Contemporary Culture and Media in Asia

Daniel Black, Olivia Khoo, Koichi Iwabuchi

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783487103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

The study of Asian culture, media and communications is an area that has developed rapidly over the past two decades. This rapid development has led to the deployment of diverse scholarly approaches while simultaneously raising important questions regarding the extent to which the use of key terms such as “nation”, “citizenship” and “modernity” must be modified to reflect the specificity of an Asian context. Furthermore, the irrepressible flows of popular cultural forms and the enthusiastic adoption of new communications technologies across the region demand approaches that can accommodate the dynamism and diversity of Asian culture and media. Contemporary Culture and Media in Asia brings together leading scholars from Asia, North America and Australia to address questions related to these challenges, producing new insights and frameworks that can be productively utilized by students and scholars working in the field.

Part I

TOPOGRAPHY OF TRANS-ASIA

Chapter 1

A Postcolonial Amnesia

Ariel Heryanto

This chapter reconsiders the recent rise in interest in trans-Asian connectivity and/or tensions and the necessity of appreciating its significance within a broader historical perspective. In brief, the recent interest can be read as a response to a set of historically specific material and intellectual conditions at the turn of the century. This is a welcome response to what is widely perceived as an Anglo-centric bias in mainstream cultural studies, and to the perceived crises of the U.S.-led Cold War-styled Asian studies and the fledgling efforts at building Asia-based cultural and area studies at the turn of the century. In specific regions, such as Southeast Asia, this upsurge in interest—in inter-, intra- and trans-Asian inquiries—is all the more curious, given the rich but largely overlooked history of such links.

For centuries, what is now known as Southeast Asia has been a hub of transcontinental flows of people, religions and sciences. This chapter will mainly focus on the region’s modernist engagement. Such connections were salient features of the activities and events in the late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century, well preceding the birth of nations in this region. Significantly, these engagements involved multi-ethnic and multilingual people from all walks of life in urban settings, rather than an exclusive preoccupation with a tiny elite of European descent in the colonies. A serious look at this history will throw new light on the contemporary pursuit of inter-, intra- and trans-Asian inquiries, by providing a broader historical perspective. While a narrow investigation of cosmopolitanism in the region’s past is necessary, it should serve to further the enquiry into the present; namely, why early modernity has been overlooked for so long in Southeast Asia as well as in studies of the region and Asian cultural studies. The following is a preliminary attempt to address these questions with a focus on the case of Indonesia (formerly the Dutch East Indies colony), the world’s largest Muslim populated nation and Southeast Asia’s largest nation.

This chapter aims to show that modern trans-Asian cultural flows, and analyses of their significance, should not be understood primarily as a future prospect in the early twenty-first century. Neither should it be perceived as a novel endeavour, or simply expanding the scope of the intellectual enquiries beyond the nation as a point of departure. Rather, it calls for a rediscovery of Asia’s early modernity and a more serious examination of its transnational engagements a century earlier. The national and the global are neither separable nor opposites as portrayed in public discourses.

SOUTHEAST ASIA: BACK TO THE FUTURE

From the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, novels, short stories and serialized fiction in newspapers and magazines disseminated stories throughout the region from Europe, the Middle East, China and India in the Malay lingua franca (Toer 1982). Many of these important stories, along with local folklores, were popularized on stage as plays in local languages, supplemented with music and dance performances (Cohen 2009; Cohen and Noszlopy 2010; Winet 2010). These play productions meant a great deal for a social environment with fairly low levels of absolute and functional literacy. For the same reasons, the introduction and rapid dissemination of electronic media, such as radio sets and movies, heightened the sense of a shrinking world, of global connectedness and shared transregional concerns. While American films took a dominant position early on, the flow of travelling artists, producers and films from India, the Philippines and Malaya in the region was a common scene in the first half of the twentieth century (Biran 1976; Kahn 2006; Setijadi-Dunn and Barker 2010).

Cohen and Noszlopy make a good point when reminding us not to impose the contemporary nation-state grid onto understandings of the practice and network of cultural workers in this region past and present:

Mutual borrowing, fluid transactions and transformations of performances and performers have a long and enduring history in Southeast Asia. … The division of Southeast Asia into its current constellation of eleven countries (Brunei, Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) involved a high degree of what Anthony Reid (2010) has dubbed ‘imperial alchemy’. Each of these countries has immense internal diversity and fuzzy cultural borders. Southeast Asia’s nations are not monocultural monads but geopolitical products of modern histories of colonialism and nationalism. These countries were once called ‘new states’, but are made up of culturally overlapping old societies. (Cohen and Noszlopy 2010: 2)

Despite some slight variations, particularly with the regard to the government’s interest, control and inference, from the second decade of the twentieth century, listening to the radio was commonly a novel and enchanting encounter for the general population in the French colony of Viet Nam (DeWald 2012), British Malaya (Chua 2012a) and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) (Lindsay 1997). Listening to the radio, and before that, ownership and making use of new technology ‘like the bicycle, the motorcar, the gramophone, and the domestic refrigerator’ (DeWald 2012: 149), all indicated a new lifestyle of being modern. Listeners in all those colonies were kept informed of radio programmes and schedules beyond their immediate surroundings. For example, local newspapers in Singapore in the early 1930s published the daily radio schedules being aired ‘from Saigon in French Vietnam, and Bandoeng, Tanjong Priok, Batavia, Sourabaya, Medan, and Djokjakarta from the Dutch East Indies, as well as stations further afield in Melbourne, Sydney, Paris, Rome, Eindhoven, Zessen, Nairobi, New York City, and Moscow’ (Chua 2012a: 170).

Matthew Cohen (2009) describes as ‘conceited’ the thought that this new century is a ‘unique moment in human history’, equipped with all the intense globalized flows of financial transactions, media and entertainment distribution and consumption, as if they all took place without precedent. His study vividly shows that the wealth of fascinating links and modern creativity among large segments of the colonized people in Southeast Asia was not limited to the miniscule number of Europe-born elite in the late nineteenth century and early decades of the next century.

‘Showbiz’ and the global entertainment industry have nineteenth-century beginnings. During the course of Alfred Russel Wallace’s ‘wonderful century’, cultural forms and values were propelled to the far corners of the globe by the emergent transportation technologies of railway and steamship and the communication networks of telegraph and post. Photographs and phonographs allowed access to sights and sounds from far away, and offered new possibilities in live and mediated art and entertainment. The creolization of cultures and the global ecumene of today emerged in the nineteenth century, not the twentieth. (Cohen 2009: 298)

In a subsequent work, jointly authored with Laura Noszlopy, Cohen further details the myriad events and activities of the past century:

The growth of cities and print capitalism shaped new audiences interested in novel entertainments. Newspapers from 1890s urban Java contain advertisements and notices for circuses, magic shows, European social dancing, organ grinders, string orchestras, phonographic demonstrations, magic lantern shows, variety shows, marionette companies, English operetta companies, French and Italian opera, ring toss games and tombola stands, Japanese and Chinese acrobats, firework displays, panoramas, waxworks, cinematic projections, dog-and-monkey shows, ventriloquists, balloon shows, freak shows, fire juggling, magnetism, comic speeches, mimics and many other international expressive forms. …

Filipino musicians established their pre-eminence in the pan-Southeast Asian urban musical arena by the late nineteenth century. There are accounts of an orchestra of Filipino musicians playing daily in the esplanade of the colonial town of Medan in the 1890s. Musicians from the Philippines are still playing pop and country-western standards in bars, clubs and hotels in Singapore, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur and cities around Asia and the world today. (Cohen and Noszlopy 2010: 7)

With a special focus on popular music performance in public spaces, the work of Peter Keppy (2008) confirms Cohen’s observation, emphasizing the fact that ‘this popular culture had modern and cosmopolitan features, but it was not merely a derivative of Euroamerican modernity’ (Keppy 2008: 141). In the first two decades of the twentieth century, artists from major cities in the Dutch East Indies travelled and performed in the British colony of Malaya, and vice versa. Hawaiian and jazz were equally popular across the colonies in this region, with the Philippine artists coming from Manila being the most prominent among their counterparts of other local ethnic groups.

In the same period, a similar desire for the modern, cosmopolitanism and daily engagement with fellow Asians across the region developed in earnest among photographers (both amateur and studio types) in the Dutch East Indies, particularly in the major cities of Java. ‘As Holland ceased to be the sun around which the postcolonial world orbited, other centers of modernity—particularly the closer-to-hand pan-Asian centers of Hong Kong and Singapore, the “capital” of the Asian overseas community … —became more salient to the aesthetic currents and actual circuits through which Indonesian amateur images traveled,’ notes Strassler (2008: 408). A large proportion of these photographers were ethnic Chinese, the majority of whom came from Canton, via Singapore where they had their apprenticeship training (Strassler 2008: 415).

By no means are the preceding paragraphs intended to capture a comprehensive survey of the exciting decades of the past two centuries. Suffice to note that in the late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century, significant and sustained engagements with modernist and cosmopolitan aspirations were salient features of the activities of what is now identified as the Southeast Asian region. Globalized networks or trans-Asian engagement no longer appear to have commenced in recent decades, thanks to the Internet, smartphones, increased modes of transport and people’s mobility. No less intriguing is the question of why this past history has not been widely known or remembered by many in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Why has global studies been salient only in recent decades, and trans-Asia engagement in area and cultural studies discussed as a desirable but challenging project for the future? The next section is an attempt to provide some answers.

THE NATIONAL REIGNS IN SCHOLARSHIP AND BEYOND

Decolonization in the region gained momentum between the two world wars. Immediately following independence, nation-building has been the single most important project of the political elite. Nationalist discourses acquired unrivalled emotional and political grandeur in nearly all public events and debates. Partly in strong sympathy for these new nations, and partly due to the older and greater forces of ‘the process of reading nationalism genealogically—as the expression of an historical tradition of serial continuity’ (Anderson 2006a: 195), academic and journalistic analyses alike accorded special status, integrity and autonomy to ‘nations’.

Southeast Asia studies, in the bigger family of U.S.-led area studies in the course of the Cold War, took the nation as a primary unit of analysis. Far from being a peculiarly biased version of area studies, preoccupation with the nation has been no less paradigmatic of the social sciences and in the humanities more generally. Until recently, cultural studies has not radically challenged the status quo. Altogether, and for very different reasons, all the above institutionalized discourses and networks have been complicit in the prominence of nations as a key trope in public discussion, at the expense of broader and older trends in the region’s early modernity and transregional engagement.

The term ‘area studies’ is not a generic or politically neutral reference to the study of regions. Rather, as has been well documented (see Dutton 2002; Emmerson 1984; Heryanto 2002, 2013a; McVey 1995; Rafael 1994; Reynolds 1995), this term has acquired its dominant meanings referring to a specific set of studies of regions, in specific historical periods and contexts. In contrast to the so-called Oriental studies of the colonial period, with major centres in Europe, the dominant meaning of ‘area studies’ refers to the study of the non-West, mainly in English, during much of the Cold War period (with all the political, material and ideological interests, constraints and implications embedded in that war), and with its strongest centres in U.S. universities and think tanks. With the end of the Cold War came a serious decline in the status and legitimacy of area studies.

In post-Cold War years, and with the rise of globalization studies, Asian area studies has frequently become a target of derision, not only for postulating the integrity of its imagined region as object of study, but also for its preoccupation with single-nation-focused analyses among its practitioners (Jackson 2003a, 2003b). While such criticism is welcome among the advocates of area studies, some qualifications would be useful. In area studies scholarship, as well as in the work of its critics alike, ‘nations’ are conceptualized, more frequently than not, in their broad abstraction. The ‘area’ in the label ‘area studies’ is widely understood primarily in terms of a cluster of ostensibly ‘autonomous’ nations. Studying more than one nation is considered conceptually and methodologically ideal, more complex and qualitatively superior to the standard practice of focusing on one nation. The rationales for such discrimination are the presumed value of general knowledge instead of the particular. An equally important factor, but too embarrassing to be admitted explicitly, in the preference for multinational studies is the ideological interest; ‘multi- or inter-national’ scoped researches would help consolidate and justify the overall rationales or raisons d’être for area studies as distinct and multidisciplinary scholarship in its own right.

Disdain for single-nation-focused studies is even stronger with the growing number of Asian-born persons who went to major centres of Asian studies with a passionate and personal interest in studying their country of birth (Heryanto 2002: 6−7, 10−13). Many came as enrolled students for a university degree; others were employed as lecturers and researchers. The rationale for official censure of such work in a number of degree programmes is based on problematic assumptions that it reflects intellectual laziness or parochialism. While such censure is not entirely unjustified, it oversimplifies the matter. Singapore, Malaysia and the northern parts of Indonesia’s Sumatra share deep connections and similarities which date back centuries. Under different historical circumstances, they could easily belong to one and the same nation with solid unity. In contrast, Indonesia is remarkably an ‘improbable’ nation (Pisani 2014), due not merely to its extreme diversity of ethnic, religious and lingual dimensions (which can be easily found in many metropolitan cities around the globe) but, more importantly, also to the huge social gaps and disconnections among the hundreds of distinct and scattered ethnic communities that inhabit the thousands of islands across the world’s largest archipelagic nation. A comparative study of cultural, linguistic, historical, religious or musical practices in Singapore, Malaysia and northern Sumatra can be a lot less challenging (although it may look ‘transnational’) than one that attempts to compare or seek connections between social life in Sumatra and that in Flores or Papua. One can draw similar cases from huge nations such as China or India and contrast it with small ones such as Timor Leste in the neighbourhood of other smaller islands of eastern Indonesia.

Criticism of area studies’ disposition towards the particular (i.e. the national) often comes from the conservative elements within traditional disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, which valorise knowledge of the global. Ironically, as Timothy Mitchell shows (2003), the nation-state has also provided the defining framework of many of these traditional disciplines.

As professional, political, and academic knowledge came to see the world a...