This essential collection of essays on the visibility of women singers in Asian popular music aims to historicise their rise in conditions of colonialism, postcolonialism, and aspirations toward modernity. Both historical and comparative, and based on analysis of recorded music and media as well as ethnography, the essays in this volume reveal how women singers, actors, and dancers reflected, troubled, and sometimes even caused shifts in gender roles and concepts of gendered modernity in Asia over the last century. Vamping the Stage grew out of the Voices of Asian Modernities Project (or VAMP), a consortium between the University of Pittsburgh, Leiden University, and the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asia and Caribbean Studies. Two conferences organised by the consortium resulted in this book, which narrowed the topic to focus on women’s voices; women also make up well over half the contributors. The editors, Bart Barendregt and Andrew N. Weintraub, position the essays in chapter 1.

The editors divide the essays into four parts. The first of these parts focuses on singers under colonial regimes. Yiman Wang’s exceptional chapter 2 begins part one with a discussion of how Chinese-ness was heard in early film industries, with an especially noteworthy passage about how film star Anna May Wong derailed audiences’ Orientalist expectations by singing with bel canto technique in languages like German and French. Yifen Beus also discusses tensions between modernist and nationalist orientations in the Shanghai Film Industry with an examination of singer and actor Zhou Xuan in chapter 3. Zhou created a new social outcast character archetype in Shanghai film who, after a series of struggles, eventually transforms into her true, liberated self; this in turn served as an allegory for 1930s China as a nation. One then might read chapter 5 after chapter 3: in chapter 5, Joshua D. Pilzer provides an alternative reading of film in East Asia by arguing that portrayals of women’s suffering in films and songs of early twentieth century East Asia both reflect the failed promises of modernity as experienced by many women and legitimise their suffering. In chapter 4, Tan Sooi Beng reiterates the positive opportunities afforded to women in colonial Malaya by rapid socio-economic transformation, commoditised entertainment, and new technology. These opportunities unsettled gender norms promoted both by British colonialism and Malay Muslim society.

Part two centres on the nation-state. In chapter 6, Christine R. Yano explains how the voice of Japanese songstress Misora Hibari represented national rebuilding after World War II. Andrew N. Weintraub’s chapter about singer Titiek Puspa’s relationship with two Indonesian regimes likewise foregrounds how women singers encode ideas about gendered agency under nationalist projects. Amanda Weidman then complicates the volume’s portrayal of singers and nation-states by focusing on a South Indian playback singer, L. R. Eswari, who negotiated a career singing archetypal “bad” woman roles while protecting her reputation through religious devotional performance and refusing to appear on camera in her films.

Part three deals with questions of censorship and morality. Soojin Kim’s chapter problematises the often-seen dichotomy of good and bad women by revealing how post-colonial South Korea governments censored the genre trot because of perceived Japanese influences, even though it portrayed demure and nostalgic femininity. Bart Barendregt then writes about how one Malaysian diva negotiates her career through the idiosyncrasies of local, national, and global Islamic music industries. Lastly, Farzaneh Hemmasi examines how Iranian pop icon Googoosh’s twenty-year silence after the Iranian Revolution made her voice a metaphor for disenfranchised Iranians in the eyes of Iranians living in diaspora in Los Angeles.

Part four turns back to bodies and sexuality, beginning with Ricardo D. Trimillos’ chapter that demonstrates how “good” and “bad” stereotypes of women were coded onto American and Spanish-influenced music genres and aspirations to modernity in the Philippines. Russell P. Skelchy describes how singer Waldjinah’s efforts to navigate gossip about her sexuality in print media impacted her career. Hee-sun Kim outlines how South Korean dance divas laid the groundwork for the K-pop industry. Finally, Jennifer Milioto Matsue pushes questions of gender, modernity, and agency to their limit in her chapter about vocal synthesiser software Hatsune Miku. Hatsune Miku exists only as software and an image, and therefore is the “ideal idol” (p. 320) for the “prosumers” who both consume and control her (p. 324).

The chapters in this volume are excellent. Given the scope of the collection, spanning about a hundred years and more than a continent’s worth of popular music, the themes that emerge are remarkably consistent. The text’s greatest weakness is its title: the implication that the women discussed in the volume uniformly are or portray “vamps”—or women who use their sexual wiles to manipulate men—ultimately undercuts the intention of its authors despite the term’s convenience as a musical metaphor and the title of the symposium. Title aside, this volume is a major expansion of knowledge about popular culture and gender in Asia and globally.