Session 40: Unity and Diversity: Local, National, and Global Identities in East and Southeast Asian Music

Organizer: Richard C. Miller, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Chair: Jennifer H. Munger, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Discussant: Deborah Wong, University of California, Riverside

Keywords: globalization, identity, music, East Asia, Southeast Asia.

Like much of the world, East and Southeast Asia have an intense if not always friendly relationship with the forces of globalization. The peoples of East and Southeast Asia have a long history of international entanglements that have encouraged an attraction to global cultural forms. At the same time, their local diversity has stimulated a variety of strategic goals for and practices of self-representation. For example, within the regimes of colonialism, a broad range of. experiences produced a diversity of national ideologies of culture. Indonesia was unified in part through the experience of European colonization, and promotes a cultural ideology of "unity in diversity" (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika) that acknowledges internal heterogeneity. Japan, on the other hand, responded to European colonization by aggressively colonizing its Asian neighbors, and developing an ideology of cultural homogeneity (Nihonjinron). Nevertheless, musicians in both nations combine local, regional, national, and global forms into a performance of identity. The resulting performative genres may emphasize material culture, repertoire, social function, or overall style; they may celebrate a patchwork of sources from around the globe, or carefully conceal the seams; they may revel in redefining global forms for local tastes, strive for regional inclusion in national projects, or assert the importance of national culture. To understand these representational practices, this panel focuses on the music of East and Southeast Asia as the product of active participants in their own cultural identity within the context of globalization. By doing so, we attempt to reconsider the concepts of "local," "national," and "global"‘ as strategic elements in an ongoing politics of cultural identity.

No Sign Pointing West: The Occluded Origins of Japanese Taiko Drumming

Shawn Bender, University of California, San Diego

Few genres of contemporary Japanese musical performance look as quintessentially Japanese as ensemble taiko drumming. Yet few observers are aware that taiko drum ensembles in fact date only from the postwar period of Japanese history. Even fewer still are aware that the first taiko ensembles in Japan were created largely on the model of jazz drumming and incorporated jazz motifs into their performances.

This paper examines the interaction between "Western" influence and "Eastern" instrumentation at the origin of contemporary taiko drumming. It does so in order both to interrogate the academic discourse on globalization and to broaden the understanding of musical history in Japan. The emergence of taiko ensembles, I argue, contrasts with earlier efforts in Japan to reconcile western musical influences with inherited Japanese forms. In linguistic terms, instead of "transliterating" western musical influence by modifying Japanese instruments or by performing Japanese music on western instruments, taiko ensembles demonstrate a desire to "translate" western musical idioms using instruments taken from Japanese folk music alone.

The end result of this "translation" process is not "hybridization," as some theorists of globalization might suggest, but, rather, the total effacement of original western influence. In addition to marking a distinct point in the appropriation of western musical influence in Japan, taiko ensembles thus represent an unusual artistic response to the increasing pervasiveness of western culture in postwar Japanese society.

Thunder Girl Meets the Shining Prince: Musical Mestizaje and Japanese Identity

Richard C. Miller, University of Wisconsin, Madison

In the realm of popular culture, "globalization" typically means the spread of American and European cultural forms across the globe. As such, it stands in for "homogenization," the idea that the diversity of human cultural practices is being replaced with a single, standard set. The prime example of this is surely western-style popular music, the spread of which has been termed a cultural gray-out, a cultural glitter-out, or even more frankly, sheer McDonaldization. Yet, when we examine popular culture in its concrete manifestations locale by locale, we find great diversity even within the forms that have so easily spanned the globe. This diversity is the sign of mestizaje, the hybridization of cultures from locales which partake in but are not summarized by national identity. In this paper, I consider two examples of mestizaje in Japanese popular music, the Osaka hip-hop group In-sist and the Kagoshima pop-punk band Go! Go! 7188. In-sist, combining live funk with multiple rappers, produces music permeated by a specific sense of local identity, building a complete "Naniwa style" through lyrics, language, music, and visual art. Go! Go! 7188, on the other hand, draws much more broadly from nationwide cultural phenomena, tending to eschew specific local references in favor of standard references such as The Tale of Genji. Nevertheless, both groups express themselves through a process of hybridization that acknowledges the discontinuities within Japan and the West even while accepting the similarities between Japan and the West necessary to allow the appropriation of hip-hop and punk.

Listening for Global Flow in Taiwanese Song

Nancy Guy, University of California, San Diego

While globalization is often imagined as the nearly universal spread of Western culture, Japan’s unique brand of popular culture represents a competing force throughout East and Southeast Asia. For instance, Japanese owned and administered recording companies gave birth to Taiwan’s vital popular music industry in the early 1930s. This was a watershed event in the history of musical and cultural flow between Japanese and Taiwanese societies. With a foundation laid during Japan’s period of colonial expansion, bilateral cultural flows have persisted between Taiwan and Japan up to the present.

In this paper, I take the Taiwanese song genre known as enka in its Japanese form, and most commonly called "old Taiwanese songs" in Taiwan, as a case study. Taiwanese "enka" clearly trace their parentage to Japan. Taiwanese singers typically use a use deep-throated, trembling vocal style characteristic of their Japanese counterparts, though the last decade has witnessed an increasing move towards a more "Western pop" vocal quality. Song lyrics, however, continue to narrate emotions and life circumstances that are understood to be quintessentially Taiwanese. Examination of this expressive form provides a window into the complex realities of Taiwan’s ambiguous cultural and political identity.

Has globalization resulted in "transnational domination and uniformity," or "the liberation of local culture from dominant state and national forms" as Fredric Jameson asks? The evidence presented by "old Taiwanese songs" demands a more nuanced understanding than this simplistic binary allows and suggests that both of these conditions exist simultaneously.

Identifying as Global in North Sulawesi: Constructing the Modern through the Language of Birds

Jennifer H. Munger, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Scholars have coined the term "glocalization," in an attempt to recognize agency on the part of people around the world who engage the global by reinterpreting it in local forms. This reformulation puts a more upbeat spin on what was presumed to be an overwhelmingly negative force. Globalization’s older twin, modernity, likewise engenders emotional responses ranging from dread and regret to excitement and admiration. Why do these terms carry such emotional content, both for researchers and people at large? What is the modern’s partner to globalization’s glocal? If we answer that question by thinking in terms of multiple modernities we are limited to the notion that at base there is some sort of unitary force behind both the global and the modern, albeit one shaped by local circumstance. But how does it help our analyses to presume a unitary drive whether orchestrated by a concrete authority, or by amorphous powers as in the case of hegemony? This paper deconstructs both the global and the modern, by examining what it means to be modern and global in Minahasa, North Sulawesi, where brass bands and Dutch-language social clubs create themselves side by side with ritual specialists contacting precolonial ancestors and interpretation of sounds from nature as a means to predict future events.