all locals while making locals of all national citizens. Enka is integral to the process, evoking difference through regional idioms of musical instruments, styles, folk songs, dialect, and textual references. At the same time, enka subsumes difference under a national umbrella of homogeneity integral to the commercial realms of mass media representation, promotion, and sales.
These intra-national processes take place alongside intra-Asian ones. For one, enka enjoys popularity throughout Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. Part of this is the legacy of Japan’s colonial empire, which ended in 1945. However, part of this is also due to current aggressive marketing. Moreover, since the 1980s, the Japanese music industry regularly imports foreign Asian singers to sing enka. These foreign Asian singers enter a music industry populated in part by "hidden" foreign Asian singers (Korean). The identity politics behind these various configurations make enka a highly problematized national music, which mobilizes "local" even as it shapes it as an effective weapon.
J. Lawrence Witzleben, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Cantonese-language popular song (Cantopop) in Hong Kong is one of the world’s most avidly supported localized genres of popular music: in a city of six million people, top performers can attract several hundred thousand fans in a series of concerts. Cantopop has been strongly influenced by its Japanese, Mandarin-language, and Western counterparts, and many of the best-known songs are Cantonese-language "cover versions" of Japanese or Western songs, but a successful singer is able to synthesize these diverse elements into a unique style and identity which includes artistic, political, and ethnic components.
The events of 1989 led to an increased interest in China and a series of concerts and recordings by Hong Kong singers in support of the democracy movement. More recently, Hong Kong performers and recording companies have seen a vast potential market in mainland China and Taiwan, and many Hong Kong singers have begun recording extensively in Mandarin. Nevertheless, Hong Kong performers must negotiate a balance between enthusiastic entrepreneurs and consumers in China and authorities who have reservations about Western-influenced pop music and sexually suggestive—by PRC standards—song content and performance behavior.
Many of these recent developments can be seen in the career of Anita Mui Yim-fong, a quintessentially "local" singer whose performances have both captivated fans and offended cultural policymakers on the Chinese mainland. As Hong Kong-China interactions move from "intercultural" to "intra-cultural," performers such as Anita Mui exemplify the negotiation of Chinese, Cantonese, and Hong Kong identities which characterize contemporary Hong Kong performing arts and society at large.
Andrew N. Weintraub, University of Pittsburgh
Wayang golek purwa, the Sundanese rod-puppet theater of West Java, Indonesia, has become a privileged space for the social construction and possible reconciliation of local and national identities. As a cultural form that continues to have mass appeal, wayang golek purwa is intersected by social struggles over meaning, language, and national identity. The most accomplished, celebrated, and rewarded dalang (puppeteers) and troupes have become the focal points of symbolic production and negotiation of meaning among multiple actors, as their "popularity" is placed at the center of material and discursive investments for state officials, mass media producers, and spectators. Because of their ability to reach and influence the masses, popular dalang and troupes are called upon to communicate the objectives of the Indonesian state to assimilate differences and integrate Sundanese audiences into the national formation. However, the contradictory position of popular dalang prevents them from being simply reduced to "information officers" (juru penerangan), insofar as dalang must also be able to speak with the voice of the people in order to communicate with them at all.
In this paper, I analyze how entertainment performs a crucial function in foregrounding representations, in wayang golek purwa, of the desires, aims and pleasures of Sundanese audiences. The dalang’s impulse to satisfy the demands of Sundanese audiences for entertainment, above all, causes him to speak in a voice that is distinctly resistant to the unilateral mandates of centralized government authority. In the absence of direct political representation, people can still articulate a will separate from the state by participating in the collective process of defining the "nation," as these processes coincide with the realm of popular culture and local performing arts.