Malay Women Singers of Colonial Malaya

Author(s):  
Tan Sooi Beng

Popular Malay music developed in Malaya in tandem with socio-political transformations which took place as a result of British colonialism. It was at this time that a new type of local commodified urban popular music known as lagu Melayu (Malay song) emerged to entertain the multiethnic urban audiences from different social and class backgrounds. This new music was shaped by the convergence of the new social conditions, technology such as print, gramophone, radio, film, microphones, cultural forms, and performance sites that emerged. By examining the song styles and texts of 78 rpm recordings of Lagu Melayu, oral interviews with performers, and published texts of the colonial period, this chapter illustrates how the new popular music accorded women performing artists voice and agency to negotiate dominant discourses regarding modern colonial subjectivity and gender. Women singers promoted a type of vernacular modernity that was not defined solely in European terms butwas characterized by continuity, difference, and hybridity. The musical recordings and stories of their lives reveal the complex polyvocal and sometimes contradictory experiences of women performers in colonial Malaya.

Vamping the Stage is the first book-length historical and comparative examination of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia. This book documents the many ways that women performers have supported, challenged, and undermined representations of existing gendered norms in the entertainment industries of China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The case studies in this volume address colonial, post-colonial, as well as late modern conditions of culture as they relate to women’s musical practices and their changing social and cultural identities throughout Asia. Female entertainers were artistic pioneers of new music, new cinema, new forms of dance and theater, and new behavior and morals. Their voices, mediated through new technologies of film, radio, and the phonograph, changed the soundscape of global popular music and resonate today in all spheres of modern life. These female performers were not merely symbols of times that were rapidly changing. They were active agents in the creation of local performance cultures and the rise of a region-wide and globally oriented entertainment industry. Placing women’s voices in social and historical contexts, the authors critically analyze salient discourses, representations, meanings, and politics of “voice” in Asian popular music of the 20th century to the present day.


1997 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 658-689 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asgedet Stefanos

In this article, Asgedet Stefanos examines women and education in the east African nation of Eritrea. She tackles as her central questions whether, and to what extent, Eritrean women have been achieving emancipation; and, if so, what role education has played in that process. Stefanos begins by providing a historical overview that delineates Eritrean women's general social condition and access to education in pre-colonial traditional society and during the eras of Italian and British colonialism. She then evaluates developments during Eritrea's protracted national liberation struggle against Ethiopia and the four years since independence. Stefanos documents significant advances in the emancipation of women and highlights education as a vital arena for change. She observes shortcomings in the Eritrean political leadership's strategy to establish effective educational equity for women, as well as disparities between the goals and assessments of policymakers and the aspirations and experiences of women. Her discussion of contemporary Eritrea is informed by policies and commentary of political leaders and interviews with a diverse sample of Eritrean women. Stefanos concludes by asserting that the current situation confronting an independent Eritrea promotes new obstacles and challenges to a vigorous pursuit of female rights and gender equality, and that the prospects for expanding women's gains in education are very much in the balance.


Popular Music ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-402
Author(s):  
Jill Halstead

Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender.Edited by Sheila Whiteley. London and New York: Routeledge, 1997, 353 pp.Sex, sexuality and articulations of gender are well-established components in the production and performance of popular music. Hence, Sexing the Groove, edited by Sheila Whiteley, is a very welcome addition to this vital and growing area of popular music studies and cultural theory more generally. The collection reflects the reality that studies of gender and sexuality in popular music are born of a hybrid lineage; accordingly the book approaches its subject from a range of disciplines such as sociology, cultural theory, media studies, sychology and musicology, and as such is a vibrant mix. Despite its relative diversity, the book's structure and progression is fluent and focused.


Author(s):  
Wakoh Shannon Hickey

Mindfulness is widely claimed to improve health and performance, and historians typically say that efforts to promote meditation and yoga therapeutically began in the 1970s. In fact, they began much earlier, and that early history offers important lessons for the present and future. This book traces the history of mind-body medicine from eighteenth-century Mesmerism to the current Mindfulness boom and reveals how religion, race, and gender have shaped events. Many of the first Americans to advocate meditation for healing were women leaders of the Mind Cure movement, which emerged in the late nineteenth century. They believed that by transforming their consciousness, they could also transform oppressive circumstances in which they lived, and some were activists for social reform. Trained by Buddhist and Hindu missionaries, these women promoted meditation through personal networks, religious communities, and publications. Some influenced important African American religious movements, as well. For women and black men, Mind Cure meant not just happiness but liberation in concrete political, economic, and legal terms. The Mind Cure movement exerted enormous pressure on mainstream American religion and medicine, and in response, white, male doctors and clergy with elite academic credentials appropriated some of its methods and channeled them into scientific psychology and medicine. As mental therapeutics became medicalized, individualized, and then commodified, the religious roots of meditation, like the social justice agendas of early Mind Curers, fell away. After tracing how we got from Mind Cure to Mindfulness, this book reveals what got lost in the process.


Author(s):  
Stan Hawkins

This chapter explores transcultural perspectives on popular music aesthetics and gender in Norway through case studies of male celebrities born around 1980: the duo Madcon, Jarle Bernthoft, Lars Vaular, and Sondre Lerche. The analysis focuses on the practices of self-fashioning a persona in the realm of the popular, involving the aesthetics of masquerade, the ordinary, and escapism. Conceptually, the chapter draws from Bakhtin, Eyerman, Frith, and other influential voices in the literature on cultural performance and identity. The discussion also sheds light on fundamental issues in popular music aesthetics, demonstrating how the musicology of popular music can offer a unique cultural critique of identities that may appear to be “only entertainment” but in fact mediate powerful ideologies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-62
Author(s):  
Santiago Iglesias-Baniela ◽  
Juan Vinagre-Ríos ◽  
José M. Pérez-Canosa

It is a well-known fact that the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster caused the escort towing of laden tankers in many coastal areas of the world to become compulsory. In order to implement a new type of escort towing, specially designed to be employed in very adverse weather conditions, considerable changes in the hull form of escort tugs had to be made to improve their stability and performance. Since traditional winch and ropes technologies were only effective in calm waters, tugs had to be fitted with new devices. These improvements allowed the remodeled tugs to counterbalance the strong forces generated by the maneuvers in open waters. The aim of this paper is to perform a comprehensive literature review of the new high-performance automatic dynamic winches. Furthermore, a thorough analysis of the best available technologies regarding towline, essential to properly exploit the new winches, will be carried out. Through this review, the way in which the escort towing industry has faced this technological challenge is shown.


Author(s):  
Margaret Murray

Abstract This article turns a critical eye on the arguments deployed by Pitchfork, one of the most popular music websites, when reviewing two artists: Vampire Weekend and Lil Wayne. Rhetorically analyzing the reception of these two artists is illuminating because both had indie breakouts in 2008, both release genre-spanning music, and both have had over a decade of commercial success. However, Vampire Weekend’s whiteness enables them to benefit from authenticity tropes that are unavailable to Lil Wayne. The analysis will show how Lil Wayne is essentialized as a rapper who is unauthorized to move beyond that genre. Overall, this article examines authenticity as the rhetorical move by which exclusion is constructed and highlights how assumptions about the relationship between race and performance are key to arguments about artistry.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 23-40
Author(s):  
Aysegul Sagkaya Gungor ◽  
Yusuf Ihsan Kurt

Making customers adopt mobile banking is a great challenge for banks, and especially for Islamic banks. This study investigates the factors that could predict the customers' use intention of the mobile banking services of Islamic banks by applying the conceptual model of UTAUT2. The model was further extended with gamification, as a promising tool to ease the adoption, while discussing the moderating effect of age and gender for all variables. The applied questionnaire to collect data has resulted in 205 respondents. The findings implied that facilitating conditions, habit, price value, and performance expectancy are effective variables in Islamic banking customers' behavioral intention to use m-banking. Gamification has a positive effect only when customers are younger than 30. It is further discovered that only the customers 30 and older had performance expectancy. Regarding gender differences, the only finding is the men's greater interest in the price value.


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