Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities (Music and Performing Arts of Asia and the Pacific)

The emergence of modernity has typically focused on Western male actors and privileged politics and economy over culture. The contributors to this volume successfully unsettle such perspectives by emphasizing the social history, artistic practices, and symbolic meanings of female performers in popular music of Asia. Women surfaced as popular icons in different guises in different Asian countries through different routes of circulation. Often, these women established prominent careers within colonial conditions, which saw Asian societies in rapid transition and the vernacular and familiar articulated with the novel and the foreign. These female performers were not merely symbols of times that were rapidly changing. Nor were they simply the personification of global historical changes. Female entertainers, positioned at the margins of intersecting fields of activities, created something hitherto unknown: they were artistic pioneers of new music, new cinema, new forms of dance and theater, and new behavior, lifestyles, and morals. They were active agents in the creation of local performance cultures, of a newly emerging mass culture, and the rise of a region-wide and globally oriented entertainment industry. __Vamping the Stage__ is the first book-length study of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia, showcasing cutting-edge research conducted by scholars whose methods and perspectives draw from such diverse fields as anthropology, Asian studies, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, and film studies. Led by an impressive introduction written by Weintraub and Barendregt, fourteen contributors analyze the many ways that women performers supported, challenged, and transgressed representations of existing gendered norms in the entertainment industries of China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Placing women’s voices in social and historical contexts, the essays explore salient discourses, representations, meanings, and politics of “voice” in Asian popular music. Historicizing the artistic sounds, lyrical texts, and visual images of female performers, the essays reveal how women used popular music to shape the ideas, practices, and meanings of modernity in various Asian contexts and time frames. The ascendency of women as performers paralleled, and in some cases generated, developments in wider society such as suffrage, social and sexual liberation, women as business entrepreneurs and independent income earners, and particularly as models for new life styles. Women’s voices, mediated through new technologies of film and the phonograph, changed the soundscape of global popular music and resonate today in all spheres of modern life.

Ogyû Sorai (1666-1728) was one of the greatest philosophers of early modern Japan, often compared to Western thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. This volume, a monumental work of scholarship, offers for the first time in any Western language unabridged and fully annotated translations of Sorai's masterpieces. The Bendô (Distinguishing the Way) and Benmei (Distinguishing Names) are works of political philosophy that define the theoretical foundation for a leadership exercising total power, the best remedy, in Sorai's view, for a regime in crisis. The translations are based on the 1740 (Genbun 5) woodblock edition, the first major edition of these seminal texts published during the Tokugawa period.

John Tucker situates the Bendô and Benmei in relation to Neo-Confucianism via what is known as "philosophical lexicography." This genre is traced to the early-thirteenth-century Song dynasty text the Xingli ziyi (The Meanings of Neo-Confucian Terms) by Chen Beixi (1159-1223). Although Sorai was an unrelenting critic of the Neo-Confucian formulations of the great Song synthesizer Zhu Xi (1130-1200), his thinking remained, due to its genre, methodology, and conceptual repertory, essentially a radical revision of Neo-Confucian discourse. Tucker's introduction also examines the reception of Sorai's two Ben during the remainder of the Tokugawa, calling attention to radical tendencies in later developments of Sorai's thought as well as to the increasingly scathing critiques of his "Chinese" approach to philosophy, language, and politics. Finally, it traces the vicissitudes of the two Ben in modern Japanese intellectual history and their role in the formation of the ideas of Meiji intellectuals such as Nishi Amane (1829-1897) and Katô Hiroyuki (1836-1916).

As before, however, Sorai came under attack this time for his supposed irreverence toward the throne, the Japanese people, and the imperial nation-state. Though an unpopular philosophy in early twentieth-century Japan, in the postwar years Sorai's thought was interpreted (by Maruyama Masao and others) as an important modernizing force. While it critiques such ideologically grounded attempts to cast Sorai's Bendô and Benmei as theoretical contributions to political modernization, Tucker's study nevertheless acknowledges that Sorai's masterworks, in their concern for language analysis as the way to solve philosophical problems, share significant common ground with the analytic approach to philosophy pioneered by various twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophers.

CONTENTS CHAPTER 1. Re-Vamping Asia: Women, Music, and Modernity in Comparative Perspective PART I. Triumph and Tragedies of the Colonized Voice: Colonial Modernity, Commodification, and Circulation of Women’s Voices CHAPTER 2. Acoustic Ladies: Mediating Audiovisual Modernity in Early German and Chinese Talkies CHAPTER 3. On Becoming Nora: Transforming the Voice and Place of the Sing-Song Girl through Zhou Xuan CHAPTER 4. Malay Women Singers of Colonial Malaya: Voicing Alternative Gender Identity and Modernity CHAPTER 5. The “Comfort Women” and the Voices of East Asian Modernity PART II. Modern Stars and Modern Lives: Nation, Memory, and the Politics of Gender CHAPTER 6. Diva Misora Hibari as Spectacle of Postwar Japan’s Modernity CHAPTER 7. Titiek Puspa: Gendered Modernity in 1960s and 1970s Indonesian Popular Music CHAPTER 8. The Remarkable Career of L. R. Eswari PART III. Silenced Voices and Forbidden Modernities: Censorship, Morality, and National Identity CHAPTER 9. Gendered and Censored Modernity: Two Female Singers and Their Music in South Korea CHAPTER 10. Princess Siti and the Particularities of Post-Islamist Pop CHAPTER 11. Googoosh’s Voice: An Iranian Icon in Silence and Song PART IV. Body Politics and Discourses of Femininity: Image, Sexuality, and the Body CHAPTER 12. Enacting Modernity through Voice, Body, and Gender: Filipina Singers from the Close of the Philippine-American War to the Onset of Martial Law (1913–1972) CHAPTER 13. Beyond Black and Gray: Portraits and Scenes of Javanese Singer Waldjinah in Indonesian Popular Print Media CHAPTER 14. Mainstreaming Dance Music and Articulating Femininity: South Korean Dance Divas in the 1980s CHAPTER 15. The Ideal Idol: Making Music with Hatsune Miku, the “First Sound of the Future” Contributors Index The emergence of modernity has typically focused on Western male actors and privileged politics and economy over culture. The contributors to this volume successfully unsettle such perspectives by emphasising the social history, artistic practices, and symbolic meanings of female performers in popular music of Asia. Women surfaced as popular icons in different guises in different Asian countries through different routes of circulation. Often, these women established prominent careers within colonial conditions, which saw Asian societies in rapid transition and the vernacular and familiar articulated with the novel and the foreign. These female performers were not merely symbols of times that were rapidly changing. Nor were they simply the personification of global historical changes Vamping the Stage is the first book-length study of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia, showcasing cutting-edge research conducted by scholars whose methods and perspectives draw from such diverse fields as anthropology, Asian studies, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, and film studies. Led by an impressive introduction written by Andrew Weintraub and Bart Barendregt, fourteen contributors analyze the many ways that women performers supported, challenged, and transgressed representations of existing gendered norms. Placing women's voices in social and historical contexts, the essays explore salient discourses, representations, meanings, and politics of "voice" in Asian popular music Selected Papers From Two Conferences, Convened As Part Of The Voices Of Asian Modernities Project (vamp), Held September 4-6, 2013, In Leiden, The Netherlands, And April 4-6, 2014, At The University Of Pittsburgh.