Book

Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities

Announcement of the publication of Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities, the first book-length study of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia (University of Hawai'i Press, 2017).

Author

Andrew Weintraub and Bart Barendregt (eds.)

Date

01 September 2017

Links

University of Hawai'i Press

Consisting of a lengthy introduction and 14 case studies, this edited volume demonstrates how female performers supported, challenged, and transgressed 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 authors explore salient discourses, representations, meanings, and politics of “voice” in Asian popular music.  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.