Vamping the stage: Female voices of Asian modernities is the first book-length study dedicated to female artists in Asian popular music cultures. What emerges through the edited volume's 15 chapters are variegated, wide-ranging accounts of inter-Asian connections and localised formations of popular music from the early twentieth century to the present. Although it covers a broad geographical range, the volume has a strong focus on female artists in Malaysia and Island Southeast Asia, and links their influence to audiences beyond the region.
The contributors resist essentialising concepts of Asia, instead using this category strategically as a means of ‘developing new approaches to the study of Asian subjectivities … grounded in specific social and historical conditions’ (p. 4). Following the volume's intent to highlight inter-Asian connections Bart Barendregt (chap. 10) analyses the career of Malaysian pop diva Siti Nurhaliza within an emerging ‘Islamic chic’ aesthetic developed primarily between the Middle East and Southeast Asia, showing how divisions of East/West or Asia/Europe are not always the most relevant for understanding circuits of popular culture production (p. 211).
The volume also contests a modular concept of modernity, instead documenting ‘distinct genealogies of modernity starting from the perspective of the local’ (p. 11). Tan Sooi Beng (chap. 4) focuses on 1940s British colonial Malaya, and shows how singer-actresses such as Che Tijah and Nona Asiah gave voice to a vernacular modernity that drew upon ‘the traditions … of Malay Muslim society’ (p. 84). In addition, several authors, including Joshua Pilzer, Christine R. Yano, and Soojin Kim trace the genealogies of modern popular music in Korea and Japan during and after the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910–45). Future research might build upon these studies to address concurrent histories of popular music in Indochina, Burma and Thailand and the role of female artists in cultural formation.
Several contributions explore gendered ideologies within popular music industries in Indonesia and the Philippines. Andrew Weintraub (chap. 7) discusses Indonesian singer and composer Titiek Puspa who ‘vocalized the tensions and contradictions of gendered modernity in Indonesia’ from Sukarno's anti-imperialist government (1950–65) to Suharto's pro-Western New Order (1966–98) (p. 144). Ricardo D. Trimillos follows the careers of Filipina singers Katy de la Cruz and Pilita Corrales who navigated and contested the contradictory terrain between ‘prescriptive and performative’ gender roles (p. 277). Russell Skelchy (chap. 13) demonstrates how Javanese keroncong singer Waldjinah carefully managed her media image as a traditional Solonese woman, while in practice breaking gendered expectations through her active career and sexualised performances (p. 281). These studies reveal how female artists both worked within and subverted gendered ideologies, leading to new forms of popular music and performance.
Finally, several articles deal incisively with themes of technological mediation, gender construction, and voice studies by exploring ‘new kinds of identities … made audible through new cultural technologies’ (p. 23). Yiman Wang (chap. 2) discusses the transition from silent film to ‘talkies’ and demonstrates how Anna May Wong's performances in German and English challenged Hollywood's stereotypical ‘ethnic imaginary of Chineseness’ (p. 49). Farzaneh Hemmasi (chap. 11) destabilises Euro-American ‘correlations between voice, identity, and politics’ by analysing performances of Iranian pop icon Googoosh after the Iranian Revolution (p. 236). Amanda Weidman (chap. 8) discusses the South Indian playback singer L.R. Eswari who shaped a vocal typology in the 1960s while also retaining ‘a capacity to exceed the systems of meaning within which she [was] placed’ (p. 189). Turning to technologies of the present, Jennifer Milioto Matsue (chap. 15) explores the posthuman voice through an analysis of the vocaloid software personality Hatsune Miku, whose voice can be manipulated in terms of vocal timbre, pitch, and ‘gender factor’ (p. 321).
Overall, Vamping the stage speaks to diverse fields including popular music, gender, and Asian Studies, and is an important contribution to critical scholarship on female pop voices and the cultural work that their lives and work perform. It is particularly insightful for Southeast Asian Studies in its focus on Malaysia and Island Southeast Asia, and signals the need for further research into gender, performance, and popular music formations across the region. As the first book-length study dedicated to female artists in Asian popular music cultures, the work is recuperative in the sense that it highlights women whose performances produced global modernities but who have been marginalised in mainstream accounts of popular music. Thus, Vamping the stage may serve as a generative source of further research into claims to modernity, their attendant gender ideologies, and the performers and artists who both create and exceed these meanings and structures.
