Music of Southeast Asia
University of Chicago
Quarters taught: Spring 2013
Course description
Thirty years ago, Benedict Anderson argued that increased access to mass mediated commodities and experiences in Southeast Asia connected individuals to trans-local social networks at the nation-state level. An individual member’s participation in these “imagined communities” was based not only on relationships built in face-to-face interactions, as in traditional local communities, but also on cultural affinities and demographics understood to be shared across a broader population. In the three decades since Anderson’s Imagined Communities, ethnomusicologists and writers on Southeast Asian cultures have examined musical life around the region through a variety of frames. Yet, one might argue that Anderson’s ideas have influenced and permeated much of this scholarship, regardless of individual works’ disciplinary perspectives, geographic boundaries, musical subjects, or theoretical perspectives.
In this course, we will examine the ways in which communities, their representation(s), and musical life are interrelated throughout Southeast Asia. Our readings will proceed thematically (and not geographically), as we examine topics including classical music, dance, education, hybridity, nationalism, nostalgia, popular music, religion, and tourism. We will study genres such as ballet, Canto-pop, dangdut, gamelan, hip-hop, lukthung, piiphaat, tari kursus, and wayang kulit, among others. How might musical activities affect communal bonds organized around shared experiences and histories of colonialism, nationalism, religion, and tradition in Southeast Asia? What roles do musical commodities, economies, identities, and subcultures play in contemporary Southeast Asian cultures? To what degree is Anderson’s idea of the imagined community useful to scholars of musical life in social worlds that are both increasingly globalized and increasingly fragmented? In our readings—which include academic articles, excerpts from monographs, and chapters from edited volumes—we will look beyond the print media that provided the basis for Anderson’s analysis and examine the ways in which various forms of musicking in Southeast Asia confirm and problematize the imagined communities model.