Southeast Asia in the Age of Jazz: Locating Popular Culture in the Colonial Philippines and Indonesia
444 Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 44(3), pp 444–464 October 2013. © The National University of Singapore, 2013 doi:10.1017/S0022463413000350 Southeast Asia in the age of jazz: Locating popular culture in the colonial Philippines and Indonesia Peter Keppy Referencing insights from Cultural Studies and taking a jazz-age perspective, this essay aims to historicise and ‘locate the popular’ in colonial Indonesia and the Philippines. A new cultural era dawned in the 1920s urban hubs of Southeast Asia, associated with the creation of novel forms of vernacular literature, theatre, music and their consumption via the print press, gramophone, radio broadcasting and cinema. By investigating the complex relationship between the elusive phenomena of modernity, cosmopolitanism and nationalism as articulated by two pioneering artists active in commercial music and theatre, the social significance of popular cul- ture is scrutinised. The 1920s was a period of intensive cultural borrowing and experimentation. The inter-ethnic urbanites, particularly a newly emerging middle-class of professionals and officials in harbour cities like Manila, Cebu, Batavia, Surabaya and Singapore, took part in this process as both producers and consumers, enjoying theatre, litera- ture, cinema and phonographic recordings. New forms of music, theatre, literature and fashion (dress, hairstyles) have, often implicitly, been associated with burgeoning popular culture and the interrelated upsurge of media technologies such as the gramo- phone, radio broadcasting, motion pictures and the print media.1 Peter Keppy is senior researcher at NIOD, Institute of War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam. Correspondence in connection with this paper should be addressed to: p.keppy@niod.
[Show full text]