Globalization and Modernity in Asia: Performative Moments 9789048530694

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
1. Global Imaginaries and Performance in Asia
2. Globalizing the Imagination
3. Weddings, Yoga, Hook-ups
4. Super Premium Soft Double Vanilla Rich and the Ideal of Convenience in Japan
5. Unearthing the Past and Re-imagining the Present
6. Keeping Communists Alive in Singapore
7. Performative Pedagogies
8. Performing Cities
9. Mobile Performance and the In-between
10. An Islamist Flash Mob in the Streets of Shah Alam
11. Pure Love?
12. Yogya on Stage
Index

Citation preview

Globalization and Modernity in Asia

Asian Visual Cultures This series focuses on visual cultures that are produced, distributed and consumed in Asia and by Asian communities worldwide. Visual cultures have been implicated in creative policies of the state and in global cultural networks (such as the art world, film festivals and the Internet), particularly since the emergence of digital technologies. Asia is home to some of the major film, television and video industries in the world, while Asian contemporary artists are selling their works for record prices at the international art markets. Visual communication and innovation is also thriving in transnational networks and communities at the grass-roots level. Asian Visual Cultures seeks to explore how the texts and contexts of Asian visual cultures shape, express and negotiate new forms of creativity, subjectivity and cultural politics. It specifically aims to probe into the political, commercial and digital contexts in which visual cultures emerge and circulate, and to trace the potential of these cultures for political or social critique. It welcomes scholarly monographs and edited volumes in English by both established and early-career researchers. Series Editors Jeroen de Kloet, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Edwin Jurriëns, The University of Melbourne, Australia Editorial Board Gaik Cheng Khoo, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom Helen Hok-Sze Leung, Simon Fraser University, Canada Larissa Hjorth, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Amanda Rath, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany Anthony Fung, Chinese University of Hong Kong Lotte Hoek, Edinburgh University, United Kingdom Yoshitaka Mori, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Japan

Globalization and Modernity in Asia Performative Moments

Edited by Chris Hudson and Bart Barendregt

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: ‘Membuat Obama dan Perdamaian yang dibuat-buat’ (2009); fibreglass and painted becak. The sign on the becak reads: ‘Please do not touch’. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 112 6 e-isbn 978 90 4853 069 4 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789462981126 nur 630 © Chris Hudson & Bart Barendregt / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2018 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 9 1 Global Imaginaries and Performance in Asia

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2 Globalizing the Imagination

29

3 Weddings, Yoga, Hook-ups

35

4 Super Premium Soft Double Vanilla Rich and the Ideal of Convenience in Japan

57

5 Unearthing the Past and Re-imagining the Present

71

6 Keeping Communists Alive in Singapore

89

Chris Hudson and Bart Barendregt

Introductory Reflections Terrell Carver

Performed Identities and Technology in Bali Craig Latrell

Peter Eckersall

Contemporary Art and Muslim Politics in a Post-9/11 World Leonie Schmidt

Chua Beng Huat

7 Performative Pedagogies

107

8 Performing Cities

129

9 Mobile Performance and the In-between

149

Lifestyle Experts on Indian Television Tania Lewis

The Philippines Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai International Exposition William Peterson

Yogyakarta Comes to Melbourne Chris Hudson

10 An Islamist Flash Mob in the Streets of Shah Alam

169

11 Pure Love?

195

12 Yogya on Stage

215

Unstable Genres for Precarious Times Bart Barendregt

Sanitized, Gendered and Multiple Modernities in Chinese Cinemas Jeroen de Kloet

Barbara Hatley

Index 235

List of Figures Figure 3.1 Couple in Balinese wedding vestments at Antonio Blanco Museum 41 Figure 3.2 Couple in wedding procession 42 Figure 3.3 Couple performing Balinese dance 43 Figure 3.4 Wedding chapel and flower girls at Blue Point Bay Villas 44 Figure 3.5 Couple posing for wedding photo with hotel guests in pool 45 Figure 3.6 Wiwaha Chapel at the Nikko Resort 46 Figure 3.7 Sumatran ‘ship cloths’ (palapai) 47 Figure 5.1 ‘Membuat Obama dan Perdamaian yang dibuat-buat’ (2009) fibreglass and painted becak 76 Figure 5.2 A repaired and visibly damaged president posing in front of the PKU Muhammadiyah hospital 80 Figure 7.1 Billboard at Star’s Mumbai headquarters 109 Figure 7.2 Vikram Chandra and Rajiv Makni, the hosts of Gadget Guru 112 Figure 7.3 The Princess of Rampur (centre), assisted by an unnamed cook, shows host Amrita Gandhi how to host a soiree on an episode of Royal Reservation entitled ‘Party Like the Nizams’ (nizam is a title for sovereigns of Indian states). 113 Figure 7.4 Anchor Ambika Anand and fashion designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee (centre) meet the bride, groom and their respective mothers in Band Baajaa Bride. 114

Figure 7.5 Pawan Sinha, resident astrologer on Astro Uncle, uses astrology to give psychological counselling for irritable children. The text in the panel reads: ‘The combination of Saturn-Mars, Mars-Rahu, Rahu-Saturn, in one’s planetary alignment makes one prone to anger.’ 117 Figure 7.6 In this episode of Live Vaastu, its star, Dr. Chawla, offers advice on what colours improve the energy of a house. In this clip (solution Number 5), the audience is told to avoid the colours blue or black. 118 Figure 7.7 A segment of Live Vaastu where Dr. Chawla (compass in hand) visits an audience member’s house to do a vaastu reading. 119 Figure 7.8 ‘Wisdom comes with responsibility’: Pragya TV website, featuring five categories of life-advice videos, including beauty, relationships, good living, food (smart kitchen) and living wisely 121 Figure 8.1 Philippines Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo 2010 134 Figure 8.2 Panel with map of the Philippines 136 Figure 8.3 Band playing bamboo instruments 138 Figure 8.4 Handicrafts zone at the Philippines Pavilion 140 Figure 9.1 Grobak in Swanston St. Melbourne 151 Figure 9.2 Grobak by night on the banks of the Yarra River 155 Figure 9.3 Grobak with images from Yogykarta 157 Figure 9.4 Grobak with skype technology 158 Figure 10.1 Young Islamist performers singing a praise to the Prophet at Freedom Square 171 Figure 10.2 Ustaz Nazmi Abd Karim driving through spectators 173 Figure 10.3 Al Farabi Band’s advertisement for a mobile stage truck 183 Figure 10.4 Islamic Rock act Al Farabi Band being filmed during the flash mob while performing to the backdrop of the Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz State Mosque 185

Acknowledgments This book represents first and foremost the combined intellectual effort of all the scholars whose work appears here. It is also evidence of the passion we share for performance and our interest in its creative and transformational possibilities. It is the outcome of collaboration between the School of Media and Communication (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University), the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (Leiden University), the Asian Modernity and Traditions research cluster at Leiden University, and the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden. Our thanks go to all these institutions for their financial support for the symposium that was held at RMIT Europe in Barcelona in November 2014. Present at that symposium were Bart Barendregt, Craig Batty, Terrell Carver, Chua Beng Huat, Peter Eckersall, Chris Hudson, Jeroen de Kloet, Will Peterson, Sean Redmond, Leonie Schmidt, Fridus Steijlen and Jo Tacchi. We would particularly like to express our gratitude to Jo Tacchi and Colin Fudge for their support and encouragement to make the symposium happen and to Katarina Frank for making it enjoyably problem free. We are also indebted to Fridus Steijlen, whose initial ideas and enthusiasm – not to mention wonderful hospitality in Amsterdam – were the catalyst for the project that has culminated in this book. Chris Hudson and Bart Barendregt May 2018

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Global Imaginaries and Performance in Asia Chris Hudson and Bart Barendregt

Performing the Global It is now widely accepted that a key feature of life in our era is the deepening engagement of the local with the global. Ulrich Beck has defined globalization as: a non-linear, dialectic process in which the global and the local do not exist as cultural polarities but as combined and mutually implicating principles. These processes involve not only interconnections across boundaries, but transform the quality of the social and political inside nation-state societies. (Beck 2002, p. 17)

The consequences of these mutually implicating principles, and the social and political transformations they might bring about, have been well examined in the context of cultural, economic and technological flows between sites in the developed world. Less attention has been paid to global circuits of exchange outside the West. Some notable exceptions have highlighted interconnections between countries of the global South and increasingly intense inter-Asia cultural flows (see, for example, Iwabuchi et al. 2004; Chen and Chua 2007; Chen 2010; Goh 2015). Cultural flows exceed and move beyond economic and political relationships, resulting in cultural traffic that can often be found moving in many different directions simultaneously (cf. Ahmed and Donnan 1994). To fully grasp the power of globalization to collapse the polarities and transform culture at the local or national level, we need to look beyond the economic, financial and material aspects to the imaginative and less tangible dimensions of social reality. Novel ideas and meanings can also transform local cultural sensibilities and give rise to an expanded consciousness – what we now understand, after Manfred Steger,

Hudson, Chris, and Bart Barendregt (eds): Globalization and Modernity in Asia. Performative Moments. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462981126_ch01

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as the ‘global imaginary’ (Steger 2008). Images and symbols of the global that can promote this new consciousness increasingly appear in the public domain, in particular, but not exclusively, in the urban, mediatized and consumption-oriented spaces we recognize as sites of modernity. Alongside these visual cues, certain performative practices have the power to create an imagined connection with the global. These imaginaries, as Steger asserts, acquire solidity – a sense of the ‘real’– through the (re)construction of social space and the repetitive performance of certain communal qualities (Steger 2008, p. 7). How this awareness of the global is generated in specific contexts and sites of cultural activity still remains to be discovered. Steger and Paul James explain the complexity and the apparent neglect of this subjective dimension of the perception of the global: [G]lobalization involves both the objective spread and intensification of social relations across world space, and the subjective meanings, ideas, sensibilities, and understandings associated with those material processes of extension. Moreover, objective and subjective relations and meanings are bound up with each other. (Steger and James 2013, p. 19)

Steger and James suggest that we should further our understanding of how subjectivities are carried in narratives, stories, descriptions and ideas (2013, p. 19). One source of such narratives and stories that might expand meaning is to be found in the realm of performance. This book, therefore, focuses on selected performances of the global to consider how new versions of social imaginaries are created in an increasingly cosmopolitanized and interconnected Asia. Performance can stand for a wide range of publicly staged cultural expressions. Throughout this volume we use it in the broad sense of any instance of performing an artistic or creatively inspired work, composition, play, choreography or staged event. Such an expansive definition allows the inclusion of public protests, marches or rallies, crowd mobilizations, street art and other spectacles that may be either live or in mediated form. Performance inhabits many platforms including stage, film, arts festivals and exhibitions, and may articulate any political, community or national identities, consumer performance, mobile performance, tourism performance or performance of the modernized self in any combination of multiple aspects. This volume ranges freely over this wide spectrum of possibilities, focusing on the performative elements in and of them, and on the ‘action of performing’ them by an individual or a group of performers or artists (cf. OED n.d.) for and in front of, amidst, even with, a public. In accordance

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with Warner (2002), we see such publics as existing by the virtue of being addressed, through a text, but increasingly around the visual or the auditory. In our work, the focus is also on such cultural and performed ‘texts’ that can be picked up at different times and in different places by otherwise unrelated people, commonly referred to as ‘the public.’ As Warner asserts: ‘A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself’ (Warner 2002, p. 50). The public is, then, a significant part of the common repertoire of modern culture. Its power lies in its capacity to provide a new sense of belonging separate from state, law, or other pre-existing institutions by uniting strangers, solely through participation, around a new social imaginary (Warner 2002, p. 56). Some prefer to speak of publics and counter publics, with the latter referring to publics organized in resistance to the hegemonic discourses of a dominant public. ‘At the same time, part of the idea of public is precisely that communication furthers integration across lines of difference’ (Calhoun 2005, p. 286) while performance may also be the arena in which existing norms and values are contested. After the ‘performative turn’ of the 1990s, the idea that all human practice is ‘performed’ has gained ground, and many scholars have investigated performativity as constitutive of the public presentation of the self. It has also been acknowledged that shared experience of performance as event or spectacle can transform interpretations and actively create new meanings. Furthermore, the concept of performativity has become a prominent model for investigation in a range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, literary theory and queer studies, as well as performing arts studies. Each field formulates a particular approach to, and definition of, performativity. As a concept, performativity was famously brought to scholars’ attention by J.L. Austin in the 1950s. He explained how words, once uttered, do not simply reflect a perceived reality; utterances can also be performative, they can do something in the world, even produce a world (see Loxley 2007). The work of Victor Turner, Erving Goffman, Judith Butler, Marvin Carlson, Richard Schechner and Jon McKenzie, amongst others, has been the basis for investigation of the role performance plays in social life. This volume is a further contribution to the exploration of these concepts. The importance of performativity as an analytical category is underlined by the emergence of performance paradigms in a range of social sites. They appear not only in the idiom of the cultural (‘the performance of everyday life’; ‘the performance of self’), but are increasingly infiltrated by the economic and political. Regular references to such concepts as performance management, organizational performance and technological performance are an indication that Jon McKenzie is correct when he argues

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that performance is a mode of power, ‘a stratum of power/knowledge’ and that ‘discursive performativities and embodied performance are the knowledge forms of this power’ (2001b, p. 25). Our focus in this book, therefore, is not simply on artistry and theatricality, although that is of course important, but more particularly on some of the ways in which power, knowledge and forms of discipline of the self can be mobilized through discursive performativities, public spectacle and embodied performance. McKenzie also stresses the importance of theorizing the impact of globalization on performance. We similarly acknowledge the dialectic at work and the influence of cultural performances on the very processes of globalization itself. Many of the chapters in this volume, therefore, opt to study this two-way logic of global performance. Some also highlight the role of performance in global transference, a consequence, as McKenzie points out, of living in an age of global performance (2001a). Performance and performativity offer a fertile field in which to think about the ways in which cultural identity and agency are constantly constructed, recognized and reproduced, but also criticized. Our work highlights the ways in which performance provides a context in which the global, national or local identities can be expressed or condensed and reconfigured to produce a new consciousness of all three. For the authors in this volume then, performative moments can illustrate how new artistic and aesthetic interventions might generate a social imaginary in which the local can be transformed by the global and in which the problematics of both domains may be interrogated. We approach this through an investigation of the aesthetics of global presence – to be found in the images, symbols and narratives that diminish the distance between the near and far – in urban and mediated publics that transcends language to afford a new understanding of one’s place in the global environment. Our project underlines the significance of performance for understanding ‘the work of the imagination’ as an element in global processes. Appadurai’s well-known work on global cultural flows offers a useful starting point. There is, he argues, something critical and new in global practices: the imagination as a social practice (Appadurai 1996, p. 31). Terrell Carver takes up and expands this idea in Chapter 2. His and other contributions in the book rest on the premise that artistic interventions can generate re-imaginings of the local, in both urban and mediatized spaces, and help to renegotiate the connection between the local and the global. It is to the agency of the aesthetic, the artistic, and the work of the imagination that we turn in this project to understand the social imaginary that is made possible by the intersection of diverse ‘modern’ publics in the global era.

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Decentring Modernity Starting from cultural performances of the global, our work represents a renewal of interest in the ‘new imaginaries’ (Gaonkar 2002) of modernity that might arise in non-Western, and particularly Asian sites, how it may be experienced on a day-to-day basis by artists and their audiences and how it may help contribute to the sort of performances that authorize or disavow the values of the modern. The proliferation of discourses around the idea of multiple or alternative modernities (see, for example, Eisenstadt 2000; Gaonkar 2001) has led to questions about the historical and spatial locations of modernity. Modernity is not easily defined – and there may be no definitive or uncontested account possible – but the way people at various times and in different places have used the term can be traced and analysed (Rabinow 1989; Cooper 2005). Modernity is historically grounded but has ‘only an ambiguous and impermanent relationship to the reality we seek to describe’ (Mee and Kahn 2012, p. 4). Modernity might have had a particular meaning in the age of empire, when the projects of colonialism, science, capitalism and modernity were intimately intertwined (see Barlow 1997; Prakash 1999). Since then, however, it has morphed into something wholly different, particularly in an era of postcolonial and newly formed nation states. The need to rethink its meaning is even more pressing in the current era, commonly referred to as ‘late modernity.’ Beck has outlined the challenges to a modernity based on the values of the European Enlightenment, arguing that with the rise of globalization, there is ‘a new kind of capitalism, a new kind of economy, a new kind of global order, a new kind of personal life coming into being, all of which differ from earlier phases of social development. So we do need, sociologically and politically, a new frame of reference’ (Beck 2005). Beck’s remarks coincide with comparable calls to study non-Western modernities (for example, see Rofel 1999; Chu and Man 2010; Mee and Kahn 2012; Weintraub and Barendregt 2017) in their own right as a new frame of reference. These might not be derivative counter-modernities, second modernities or belated modernities, but distinctive iterations of the various strands of a global modernity. In a similar vein Dirlik (2010, p. 29) adds to the discussion by stressing that this new phase in the globalization of modernity ‘needs to be comprehended not just in the trivial sense of an originary (Eurocentric) modernity reaching out and touching all, even those who are left out of its benef its, […] but more importantly as a proliferation of claims on modernity.’ These claims

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are mostly inconsistent and aspirational, and therefore, necessarily unfinished. Contemporary arts and culture prove to be the perfect playground to experiment with such claims and aspirations, with performance increasingly at the forefront of arenas in which such claims of ‘being modern’ are pronounced. New research questions that have emerged, and new problematics of understanding that this volume seeks to explore, arise from an investigation of, on the one hand, local, nation-based claims to the modern (Dirlik 2010), and on the other, an overarching, but not necessarily all-encompassing global modernity. Our focus is the role played by performance in this inquiry. Through our frame of reference – the locally grounded but globally oriented ‘performative moment’ – we investigate contemporary processes of globalization in Asia that have given rise to publics, both distant and present, through a repertoire of performative aesthetics. In her study of Southeast Asia, Brenda Yeoh has pointed to the creation of ‘globalness’ through the integration of economic and cultural activity (Yeoh 2005) involving the arts and entertainment. Performative moments may reshape mediated and lived social space to become sites of experimentation of global modernity. Beck has noted that globalization is becoming increasingly decentred, and that a ‘reverse colonization’ is observable (Beck 2005). Non-Western societies now help to shape development in the West. The forms of globalization that this dialectical relationship have engendered, it has been suggested, is the starting point of a new modernity (Beck 1999). The development of cultural capital as mode of economic power in postindustrial Asia has radically reconfigured the importance of the West and its cultural programs. If the creative capacities of the West and its position as the dominant producer of globally dispersed cultural goods have been challenged, globalization itself may not only be decentred, but also recentred as Koichi Iwabuchi (2002) has suggested. Examples of a shifting centre are manifold, and include: the extraordinary popularity of the Korean Wave in most of East and Southeast Asia (Chua and Iwabuchi 2008; Sun Jung 2011; Hyunjoon Shin 2013); Thai ‘pop culture regionalism’ in mainland Southeast Asia; Islamic pop in the Malay-speaking world (Chua 2015); Chinese state collaboration with Western capital to produce local youth cultures (Fung 2006; see also the examples of ‘local absorptions of the global’ and ‘cultural domestication’ in Fung 2013). With emphasis on the performative, in this volume we examine further examples of cultural practices that may destabilize unilinear global forces as they promote non-Western modernities and recentre local and regional cultures.

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Asian Cosmopolitanisms Beck and Edgar Grande (2010) have pointed to the failure of social theory to account for fundamental transformations of society not only by modernity, but within (emphasis in the original) modernity. Recognition of this transformation has precipitated urgency for a new research one that is broader and more globally encompassing. Beck and Natan Sznaider argue that theorists now need to develop a methodology for understanding global processes that is more sophisticated than the methodological nationalism that equates society with national society (2006, p. 2). We need, they argue, a ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ that allows for the consideration of new units of analysis that will help prevent us from falling into the trap of dualisms. Beck and Grande problematize Eisenstadt’s work on multiple modernities, arguing that although Eisenstadt points out that Western modernity does not represent a universal type of modernization, he treats the various modernities as relatively closed units and the product of internal mechanisms and processes (Beck and Grande 2010, p. 414), albeit part of a network of global historical interaction and mutual transformation of cultural forms. The ‘cosmopolitan turn,’ leading to a rejection of the nation as the primary basis for understanding global modernities, is based on a cosmopolitanism that is not spatially fixed, is not tied to the ‘cosmos’ or the ‘globe’ but fixed in difference. The principle of cosmopolitanism is that of constant boundary-crossing and investigation of it may benefit from ‘a cross-cultural analysis that centers less on the binarist global-local divide than on the processes of subject-formation among native – in this case, Asian – peoples’ (Chow 2007, p. 293). If national organization as the structuring principle of society can no longer serve as the reference point for observers (Beck and Sznaider 2006, p. 4, but see also Steger’s arguments), we seek to identify a new reference point that could explain transformations brought about by globalization. This is not premised on the demise of the nation state, but recognizes the need for a new approach to understanding global processes and a demand for a new unit of analysis. In order to overcome the theoretical limitations of tying ‘multiple modernities’ to the national cultures, this book explores new theoretical possibilities based on cultural formations at the sub-national level. This goes beyond the well-used triad of spatial scales – global/national/local – to consider a level of engagement with global modernity that is at once none of these and all of these. The forms of interaction are altogether fluid, ephemeral and transitory. Like Collier and Ong’s ‘global assemblages,’ they are articulated in specific situations to ‘define new material, collective and discursive relationships’

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(2005, p. 4). Our unit of analysis, leading to a new frame of reference for global modernity, is the performative moment that exists in the fluid spaces and intermittent instances where global, regional and national cultural programs temporarily, yet noticeably, intersect and transform each other. Such intersections might consist of a number of interrelated dynamics, as for example, when global Islamism met neo-liberal Asian values in the lead up to the national elections in Malaysia in 2012. Compounded by feelings of frustration and a sense that the public was being denied information, the result was the sudden, momentary emergence of a singular Islamic flash mob (Chapter 10). In other cases, such performative interventions may comprise Filipino arts being used to talk back to both nationalist cultural policy and universalist themes at the world expo (see Chapter 8), or Indian spiritual tradition being taken up in the global format of the reality show (Chapter 7), resulting in often unstable and surprising hybrids. This approach extends and expands Singaporean academic Wan-Ling Wee’s work on the arts and the aesthetic dimension of social life as one of the most visible sites in which to examine the ‘New Asia’ (Wee 2010). Performance is increasingly central to imagining a cosmopolitan and multicultural Asia, and to the generation of a ‘Globalized Asia’ (Wee 2010, p. 92). The ‘Asian Modern,’ a product of a ‘globalizing Asia’ (Wee 2007, p. 2), finds its most creative articulation through the arts. The chapters in this book contribute to the development of a new paradigm for understanding the emergence of a ‘new Asian modernity’ in which the convergence and dialectical interplay between the global and the national is a key feature. The site of performance is where disjuncture and potentially conflicting modes of modernity may be appreciated; they have, on the one hand, destabilized and disassembled national and global modernities, and on the other hand, reassembled them in new modes as concentrated, condensed spaces of cultural intensity. This not only repudiates any lingering attachment to the idea of a binary opposition between the West and Asia, but deploys the artistic event to demonstrate this. The rise of new, transitory, affective modernities is the crucial element in the decentring of the West and the recentring of Asia.

Performative Moments in Globalized Asia Bali has long been recognized as a site of heightened performativity with enduring links to the global through its accommodation of foreign scholars, artists and other expat communities. Craig Latrell (Chapter 3) expands on our understanding of this persistent image of Bali to consider the ways in

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which tourism and the marketing of Bali can offer possibilities for performing re-imagined identities as a feature of global modernity. Performance becomes the most visible and obvious site for the merging of what might be recognized as Balinese exoticism with New Age ideas imported from the West. While Bali has long been a favoured site for the construction of the Western self, developing technologies have created opportunities for new versions of personal transformation through performance. Latrell identifies three domains in which this takes place: destination weddings; yoga and spiritual tourism; and ‘hook-up’ apps such as Grindr. All are facilitated by the affordances of the Internet. The use of the Grindr app for ‘hook-ups’ negotiates connections between the local and the global, while at the same time complicating the distinctions between foreigner and local. All these examples also rely on the performativity of Bali itself, albeit in a commodified and technologized version of global modernity. Bali becomes a stage set where fantasies can be performed, identities tried on like costumes or masks, and the global self, reimagined through the local. Global desire for the exotic and the authentic, the search for self, and the performance of sexuality in virtual and real spaces can merge in the local to transform identities, as it transforms the island itself. A salient feature of modernity and a globally oriented life is convenience shopping and non-stop ease of access to goods and services. This is especially true of Japan where the konbini – convenience stores – are a ubiquitous presence running on a 24/7 cycle. Peter Eckersall (Chapter 4) explains that, while the konbini are popular, and a sign of Japan’s globality, they are also an example of capitalist deterritorialization and the weakening of ties between culture and place. The practical expediency they offer is dependent to a large extent on the ‘freeter’ generation, that is, low-paid young people in insecure work who form part of the underclass of exploited labour in the global economy, now sometimes known as the ‘precariat.’ Eckersall discusses two artistic interventions that offer critiques of the konbini system. Firstly, he examines the ways in which Nakamura Masato’s 1997 artwork Traumatrauma drew on the aesthetics of convenience stores to reimagine nostalgia and familiarized social environments in the context of the commodity enterprise of convenience capitalism. Secondly, he discusses playwright and director Okada Toshiki’s theatre group chelfitsch. Okada is noted for work that often reflects the dystopian, alienating aspects of neo-liberal globality. Several of Okada’s plays treat the condition of being trapped in a sort of ‘slow time’ of dull servitude that is a feature of the global economy. His second case study is Okada’s 2014 play Super Premium Soft Double Vanilla Rich, an exploration of consumerism, precarious employment and the social and cultural experience

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of konbini in an environment where workers are depersonalized and easily replaceable. While konbini are popular and familiar, they are also a symbol of the existential crises that have resulted from Japan’s super-modernity. Leonie Schmidt explores two recent performances in Indonesia that contest common representations of Islam in a post-9/11 environment (Chapter 5). Both of these performance pieces evoke fragments of a local past to question the construction of a global present. One performance, Membuat Obama dan Perdamaian yang dibuat-buat (The making of Obama and artificial peace, 2009) by Indonesian artist Wilman Syahnur, involves an effigy of former US president Barack Obama being driven around Yogyakarta in a pedicab. This locates the performance in the past of Indonesia where Obama spent some years of his childhood, while at the same time linking it definitively to the global of geo-political politics. While Obama had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and was celebrated for his ties to Indonesia, Schmidt shows that the public focus on fragments of his past that located him as belonging to Indonesia was not without its contestations and protests. Benjamin’s references to rags and refuse, a framework Schmidt uses to bring the past into the global present, have a particular resonance when the audience sees Obama thrown out of his vehicle and reduced to rubble. If the past is juxtaposed against the present, it also suggests a possible future of a reconstructed Obama after he is taken to the Islamic hospital for treatment. Schmidt’s second example is an installation that reimagines the global heightening of security measures for travellers through the experience of Muslims. Considering Indonesian artist Arahmaiani’s visual presentation of her own experience as a Muslim woman and her treatment by immigration officials on arrival in Los Angeles, Schmidt shifts her frame from Benjamin’s ragpicker of history to Nora’s lieux de mémoire to take up the theme of memory in the global political context. The hotel room of her incarceration is the setting of the installation, functioning as a symbolic site of global memory. In Chapter 6 Chua Beng Huat examines the performative possibilities of film to reimagine national identities in the context of exile, longing and desire for home. Discussing Singapore film-maker Tan Pin Pin’s 2014 documentary To Singapore with Love, Chua reveals the contentious relationship between the local and the global through voices from exile. When members of the Malayan Communist Party were driven into forced diaspora and dispersed in the 1970s and 1980s, their love for their nation never diminished, despite the four or five decades of exile and the state’s threat to their personal welfare. Some of these ageing political outcasts are in self-imposed exile, others have been forbidden from returning to Singapore. The local of their

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childhoods and their continued desire for belonging is brought into sharp focus with the Singapore Censorship Board’s decision to deny it a censorship rating, thereby effectively preventing it from being released commercially. Chua highlights the potential for film to generate renewed interest in the continuing contest over Singapore’s history, and over questions of national belonging. In doing so, he also highlights its limitations. He notes that film as a medium of performance and spectacle makes a far more effective statement than books, particularly since Singapore as a nation may have a tenuous attachment to the written word, but film is a highly popular form of entertainment. Since the government cited security concerns for their decision to ban the film, it is clear that the performance of the banished and isolated self that is made available through Tan’s interviews with the former communists has refocused the government’s attention on the power of narrative performativities to unsettle state-sanctioned historical orthodoxy and call into question the extent of civic freedoms. If performance is ‘a stratum of power/knowledge’ articulated through embodied performance, as McKenzie argues, this power can be used not only by the state, but also against it. Popular factual television in India provides a vibrant performative public for growing numbers of lifestyle experts. Tania Lewis (Chapter 7) shows that performances by globally recognizable figures of expertise such as the celebrity chefs and exponents of the personal makeover can highlight the ontological significance of performance as a nexus of power/knowledge. With the momentous economic and social changes that have occurred in India in the past three decades, new lifestyle norms and aspirations, both globally and locally focused, have demanded new forms of discursive performance to promote them. Lewis’ chapter shows that the rise of the popular expert in India has included a multifarious collection of motivational figures performing in the mode of the didactic to promote lifestyle advice that encompasses transformed versions of the traditional along with the globally modern. This army of lifestyle experts includes yoga gurus, celebrity chefs, gadget gurus, and travel, taste and fashion advisors. Lifestyle television has constructed a new imaginary to exploit a growing middle-class aspirationalism. It emerges in the pedagogical and performative space of a new public inhabited by an outward-looking cosmopolitan elite who might have undergone Beck’s internal globalization (2002, p. 17). Modernized adaptations of Indian spiritual traditions that combine spiritual advice with new understandings of selfhood to promote a modern, globally oriented self, aimed at the globetrotting entrepreneurial elite, are an indication that local performance may also influence and transform the global.

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If we were in any way sceptical about the validity of McKenzie’s suggestion that we are in an age of global performance, the Shanghai International Exposition of 2010 would dispel any such doubts. William Peterson (Chapter 8) focuses on the Philippines Pavilion at the expo as a site for the promotion of a national narrative in the context of the global. Participants at the expo were given the opportunity to showcase their nation by engaging with the expo’s overall theme of ‘Better City, Better Life.’ The Philippines was able to exploit the almost universally received view of the Philippines as a nation of performers to conflate forms of embodied performance, including dance and music with other paradigms of performance such as the organizational practices of communities or nations. For this reason, the pavilion deployed two registers of performance to define the nation and reimagine it through the concept of ‘well performing cities.’ The first recreated an imagined past that never really existed – indicated by an aesthetics of kitsch pseudo-ethnographic objects and stereotypical Filipino dishes to fulfil audience expectations of authenticity; the second imagines a future of global engagement predicated on the efficient performance of urban infrastructure and organizational capabilities. Drawing on Appadurai’s conceptualization of the global era as defined by a range of ‘scapes,’ while focusing on the pavilion and its rehearsal of stereotyped images, Peterson shows how global transference involves new configurations of the local and global in unpredictable flows. Mobile performances can provide the conditions for the reinvention of the local in the changing context of the global and create publics in which the processes of cultural negotiation and accommodation can play out. Chris Hudson (Chapter 9) investigates the publics created by grobak (mobile Indonesian food carts) that were imported from the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta for the 2012 Melbourne Festival. Performing as travelling objects, they moved from location to location around the city of Melbourne, selling Indonesian food and reconfiguring social space as they went. The publics created as they journeyed through the streets of Melbourne were both mediated and lived social spaces, since they provided, along with the satay and other Indonesian dishes, the technological means to Skype a corresponding grobak in Yogyakarta. Moments of globalness were generated when people eating lunch at a grobak in Melbourne could interact in real time with people eating lunch at a grobak in Yogyakarta. This reconfigured the local of Melbourne as a hybrid space – something in between the global and the local. The mode of technologized modernity that made this performance possible created a ‘thirdspace’ in which the imagined presence of the global could produce a magical moment of translocal co-presence constructed across time and space.

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Barendregt’s chapter (Chapter 10) uses the instance of an Islamist flash mob in the Malaysian city of Shah Alam in late 2012 to explain how, in Muslim Southeast Asia, a long-standing Islamist visual and auditory repertoire is currently being re-shaped in and through its interaction with both a national public sphere and international trends, It also explains how a new-found repertoire of spectacular street performance provides Malay Islamists with the means to articulate everyday political concerns and local claims to the modern with global pop aesthetics. In doing so, his chapter moves away from the ways street spectacle and a remediation of such performances through social media have mostly been examined for progressive and ‘artivist’ causes only, showing little concern for conservative, poor, reactionary or, in this case, Islamist appropriation of the very same imagery, technology and formats. Barendregt’s contribution aims to explain what is so appealing about the global format of the flash mob, and by whom, what and to what ends it is being mobilized locally in Southeast Asia. The flash mob, in its combination of mob politics and sheer commercialism, and its transgressive and attention-seeking noise, is shown to be a transitory and highly unstable genre that not only contributes to a new Southeast Asian Muslim imagery but also captures the spirit of a modern Malaysia in precarious times. Focusing on moral, cultural and physical purity as normative modes of modernity, Jeroen de Kloet (Chapter 11) examines cinema as a site where Chinese reinscriptions of modernity can be performed. Selecting one film from each of ‘three Chinas’ – set in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Beijing – De Kloet approaches questions about a globally oriented modern China through the concept of ‘sanitized modernities.’ In urban environments permeated by global trends in consumption practices, fraught family and romantic relationships and changing social norms, amongst other issues, one aspect of modernity emerges as salient. Purity, in its metaphorical and physical senses, can become the boundary marker between global modernity and local tradition. Whereas modernity is imagined as a state where impurity and contamination have been largely banished, modernity, as performed in these examples from Chinese cinema, is an aspiration and a process, rather than a state to be achieved. The performance of modernity in the cosmopolitan enclaves of urban China can be understood as an aspect of the stratum of power/knowledge to which McKenzie refers. Imagined relationships of Chinese modernities to a Western modernity with its roots in the Enlightenment, are however, open to contestations and questions about the limitations of sanitized and purified modernity, especially in its intersection with gender and sexuality. Revisiting the multiple modernities

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thesis by locating purity and its binary opposite at the centre, De Kloet shows that global modernity can be relocated and reinvented in multiple sites and everyday acts. In Chapter 12 we return to Indonesia. The city of Yogyakarta in central Java is a site of deep cultural significance, celebrated for its enduring and vibrant Islamic court tradition. This cultural tradition now merges, in a cosmopolitan space, with a modern economy and robust national political institutions. Yogyakarta’s diverse population and reputation for tolerance made it the obvious choice to stage a performance by German theatre collective Rimini Protokoll. Barbara Hatley (Chapter 12) describes the collective’s ‘100%’ project – a globally transferable format adapted to local conditions that first appeared in 2008 as 100% Berlin, as she investigates a 2015 production of the Indonesian iteration, 100% Yogya. The performance can be understood as a mode of global transference for several reasons: the format has been used in a large number of cities around the world as it has moved from site to site; the Yogyakarta production was part of a season of arts and other events showcasing German artistic works; and because the many versions of ‘100%’ are typified by an attempt to promote shared human values and individual characteristics as global and universal. In collaboration with local theatre group Teater Garasi, a hundred inhabitants of Yogyakarta were gathered together and asked, during the course of the performance, to express aspects of themselves that reveal differences and similarities, such as personal characteristics, religious behaviour, and daily activities. The performance of such a modern reflexive self seems not to be at odds with a more traditional orientation to community. A portrait is presented of the city as a unified and inclusive public, while at the same time celebrating difference. Hatley points out, however, that the production also reveals the limits to the tolerance of globally mobile citizens and the cosmopolitanization outlined by Beck when she describes the desire of some citizens to construct the Other of cosmopolitanism through racism, sexism and homophobia. Together with the other chapters then, Hatley’s contribution illustrates our contention that certain urban spaces and media technologies can be the locations of performative moments of cultural intensity through which new forms of consciousness may be refracted through local and global iterations of modernity. This book investigates a number of sites where new publics shaped by repertoires of performative practices can generate creative domains within which new imaginaries emerge along the local-global nexus.

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Works Cited Ahmed, Akbar S., and Hastings Donnan, eds. (1994) Islam, Globalization and Postmodernity. London: Routledge. Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barlow, Tani E. (1997) Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia. Durham: Duke University Press. Beck, Ulrich (2000) What Is Globalization? Cambridge Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich (2002) ‘The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies.’ Theory, Culture and Society 19.1-2: 17-44. Beck, Ulrich (2005) ‘What Is Globalization? Some Radical Questions.’ Interview by Danilo Zolo. Jura Gentium: Rivista di filosofia del diritto internazionale e della politica globale. http://www.juragentium.org/topics/wlgo/en/beck.htm. Beck, Ulrich, and Edgar Grande (2010) ‘Varieties of Second Modernity: The Cosmopolitan Turn in Social and Political Research.’ British Journal of Sociology 61.3: 409-443. Beck, Ulrich, and Natan Sznaider (2006) ‘Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences: A Research Agenda.’ British Journal of Sociology 57.13: 2-23. Calhoun, Craig (2005) ‘Public.’ In Tony Bennet, Lawrence Grossberg and Meghan Morris, eds., New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Malden: Blackwell, 282-287. Chen, Kuan-Hsing (2010) Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham: Duke University Press. Chen, Kuan-Hsing, and Beng Huat Chua (2007) The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Chow, Rey (2007) ‘Afterword.’ In Edwin Jurriëns and Jeroen de Kloet, eds. Cosmopatriots: On Distant Belongings and Close Encounters. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 291-294. Chu, Yiu-wai, and Eva Kit-Wah Man (2010) ‘Introduction.’ In Yiu-wai Chu and Eva Kit-Wah Man, eds., Contemporary Asian Modernities: Transnationality, Interculturality, and Hybridity. Bern: Peter Lang, 9-24. Chua, Beng Huat (2012) Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Chua, Beng Huat (2015) ‘Inter-Asia Referencing and Shifting Frames of Comparison.’ In Carol Johnson, Vera Mackie and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, eds., The Social Sciences in the Asian Century. Canberra: ANU Press, 67-80. Chua, Beng Huat, and Koichi Iwabuchi, eds. (2008) East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave. Vol. 1. Hong Kong University Press. Collier, Stephen J., and Aihwa Ong (2005) ‘Global Assemblages, Anthropological Problems.’ In Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier, eds., Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden: Blackwell, 3-21.

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Cooper, Frederick (2005) Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dirlik, Arif (2010) ‘Asian Modernities in the Perspective of Global Modernity.’ In Yiu-wai Chu and Eva Kit-Wah Man, eds., Contemporary Asian Modernities: Transnationality, Interculturality, and Hybridity. New York: Peter Lang, 27-54. Eisenstadt, S.N. (2000) ‘Multiple Modernities.’ Daedalus 129.1: 1-29. Fung, Anthony (2006) ‘“Think Globally, Act Locally”: China’s Rendezvous with MTV.’ Global Media and Communication 2.1: 71-88. Fung, Anthony, ed. (2013) Asian Popular Culture: The Global (Dis)continuity. New York: Routledge. Gaonkar, Dilip P., ed. (2001) Alternative Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. Gaonkar, Dilip P. (2002) ‘Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction.’ Public Culture 14.1: 1-9. Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
 Goh, Beng-Lan (2015) ‘Uncertainties, Perils, and Hope of an Asian Century: A View from Southeast Asia.’ Cultural Dynamics 27.2: 203-213. Iwabuchi, Koichi (2002) Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Iwabuchi, Kōichi, Stephen Muecke, and Mandy Thomas, eds. (2004) Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Jung, Sun (2010) Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption: Yonsama, Rain, Oldboy, K-Pop Idols. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Loxley, James (2007) Performativity. London: Routledge. McKenzie, Jon (2001a) ‘Performance and Global Transference.’ TDR/The Drama Review 45.3: 5-7. McKenzie, Jon (2001b) Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London: Routledge. Mee, Wendy, and Joel S. Kahn (2012) ‘Introduction.’ In Wendy Mee and Joel S. Kahn, eds., Questioning Modernity in Indonesia and Malaysia. Singapore: NUS Press, 1-18. OED (n.d.) ‘Performance.’ Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prakash, Gyan (1999) Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
 Rabinow, Paul (1989) French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rofel, Lisa (1999) Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schechner, Richard (2000) ‘Performance as a “Formation of Power and Knowledge.”’ TDR/The Drama Review 44.4: 5-7. Shin, Hyunjoon (2013) ‘K-pop, the Sound of Subaltern Cosmopolitanism.’ In Kōichi Iwabuchi, Eva Tsai, and Chris Berry, eds., Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 116-123.

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Steger, Manfred (2008) The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steger, Manfred, and Paul James (2013) ‘Levels of Subjective Globalization: Ideologies, Imaginaries, Ontologies.’ Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 12: 17-40. Taylor, Charles (2004) Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. Warner, Michael (2002) ‘Publics and Counterpublics.’ Public Culture 14.1: 49-90. Wee, C.J.W.-L. (2007) The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. Wee, C.J.W.-L. (2010) ‘“We Asians”? Modernity, Visual Arts Exhibitions, and East Asia,’ boundary 2 37: 91-126. Weintraub Andrew, and Bart Barendregt, eds. (2017) Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Yeoh, B.S.A. (2005) ‘The Global Cultural City? Spatial Imagineering and Politics in the (Multi)cultural Marketplaces of Southeast Asia.’ Urban Studies 42.5/6: 945-968.

About the Authors Chris Hudson is Associate Professor of Asian Media and Culture in the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She has published widely on globalization and culture in Asia and is the author of Beyond the Singapore Girl: Discourses of Gender and Nation in Singapore (Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) Press, 2013), and co-author with Denise Varney, Peter Eckersall and Barbara Hatley of Theatre and Performance in the Asia Pacific: Regional Modernities in the Global Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). This volume is an outcome of an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant. Email: [email protected] Bart Barendregt is Associate Professor at the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology. Bart has an interest in popular and digital culture, and has published on Southeast Asian performance, new and mobile media, and (Islamic) pop music. Bart is currently working on a book dealing with Islamist boy band music and the mixing of religion, youth culture and politics among Malaysian and Indonesian student activists. He is editor of Sonic Modernities in the Malay World (Brill, 2014), and co-editor of Green Consumption: The Global Rise of Eco-Chic (Bloomsbury, 2013), the volume Recollecting Resonance (Brill, 2013) and the volume Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities (University of Hawai’i Press, 2017). Email: [email protected]

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Globalizing the Imagination Introductory Reflections Terrell Carver Abstract Imaginaries are where imagination gets to work. A global imaginary arises through factuality and ideology as globalization and globalism intertwine. This pair of concepts cannot be simply defined and ‘applied.’ Rather they are themselves political projects – by providing answers, they discourage questions. The present volume works the other way round by investigating the very local, and presenting Anglophone readers with the very exotic. This research strategy exposes the flow of power relations through which – and for which – the various performances studied here are constituted. Chief among these power relations are commercial interests, as they merge with nation states, non-governmental organizations and international ‘players.’ The global imaginary is no longer a zone of touristy innocence but rather hosts a darker realm of anti-democratic blowback and religious zealotry. Keywords: globalization, imaginaries, power relations, performance, the local

The imagination is where globalization meets globalism.1 Any conceptual exercise is inherently an act of imagination. As a phenomenon (if it is one), globalization doesn’t tell us what it is. We don’t ‘know it when we see it.’ Someone needs to persuade us with facts, figures, statistics, illustrations, anecdotes, overviews, op-eds and the like. However, it is not a bad idea to ask who is persuading us of what, and why, and to be just a bit suspicious: not so much of factual claims but why they are being made and for whose benefit. 1 For introductory reading on this distinction, see Steger (2009, 2013), Steger, Battersby and Siracusa (2014) and Steger and James (2015).

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Moreover, we need histories, debates, opinions and views, or otherwise this supposed phenomenon isn’t all that interesting and significant. Moralizing discourse frames factuality for us, as readers are told how to relate to what is said to be factual. Globalization seems descriptive, but meaning comes with morality: Are we for, against, on board, resisting? This is where globalism comes in as an ideology, a suite of ideas that tell us morally and therefore politically how globalization is inevitable, unstoppable, a march of history. Perhaps it is the cause of planetary problems, but then more than likely, so we’re told, it will provide the technological yet economically driven ‘fixes.’ In practice, though, the two – globalization and globalism – are intertwined, but not because one is factual and the other ideological. They arrive together in a single imaginary, because imaginaries are what make facts and figures persuasive. Indeed, imaginaries are why we have facts and figures marshalled together in different ways to persuade us of different things. In short, globalization isn’t a concept that one ‘applies’; it’s a diverse range of ongoing political projects, even when rhetorically the language is ‘merely descriptive’ (Martin 2013). How we are persuaded to view and understand the world is what makes it go round for each of us. And how each of us contributes, one way or another, to financing these projects – and not just overtly ‘political’ ones – should be an important part of our discussion. We are consumers, tax payers (direct and indirect), wage earners and wealth holders (or not, of course). Unsurprisingly globalization/globalism is most discussed in the economically wealthy zones of the world and the distributed populations in global cities that make up this slice of the world’s population. Globalization and globalism are not ‘out there,’ independent of us. We are already in this imaginary, and we make and re-make it every day. There is ample evidence of long-distance trade (in some sense) in objects and materials even in the Stone Age, and even more evidence as such ‘goods’ proliferated in the early ages of metalworking. What is ‘local,’ rather than ‘long distance’ begins to raise the issue ‘What is “global”?’ How far away from homebase do you have to go, or does your object have to come, to make ‘global’ a relevant descriptor? And – necessarily raising the moral/political evaluator – are you looking at an ‘alien invader’ or a valuable import? And what was going on at the other end of the supply chain? The twenty-first-century perspective is one well acquainted with the global perspective, metonymically evoked by The Blue Marble, a photograph of planet Earth taken by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft in orbit in 1972, one of the most widely circulated images ever produced. This image trades

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on the ‘reality effect’ of the medium, that is, the apparent ‘photo-as-window’ and ‘the camera doesn’t lie,’ two important tropes through which sense is made of the world so that we can, in turn, make sense of it (Rose 2016). Of course, as an image it could mean any number of things, and thus represent or feed any number of imaginaries. These could range from target finding for a ‘Star Wars’ missile system, to holistic ecologies of a ‘living planet’; or from human triumphalism in taking the picture, to the insignificance of human bodies and constructs in relation to a large planet with very big oceans. Perhaps another useful historical reference point is an era of ‘voyages’ postdating AD 1000. The early sixteenth century produced the first circumnavigation of the globe by a single expedition, and the Spanish occupation of Manila an East/West trade hub. Here we get seriously commercial and – as is often missed out or underplayed in globalization studies – we confront gold-driven greedy conquests and profit-driven colonialisms and settlements. And here we confront precious metals, luxury products (tobacco, sugar) and mass migration, forced as in slavery, or driven by economic or political circumstance. And here we also confront resistance, rebellion, ‘nation-building’ and multinational enterprise. The alignment of state power, said to be ‘public’ in some sense, with economic oligarchy, said to be ‘private’ in some sense, is fully recognizable in these developments, if not fully worked out to twenty-first-century scales and circuits (Panitch and Gindin 2013). Globalization, understood in this way, proceeds with considerable violence, and globalism works hard to justify this, or erase it as much as possible, pushing it into the past and bombing it in the present. What counts as violence, and what as salvation, though, is increasingly debated. Missionaries for various religions were also missionaries for globalization, if not for the obviously commercial and colonial projects mentioned above. But many times, of course, they were obviously much the same thing. And, of course, resistance doesn’t have to be ‘local,’ because international religious movements with global aspirations aren’t always friendly to the kind of ‘free trade’ commercialism and widening inequalities that globalism characteristically justifies. There are thus many globalizations, deriving from many performances, and many globalisms from which these performances derive. By taking this performative perspective we move away from traditional ‘Is it? Or isn’t it?’ debating binaries into a more subject-centred (but not ‘purely subjective’) approach. The chapters in this volume present studies of this sort in fascinating detail.

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A subject-centred approach brings us quite sharply to two favoured academic categories: identity and subjectivity. Taking these to be singular aspects (or even properties, in some sense) of individual humans negates the inherent sociality (and necessarily performative character) of what we are trying to talk about. Even referencing multiple identities or changing subjectivities ‘within’ an individual does violence to the social character of meaning-making and the (imperfect) reception of what anyone is trying to do (rather than merely ‘to say’). ‘All the world’s a stage’ now has a literality for us, however true it was in Shakespeare’s (early colonial) times. The chapters in this volume illustrate contexts through which ‘we’ as Anglophone observers can marvel at the complex constructions of the referentially familiar local with the exotically imagined global. But rather than tracking what ‘the exotic’ might mean there and here, a more interesting angle is to appreciate the play of morally charged power relations through which these various performances – and within which this volume’s academic observers – have necessarily proceeded. The performance and perception of tourism – even if academically motivated – is something that our authors here are adept at negotiating, and something that readers will want to consider, at least in their imagined encounters with the subjects and subject-matter. Any amount of hybridized, kitschy and touristy performances and activities will raise anxieties (or not) about authenticity, sustainability, ‘the environment,’ moralities, relationships, economic ‘benefits’ and the like, with an almost infinite array of intersecting and competing moral valuations. Our authors are doing their best to articulate some of these, and to make the political and judgemental processes visible, at least to an introductory degree. The global imaginary has been very largely presented as the commercial imaginary – free trade, economic growth, cash-ified fun, brand-ified uniformity, parties and frivolity, weddings and festivals, tours and trips etc. In the background we have the ‘screens of power,’ providing the financial flows through which goods, services, consumers and producers are constantly moving.2 Or not. Since the early days of globalized thinking and digital connectivity perhaps the anti-globalisms, and concomitant anti-globalization ‘fundamentalisms’ deserve more scrutiny. These appear in the chapters below in residual ‘localisms.’ But from the perspective of 2017 we can see – very strikingly – something else: ‘populisms’ and networks, coincidences and ‘memes.’ These interconnections appear to celebrate anti-commercial moralities and 2

The classic and highly prescient account is Luke (1990).

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religious movements, anti-expert and anti-factual epistemologies, impunity and hypocrisy, demonization and exclusion. And they seem to be ‘catching’ within polities across the globe. In that light those who want to consume cheaply, tour exotically and encounter ‘the other’ near at hand may be in for a difficult time. Be on the lookout for signs of ‘reverse globalizations’ and ‘dark globalisms’ as you read, and consider your position.

Works Cited Luke, Timothy W. (1990) Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Martin, James (2013) Politics and Rhetoric: An Introduction. (Milton Park: Routledge. Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin (2013) The Making of Global Capitalism. London: Verso. Rose, Gillian (2016) Visual Methodologies, 4th ed. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Steger, Manfred B. (2009) Globalisms: The Great Ideological Struggle of the Twentyfirst Century, 3rd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Steger, Manfred B. (2013) Globalization: A Very Short Introduction, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steger, Manfred B., and Paul James, eds. (2015) Globalization: The Career of a Concept. Milton Park: Routledge. Steger, Manfred B., Paul Battersby, and Joseph M. Siracusa, eds. (2014) The Sage Handbook of Globalization. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

About the Author Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol, UK. He co-edits a book series ‘Globalization’ for Rowman & Littlefield and has published widely on social theories and interpretive methodologies. His latest book is Marx (2017) for Polity Press in their series ‘Classic Thinkers.’ Email: [email protected]

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Weddings, Yoga, Hook-ups Performed Identities and Technology in Bali Craig Latrell Abstract From its earliest days as a tourist destination, Bali has served as a stage for personal transformation and reinvention, acted out by expats and tourists in search of the exoticism and spirituality supposedly offered by Bali. This chapter traces the growth and practice of three contemporary phenomena in Bali and how they function as virtual and/or physical spaces in which individuals can try on different identities, to be later either discarded or kept. The three phenomena discussed are: destination weddings; Eat, Pray, Love tours and yoga; and the Internet gay dating app Grindr. Besides creating spaces in which to enact provisional identities these phenomena also interact with more traditional Balinese cultural and social structures, refashioning local culture at an astonishing rate. In this way, Bali’s image as a place of spiritual and personal transformation and renewal has been extended through technology, with traditional representations of Bali merging with New Age spiritual notions and expat entrepreneurship, and purveyed through the Internet. Keywords: Bali, weddings, yoga, technology, performed identities

From its beginnings as a centre for international tourism in the early twentieth century, Bali has served in one way or another as a stage for the creation and re-imagination of performed identities, generally those of Westerners seeking exoticism 1 (or seeking to become exotic themselves), 1 Exoticism is an unstable concept, historically exhibiting both positive and negative connotations. In its former negative meaning, the word ‘exotic’ meant ‘outlandish, barbarous, strange, uncouth’ (OED n.d.). Exoticism in this negative connotation falls into the mode of discourse described as ‘Orientalism,’ functioning as part of what Edward Said called an ‘enormously systematic’ mechanism for subjugating the Orient (1978, p. 3). However, this meaning has now

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and more recently including those from other parts of Asia as well. The idea of personal transformation has proven central to Bali’s image in the world of international travel and tourism: early tourists and researchers went to Bali to encounter the exotic, the spiritual, or the primitive, and to discover in themselves something more authentic, or to mark themselves as different because they had found a supposed authenticity, and to a surprising degree, this still holds true. As MacCannell’s early work shows, tourists are pilgrims in search of authenticity (MacCannell and Lippard 1999), and this is still the case in Bali. Writers including Adrian Vickers (1989), Uni Wikan (1990), Kathy Foley (1992) and many others (see, for example, Latrell 1999, 2000, 2008) have written about the elastic Balinese version of exoticism: from the French theatre critic Antonin Artaud (1976: ‘On the Balinese Theatre’ [1931]), to American writer and self-help guru Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love (2006), Bali has served as a sort of Rorschach test of what it means to be exotic, illuminating as much about the observer as it does about Bali. Bali, it should be noted, is a Hindu enclave in predominantly Islamic Indonesia. This chapter concerns the ways in which Bali’s image has changed subtly yet profoundly over the past decade, with traditional notions of Balinese exoticism merging with New Age ideas, technology and expatriate entrepreneurship, at an ever-accelerating rate. Earlier notions of Balinese exoticism – ‘a fantasy of all the splendors of the Orient’ as Adrian Vickers (1989, p. 2) put it – centred on a variety of cultural forms, but most often on performance, as its most succinct and visible expression. These culturally centred images reflect the interests of many of the earliest expatriates in Bali, the most famous of whom were German painter Walter Spies, Canadian ethnomusicologist Colin McPhee, and American anthropologists Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Jane Belo. While this artistically driven image of Bali continues to draw academics and artists to Bali, the current incarnation of Balinese exoticism is cobbled together in what might be thought of as typical postmodern fashion to create an eclectic and fluid mix that encompasses New Age ideas and practices (yoga, some watered-down Buddhism, and the 1960s ‘human potential movement,’ to name a few) superimposed on the traditional culturally centred images, and turbocharged by Internet entrepreneurship. Following is a description of three contemporary phenomena as they are practiced in Bali: destination weddings, yoga and spiritual tourism, and the all but been displaced by a more favourable notion of exoticism as ‘having the attraction of the strange or foreign, glamorous’ (OED n.d.). It is this notion of exoticism as something to be prized, suggesting enhanced spirituality, mystery, sexuality, and authenticity that has taken over in the popular imagination, as well as in the advertising and marketing of such places as Bali.

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use of ‘hook-up’ apps such as Grindr. What the phenomena have in common is that they incorporate and extend traditional notions of Balinese exoticism still prevalent in the West, while using technology to create new spaces in which to choose and enact transformed identities. Each of the phenomena interacts with Balinese culture in somewhat different ways: destination weddings incorporate and recreate aspects of ‘traditional’ culture; yoga retreats and spiritual tourism form new publics and communities; while Grindr simultaneously challenges and preserves local values and social structures. These new created spaces are both virtual and actual, and they are refashioning local culture at an astonishing pace. As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1999) has pointed out, ‘processes of globalization produce the local, while altering the very nature and value of the local.’ Although the following discussion centres (with the exception of one event) on the area around Ubud, the same complicated interactions abound across the island. While expatriates may appear to drive the processes financially, native Balinese frequently participate in secondary, yet crucial, roles as exuberantly as the expatriate founders. In this way, these new spaces represent a far more diverse and fast-moving dynamic than previous versions of the appropriation and reinvention of the Balinese exotic.2These new iterations have led to the creation of a multitude of commercial events in Ubud, a town in the uplands of Bali, widely understood to be the cultural heart of the island. These include, amongst others, the BaliSpirit Festival, the mission of which is to ‘to awaken and nourish each individual’s potential for positive change within leading to positive change in our homes, in our communities, and around the world’ (BaliSpirit Yoga Festival 2015); and the sprawling Yoga Barn complex, with its resident expat teachers from the US, UK, Australia, Europe, Japan, and Indonesia (Yoga Barn 2014). Hybrid figures have also emerged, including Balinese-Australian self-styled ‘witch, teacher, author’ Gede Parma (Parma 2014), marketing events and services supposedly centred on Balinese spirituality, such as ‘spell-work, house-saining [blessing] and spirit negotiation,’ as well as a ‘sacred sexuality intensive’ session, held last in Sydney in 2015. All of these events, people and places depend for their livelihood on technology, in different ways and to differing degrees, while still drawing on traditional representations of Bali’s exoticism and spirituality. 2 Or perhaps not. The participation of the Balinese themselves in the construction of the island’s various images is certainly more complicated than the traditional construction of the colonizer-colonized dyad would imply, as is their participation in the current version of Internet entrepreneurship.

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Married in Bali Of the three phenomena designed to reinvent the exotic while affirming the Western self, the ‘destination wedding’ is the most connected to what is thought of as traditional Balinese culture and the traditional image of Bali. Balinese destination weddings involve a deliberate effort to incorporate and adapt elements of music, performance and ritual, in order to impart certain aspects of the exotic, thereby ‘spiritualizing’ the proceedings and providing couples with a memorable experience. Within this paradigm there is a spectrum, ranging at one end from those wanting to ‘go native,’ in order to give their wedding a distinctive flair, and at the other end to those who prefer to use Balinese culture merely as a backdrop to set off Western marriage ceremonies, which are often restructured for the occasion to include familiar elements of exotic Bali. Destination weddings have existed at least since the 1970s. ‘Special’ spaces or places serve as a site for the re-imagination and creation of married identity by couples, enhancing both the idea of a new beginning, and the setting apart of the wedding ceremony from everyday activities. Central to this concept is the idea that places – like people, or activities – can possess a type of performativity of their own by acting upon participants, helping to construct and mould experiences leading participants to feel certain ways. In ‘Tourist Weddings in Hawai’i: Consuming the Destination,’ Mary G. McDonald points to destination weddings as an example of ‘identity through consumption’ (2005, p. 172). As McDonald says, a destination is chosen according to what it says about a couple, and how it moulds their image of themselves as a married couple. The top of a mountain, for instance, says something different than a Hawaiian beach or a Vermont farm, the place lending itself to the construction of a particular performed identity. ‘One’s wedding,’ she observes, ‘has become an opportunity to shop for an exotic experience,’ with the setting itself possessing performativity. ‘In the tourist wedding ceremony,’ she says, ‘the tourists themselves are the stars, but they grant the image of the place a strong degree of performativity, or power to act upon them’ (McDonald 2005, p. 172). The degree of power granted to a place, she says, is also moulded by the tourist’s gaze, and influenced by such factors as gender, ethnicity and sexuality. Although McDonald writes about Japanese couples engaging in destination weddings in Hawaii, her remarks are equally true about Bali. In its syncretic Hinduism, its layering of varied cultural traditions, and its eclectic aesthetic, there are few places in the world as freighted with expectation and preconception as Bali: performatively speaking, it all but functions as another participant in the ceremony. It is

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the high degree of performativity of Bali itself, with its strong ready-made, multilayered identity that lends it such allure as a wedding destination. Bali has hosted destination weddings since at least the 1980s, with Mick Jagger’s famous 1990 Hindu-like wedding to Jerry Hall at Amandari Resort in the village of Sayan just outside Ubud serving as a template for future nuptials in terms of incorporating local culture. For the ceremony, Hall wore a traditional Balinese wedding dress and headdress, and a Hindu priest performed the ceremony, a fact which later proved pivotal in Jagger’s 1999 claim that Hall and he were ‘not, and have never been, married,’ and the wedding’s subsequent annulment (Cooper 1999). Interestingly, according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle (1990), a Hindu leader in Bali questioned the proceedings at the time, claiming that the attending priest had merely imitated parts of a traditional Balinese wedding ceremony, including the sacrifice of a chicken. The wedding, it turns out, was not recognized in Indonesia. In this case at least, the Balinese wedding provided a space for Jagger to try on the role of husband, which he subsequently discarded. By the time I started attending (or at least spying on) weddings in 2009, the wedding scene around Ubud had grown vastly more complicated. Since that time, options have proliferated even further, in the types of weddings offered, the expense, length, availability of sites and – most important – the amount and kinds of Balinese culture injected into the proceedings, and whether these cultural elements were to be foregrounded or relegated to a decorative backdrop. This remarkable proliferation was fuelled by the growth of the Internet, making it both fun and convenient for couples to shop for possible destination wedding options on the island. A Google search for ‘Bali weddings’ yields roughly 67,9003 results, featuring hundreds of websites offering one-stop planning for a Balinese wedding. These dedicated websites foreground the familiar image of Bali as an exotic yet spiritual paradise – wild yet holy – offering this as the single most important reason for couples to choose Bali as the site for their wedding. The word ‘paradise’ occurs frequently, as does ‘exotic,’ and ‘dream.’ One of the sites is in fact called ‘Bali Dream Day’ (Balidreamday.com 2015). After drawing on and reinforcing Bali’s singular and heightened performativity, the services get down to the business of refining the experience. In terms of specific locations in Bali, couples might choose to get married at a beach, or a palace, or even ‘atop a Sumatran elephant’ (Bali Adventure 3

Google search for ‘Bali weddings’ on 13 May 2016.

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Tours 2016). As for the ceremony itself, consultants offer a bewildering menu, from separate legal and religious ceremonies (Protestant, Catholic, Buddhist or Muslim) to commitment ceremonies, to Balinese blessing ceremonies for those who wish to ‘celebrate their love but without any legal implications’ (Bali Weddings International n.d.). Which ceremony is ultimately chosen depends not only on ‘how married’ a couples wishes to become (would that these options had been as clear to Jerry and Mick), and where marriage fits into their lives as a couple, but also on how they wish to portray themselves to themselves and their circle – ‘whatever the bride dreams we’ll deliver,’ promises the Bali Weddings International website (Bali Weddings International n.d.). Getting married on top of an elephant says something quite different than marriage in a more traditional chapel wedding, even if that chapel is on the edge of a cliff. Each potential wedding is a complicated and multilayered performance, incorporating different elements of Balinese performance and other decorative and ritual elements. The complexity of the event is heightened by the fact that sometimes there is no invited audience at all: while in non-destination marriage ceremonies the notion of witnessing is central, here the event is often intended to be documented and uploaded to, say, YouTube, or the wedding website itself, as proof that it actually happened. In short, these events are stages on which couples perform special identities related to the occasion, conceptualized and executed by resident expats and crucial local representatives in the music and dance communities who edit and insert versions of traditional dances and rituals. For example, the ‘Royal Balinese Wedding’ advertised on the Married in Bali website offers a multitude of Balinese-derived performance elements, including costumes, hair, makeup, flower girls, one ‘flute boy,’ ten ‘good life women,’ musicians, a stage setting described as ‘Balinese decoration of the Wedding Ceremony Area,’ as well as ‘Wedding Witnesses’ (Married in Bali 2007). As with other packages, the producers create a complex setting within which the celebrants act their own roles, coached by a complete production team. Often, there is a formal procession, followed by separate legal proceedings and a blessing ceremony, ending with a dance performance. Of the several weddings I have attended I have chosen to describe two, both researched and coordinated though websites, but with significant differences. In both cases, the couples were seeking the exoticism of a Balinese wedding, but they pursued it through very different means. Yuri and Alexandra, a young, comfortably off Ukrainian couple with positions in information technology and accounting, located their Balinese wedding consultant through the Internet. They decided to get married in Bali, according

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Figure 3.1  Couple in Balinese wedding vestments at Antonio Blanco Museum

Photograph by Craig Latrell.

to Alexandra, because they wanted to do something different from their friends; in other words, to pursue ‘identity through consumption’ (McDonald 2005, p. 172) by taking advantage of Bali’s heightened performativity. In this case my friend, musician and guide, Wayan Aksara, was contracted through a firm in South Bali to produce the wedding and serve as cultural editor for the event. He hired the musicians, dancers, and priest, arranged for the space, and directed the event, leading Yuri and Alexandra through every stage of the ceremony. It was held in the spectacular Antonio Blanco Museum, constructed as a Balinese-style residence and studio by the late Philippines-born Spanish painter. The museum blends Spanish and Balinese architecture, and comprises several buildings atop a hill overlooking the Champuhan Valley. As musician-cum-wedding consultant-cum tour guide, Wayan Aksara was positioned at the intersection of different power structures, negotiating between global and local by editing and shaping local performances and rituals for consumption by foreigners, while also benefiting financially and accumulating social capital and power on the village level by providing employment for friends and fellow musicians. Wedding coordinators gain esteem through proximity to the celebrants,

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Figure 3.2  Couple in wedding procession

Photograph by Craig Latrell

and also by putting themselves in a position to hire others. In exchange, the participants, who are the ultimate employers, place themselves in the hands of the coordinators, all parties enacting multiple power exchanges on both local and global levels. The Ukrainian couple was clad in traditional Balinese wedding garb (known in Indonesian as payas agung), with both wearing sarongs, and Alexandra additionally sporting a traditional headdress, while Yuri wore a less elaborate head cloth (udeng). The ceremony began with a procession down the museum’s large exterior staircase, preceded by two women, with two men holding parasols over the couple. The couple then sat for a while in a shaded area, listening to musicians and posing for photos, before entering a pavilion to sign legal documents. The procession continued through the museum’s gardens, followed by the musicians, into a different pavilion with offerings spread out on a table next to the couple. They were joined shortly by a priest who performed a version of a Balinese wedding ceremony, with prayers, ritual purification washing, bells, and so on, and ending in sharing food. Aksara stood between the priest and the couple, translating and cueing the couple’s

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Figure 3.3  Couple performing Balinese dance

Photograph by Craig Latrell

behaviour and participation. The ceremony was followed by a procession back to the bottom of the main staircase, where the couple again sat and watched performances of three traditional dances, and were themselves enticed to perform, as often happens in Bali. Other than myself, a fellow researcher and friend, 4and a couple of French tourists, there were no witnesses to the event. In exchange for giving us permission to attend, I videotaped the event for the couple and posted it on the video-sharing website Vimeo. The second wedding was held at Blue Point Bay Villas and Spa, in the Uluwatu area of South Bali, and the couple being married were from Korea. This time, elements of traditional Balinese culture were limited to background decoration. This enhanced the effect of setting a Western-derived ceremony and costumes against a ‘stage set’ of pretty Balinese flower girls and dancers.

4 I am indebted to my friend Jill Forshee and my former student Michael Breslin for their insights and observations, concerning both destination weddings and the use of hook-up apps in Bali.

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Figure 3.4  Wedding chapel and flower girls at Blue Point Bay Villas

Photograph by Craig Latrell

Whereas Yuri and Alexandra’s wedding took place largely outdoors on the grounds of the Antonio Blanco Museum, this couple was married inside a dedicated wedding chapel, with a small reception for friends and family on the lawn just outside the chapel. Unlike the wedding of the Ukrainian couple, numerous family members were present as witnesses, with the resort guests lounging in the pool adjacent to the chapel serving as a meta-audience with little direct investment in the event. After the couple and their guests emerged from the chapel, the wedding photographers attempted to isolate the couple from the resort guests to provide an illusion of privacy, but even then, the presence of the resort guests just steps away heightened the performative nature of the event, since they were constantly ‘on stage’ and unable to escape the intrusion of the public. Clearly, this couple had ordered a different type of wedding, and were staging themselves to the invited guests and family as well as the resort guests – as a very different sort of married couple than the Ukrainian couple. Within the performative setting of Bali, dedicated wedding chapels such as the one at Blue Point Bay Villas and Spa represent spaces of even more heightened performativity in which couples can enact their identities as celebrants and newlyweds. Architecturally speaking, these chapels tend to

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Figure 3.5  Couple posing for wedding photo with hotel guests in pool

Photograph by Craig Latrell

be similar in terms of style, with glass walls and if possible, a sweeping view of the sea. The Wiwaha Chapel at the Nikko Resort in southern Bali typifies these characteristics, and is described on the company website as ‘ideally suited for eloping weddings and smaller weddings with up to 20 guests’

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Figure 3.6  Wiwaha Chapel at the Nikko Resort

Photograph by Craig Latrell

(Bali Wedding Packages n.d.).The Wiwaha Chapel shares with many other wedding chapels a boat-like shape, certainly reflecting its site at the edge of the ocean, but perhaps also a reference to the Sumatran ship cloths’ called palepai (‘ship of death’ or ‘transition’). These cloths traditionally played a part in wedding ceremonies and other life-cycle ceremonies, and it is not unreasonable to conjecture that the shape might have found its way into the architecture of these wedding chapels. Certainly the ship-like shape of many wedding chapels might signify the journey of marriage, although to the casual observer it summons up a somewhat daunting image of the couple sailing off into the blank sky and sea. Getting married in Bali then, like getting married anywhere, is about staging oneself as a married couple. What makes a Balinese destination wedding stand out is, as stated above, the performativity of Bali itself and the ways in which this performativity is moulded and utilized by entrepreneurs working both on the Internet and on the ground. Writers (most notably anthropologist Clifford Geertz) have historically portrayed Bali as a place where theatre permeates daily life. Destination weddings both take advantage of and deliberately heighten Bali’s performativity to portray celebrants

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Figure 3.7  Sumatran ‘ship cloths’ (palapai)

Photo by Craig Latrell

in a special light: perhaps, finally, these events exist most vividly in their afterlives on Vimeo or YouTube than in ‘real life,’ as both performance and public can be infinitely extended and replayed.

The Complicated and Ongoing Legacy of Eat, Pray, Love The second phenomenon, even more Internet-centred than the destination wedding, concerns the creation of a new public consisting largely of

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unmarried or divorced women who come to Bali for spiritual enlightenment, or emotional healing, or both. Although as stated above Bali has long served as a place of supposed spirituality and authenticity, it was the memoir Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006) by Elizabeth Gilbert, which has sold over ten million copies since its publication, along with the subsequent 2010 movie adaptation starring Julia Roberts, which recreated and refined the template for one specific sort of spiritual tourism. The book concerns Gilbert’s voyage of self-discovery, undertaken after leaving her unhappy marriage. She lives first in Italy (the ‘Eat’ section of the book), then moves to India to practice meditation (‘Pray’), then on to Bali. In Bali (‘Love’), she encounters such people as an elderly healer, a restaurant owner who offers her jamu (herbal remedies) and sympathy, and finally, a Brazilian man with whom she is able to relearn the nature of love. I happened to be in Ubud while Eat, Pray, Love was being shot on location in 2009, and the filming was seen at the time as having great commercial potential for local residents, as well as being disruptive. Besides the necessity of entire villages being closed off, along with the main streets of Ubud, stories circulated about rampant corruption and disagreement among some of those whose property was being filmed. Still, as Bali’s governor realistically said at the time, ‘We have to be thankful, because the presence of the Hollywood movie star [Julia Roberts] has given birth to Bali’s new title, “Island of Love,” which will of course support our tourism’ (Ministry of Tourism, Republic of Indonesia 2008). And, indeed, it has. Catalyzed by Gilbert’s book and the rise of Internet entrepreneurship, Bali’s elastic exoticism was again reinterpreted – this time with the superimposition of a layer of New Age self-reinvention – as a place where single women can find solace and spirituality. By 2011, Time magazine was writing about newly popular ‘Eat, Pray, Love tourism.’ The traditional notion of Bali as a spiritual paradise was not displaced but merely augmented, adding (among other things) Buddhist ideas and practices seen through a New Age lens, centring on yoga and meditation while tweaking the attribute of spiritual transformation noted at the beginning of this chapter. The book’s description of a spiritual voyage dovetailed neatly with Bali’s pre-existing image as a place of reinvention, which was subsequently exploited and extended by resident expats working with locals, and marketed through websites such as BookYogaRetreats.com. This website markets a ‘Blissful Bali Retreat for Women’ described as follows: ‘Experience pure bliss as found in the movie Eat Pray Love [sic]. Get a chance to see where the movie was made and have your own spiritual life changing experience.

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[The Bliss Sanctuary for Women] welcomes women travelling on their own without being alone’ (Bookyogaretreats.com n.d.).5 Recreating Gilbert’s experience as closely as possible is important: ‘Eat, Pray, Love tourists’ literally follow in Gilbert’s footsteps, visiting places and figures described in the book in an effort to achieve the enlightenment and renewal she attributes to the experience. Stops include a visit to Gilbert’s guru, Ketut Liyer, a bike ride around Ubud, and a trip to the local pasar (market). Adherence to Gilbert’s path seems to conjure her presence: Time magazine quotes Halle Eavelyn of Las Vegas-based Spirit Quest Tours, as saying, ‘It really did feel like Liz was helping us experience some of the same spiritual growth she did’ (Brenhouse 2010). For those wanting less than the full Eat, Pray, Love (EPL) experience, yoga retreats fulfil many of the same functions, helping to facilitate the promised transformation and serving as a component of spiritual tourism. Scores of hotels in the Ubud area offer yoga retreats of varying duration, in which yoga might be combined with other activities such as meditation, nature hikes, and massages. For example, the website of Oneworld Retreats in Ubud offers an ‘Immerse yourself in Bali’ six-day retreat, in which participants ‘go deeper in the daily yoga and meditation practice, enjoy blissful spa treatments, discover the beautiful countryside around Ubud by walking in the rice fields and taking an exhilarating bike ride from Kintamani and fall in love with Wayan’s chanting’ (Oneworld Retreats 2014). Paradoxically, both EPL tours and the yoga retreat business exist nearly independently of everyday Balinese life. Unmediated contact between locals and seekers of spiritual fulfilment is kept to a minimum, presumably because the unpredictability of such contact does not lend itself to the streamlined, corporatized version of spiritual transformation on offer. There are few if any real differences between yoga retreats and EPL tours other than the way they are marketed and the sorts of publics they create. Yoga retreats incorporate many of the same activities as EPL tours (meditation, bicycle rides, massages), but without the shadow of Elizabeth Gilbert falling on them, or the marketing so patently directed at single women, while yoga retreats cater more specifically to New Age adherents, regardless of marital status, thus creating a slightly different public. The practice of yoga is of course not native to Bali, although through deliberate conflation with India, and a sort of generalized Buddhist overlay on top of a Hindu society, it would be perfectly reasonable to assume that it 5 It is worth noting that the website also offers a ‘Humanitarian Package,’ ‘where for an extra $250 AUD you can help support a Balinese child for 1 year! (No discounts apply).’

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is. Ubud has over the last few years become an internationally known centre for the practice of yoga and the certification of yoga instructors, serving up, as the largest yoga facility’s website says, ‘the magical and transformative power of Bali’ (Yoga Barn 2014). The Yoga Barn’s website (from which the above phrase is drawn) describes its offerings as follows: The Yoga Barn is SE Asia’s full service yoga studio, holistic healing retreat centre. Launched in 2007, [its] buildings have an indigenous Balinese feel to them. Coupled with a spiritual vibe, The Yoga Barn is at once earthy and rustic, relaxing, friendly and unpretentious. (Yoga Barn 2014)

The Yoga Barn complex is in fact enormous, incorporating rooms for rent, spa facilities, a restaurant, and five studios. I heard it described by a Balinese man who takes classes there almost daily as ‘the McDonald’s of yoga,’ making even more explicit the corporatization of spirituality referred to earlier, with the Yoga Barn a no-nonsense purveyor of transformation. The Yoga Barn’s website in fact asks potential retreat participants, rhetorically, whether they are ‘ready for a complete rejuvenation and the beginning of a life transformation?’ The ‘Holistic Healing Center’ ‘includes Ayurvedic Regeneration, Cleansing and Detox Retreats, Sound Medicine, Chinese Medicine, Acupuncture, Chiropractic, Naturopathy and much, much more’ (Yoga Barn 2014). The transformation business, including yoga retreats and EPL tours, constitutes a growing part of the Ubud area economy, both for the foreign entrepreneurs who own these businesses, and for the multinational individuals (including Indonesians) who work at them as instructors, guides, or staff, increasingly displacing more traditional art-and-dance-centred tourism. This new economy extends into real estate, as the famous rice fields surrounding Ubud are replaced by expat-owned vacation villas.6 These villas are often rented to retreat participants, or travellers creating their own versions of spiritually transformative or physically regenerative stays, and are frequently located through Airbnb (with its disturbing slogan ‘Belong anywhere’). The Australian owner of the villa where I stayed (who also owns or is the agent for 35 other villas) specifically mentioned Eat, Pray, Love as the catalyst for this new wave of Ubud tourism and entrepreneurship, centred on the manufactured transformative experiences described above. 6 At least to the degree that foreigners can own property in Bali, in partnership with an Indonesian citizen.

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As with destination weddings, what is being created are temporal and geographic spaces, largely isolated from everyday life in Ubud, in which participants can experiment with new identities and (in this case) perform a version of spiritual and physical transformation. And as with destination weddings, Bali, because of its strong historic associations with exoticism and spiritual transformation, is granted performativity by the participants as it acts upon them to mould their expectations and behaviours in their quests to achieve a deeper and more authentic self, apart from their ordinary lives at home. The preliminary nature and shape of the performance is chosen and refined online where, as with weddings, the participant selects from among many similar manufactured experiences. As mentioned above, experience with Balinese culture is heavily mediated: there are local guides, special spaces and foods, and the reassuring knowledge that the experience is being overseen by an expatriate, or (in the case of Eat, Pray, Love tours) that one is following in the footsteps of a famous American author. These experiences all provide relatively trouble-free, temporary, low-stakes ways to provisionally perform new identities, which can then be brought home or casually discarded, depending on the participant.

Grindr and Balinese Gay Life The final example concerns the smartphone app Grindr, euphemistically described on Wikipedia as ‘a geosocial networking application geared towards gay and bisexual men’ (Wikipedia 2016). For those unfamiliar with the phenomenon, Grindr and other similar dating apps are downloaded onto smartphones or tablets, and use the global positioning services built into these devices to find photos and locations of like-minded people in the area. Those people, by virtue of their presence on the app, are assumed to be available for dating or casual sex, and can be easily sorted through according to appearance, and contacted or ignored. There are many such apps, including Tinder (largely for heterosexual men and women), but Grindr is the oldest (released in 2009) and most heavily used, with more than ten million downloads (Wikipedia 2016) and a growing body of scholarly literature studying its sociological, and cultural effects. The app has even been used to recruit subjects for an HIV vaccine trial (Washington Blade 2013). Grindr is particularly popular in places with substantial transient gay populations, such as Bali, and it is fundamentally changing the gay dating scene in Bali. This may be particularly true in places like Ubud, where, for the 25 years I’ve been visiting, gay life has been less bar-centred and public

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to the point of near-invisibility, compared to more urban vacation spots such as Bali’s largest tourist centre, Kuta. In the 1990s, meetings between Balinese men and gay Western men in Ubud most frequently involved service staff at resorts and restaurants, who were sometimes available for clandestine sexual encounters. This reflects the dyadic structure Eng Beng Lim has described in his book Brown Boys and Rice Queens (Lim 2013) in which a richer and more powerful Westerner initiates a liaison with a less-powerful, often younger, local man.7 Such meetings frequently involved curiosity borne of the presumed exoticism of the other (on both sides), and sometimes money (although usually not directly for sex). Most adult Balinese men (and perhaps many foreigners) were (and are) married, and thus these liaisons were strictly circumscribed in time and place, except (as Lim and others have pointed out) where the Balinese man took a position in the household. For gay Balinese men who wanted to meet other Balinese men, the options have until recently been even more limited. In both informal conversations and more formal interviews, Balinese informants (Anonymous 2014) described the former hook-up scene between gay Balinese men in Ubud in detail. Until the last decade or so, they said, it was primarily limited to spots such as river bathing places, after dark. Men would meet, have sex, then leave. Word of these spots would spread around Ubud, the meeting place would be active for a while, then the police would come and frighten people away, and a new meeting place would spring up elsewhere. The risk was great, particularly for married men. Today, thanks in large part to apps such as Grindr, the possibilities for sexual meetings are far more numerous and frequent. Dating apps have fundamentally changed the dynamic from one of secretive, cautious, risky encounters to a more open, diverse, and yet paradoxically conservative dynamic. Grindr has served as a great leveller: distinctions of race, class, and nationality have become secondary to things like immediate availability and geographical proximity. In this freewheeling virtual space, men from all parts of the world review each other’s photos, chat, and, perhaps, meet, blurring to a large degree the previous Western/Asian dynamic, with its overtones of exoticism, money, and power. Grindr has removed many of the risks formerly involved in face-to-face meetings, particularly for Balinese men, transferring them from semi-public to an initially virtual then subsequently more private setting. Because the virtual space created by Grindr is a more private one than the former meeting places, it is also easier for Balinese men to preserve their identity as married family men. Thus, the dynamic created by Grindr is in a way conservative, in the sense that it allows Balinese men and foreign visitors to act out a (possibly temporary) gay identity in private

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while preserving the traditional marriage structure and a heterosexual public identity. In this way, Grindr renegotiates connections (in both the sexual and non-sexual sense) between local and global, as well as affecting local culture, disassembling the dyadic dynamics of native and foreigner, demoting the importance of Balinese exoticism, and complicating it in terms of the geographical and ethnic diversity of all the online participants. In fact, Grindr takes an opposite approach to Bali’s traditional allure than do destination weddings, EPL tours, and yoga retreats. Whereas the latter incorporate and reinvigorate traditional tropes of Balinese exoticism, Grindr’s approach complicates it and makes it perhaps more inclusive: in the virtual realm of Grindr, it is difficult to say whether the Balinese café owner is more exotic than the retired Swedish ballet dancer, or the film reviewer from Kolkata, all of whom might be online at the same time in Ubud. In this respect, the Balinese are no more or less exotic than any of the other virtual inhabitants from around the globe.

Concluding Remarks While creating and inhabiting virtual spaces is part and parcel of how we use technology, the ways in which such spaces interact with local cultures are often unexpected and complicated. In the end, destination weddings, Eat, Pray, Love tours, yoga retreats, and Grindr function in similar ways. Through the use of the Internet, they create virtual as well as actual spaces in which identities can be tried on and acted out, in varying degrees of separation from everyday Balinese life, while at the same time recreating and renegotiating connections between the local and global. Thus does Bali continue to fulfil and extend its image through the Internet as a place one goes in order to undergo transformation, either permanently or provisionally, whether that transformation involves marital status, spiritual enlightenment, or sex.

Works Cited Anonymous (2014) ‘Gay Meetings in Bali.’ Anonymous personal interview with Craig Latrell and Michael Breslin, 18 June. Artaud, Antonin (1976) ‘On the Balinese Theatre.’ In Susan Sontag, ed., Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 215-227. Bali Adventure Tours (2016) ‘Weddings in the Park.’ http://www.baliadventuretours. com/index.php/en/elephant-safari-park/special-events/wedding-in-the-park.html.

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Balidreamday.com (n.d.) ‘Bali Dream Day.’ http://balidreamday.com. BaliSpirit Yoga Festival (2015) ‘BaliSpirit Yoga Festival International Music and Yoga Festival.’ http://www.balispiritfestival.com/. Bali Wedding Packages (n.d.) ‘Chapel Archives – Bali Wedding Packages.’ https:// www.bali-wedding-packages.com/wiwaha-chapel/. Bali Weddings International (n.d.) http://www.baliweddingsinternational.com. Bookyogaretreats.com (n.d.) ‘7 Days Eat, Pray, Love Retreat for Women in Bali.’ Bookyogaretreats.com. https://www.bookyogaretreats.com/bliss-sanctuaryfor-women​/7-days-eat-pray-love-retreat-for-women-in-bali. Brenhouse, Hillary (2010) ‘Bali’s Travel Boom: Eat, Pray, Love Tourism.’ Time. 22 July. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2011931,00.html. Cooper, Simon (1999) ‘We Were Never Married, Says Jagger as He Fights Jerry Hall Divorce Action.’ The Guardian, 19 January. Foley, Kathy (1992) ‘Trading Art(s): Artaud, Spies, and Current Indonesian/American Artistic Exchange and Collaboration.’ Modern Drama 35.1: 10-19. Gilbert, Elizabeth (2006) Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia. New York: Penguin. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (1999) ‘Performance Studies.’ Rockefeller Foundation, Culture and Creativity, September. http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bkg/ issues/rock2.htm. Latrell, Craig (1999) ‘Neither Traveler nor Tourist: The Accidental Legacy of Antonin Artaud.’ In Jill Forshee, Christina Fink, and Sandra Cate, eds., Converging Interests: Traders, Travelers, and Tourists in Southeast Asia. Berkeley: Center for Southeast Asia Studies, University of California, 235-246. Latrell, Craig (2000) ‘After Appropriation.’ TDR/The Drama Review 44.4: 44-55. Latrell, Craig T. (2008) ‘Exotic Dancing: Performing Tribal and Regional Identities in East Malaysia’s Cultural Villages.’ TDR/The Drama Review 52.4: 41-63. Lim, Eng-Beng (2003) Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias. New York: New York University Press. MacCannell, Dean, and Lucy R. Lippard (1999) The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press. Married in Bali (2007) ‘Royal Balinese Wedding.’ Married in Bali website. http:// marriedinbali.blogspot.com/2007/02/bali-royal-balinese-wedding.html. McDonald, Mary (2005) ‘Tourist Weddings in Hawai’i: Consuming the Destination.’ In Carolyn Cartier and Alan Lew, eds., Seductions of Place: Geographical Perspectives on Globalization and Touristed Landscapes. New York: Routledge, 155-175. Ministry of Tourism, Republic of Indonesia (2008) ‘Eat, Pray, Love Gives Bali a New Title: Island of Love.’ Wonderful Indonesia, 8 November. http://www.indonesia.travel/en. OED (n.d.) Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Oneworld Retreats (2014) ‘Bali Yoga Retreats and Bali Discovery Journeys.’ http:// www.oneworldretreats.com/. Parma, Gede (2014) ‘Gede Parma.’ http://www.gedeparma.com/. Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books. San Francisco Chronicle (1990) ‘Jagger Bali Wedding a Sham.’ San Francisco Chronicle, 3 December. https://www.library.ohiou.edu/indopubs/1991/01/04/0008.html. Vickers, Adrian (1989) Bali: A Paradise Created. Ringwood: Penguin Books Australia. Washington Blade (2013) ‘HIV Researchers Use Grindr to Recruit Participants.’ Washington Blade, 28 August. http://www.washingtonblade.com/2013/08/28/ hiv-researchers-use-grindr-to-recruit-participants-gay-health-news/. Wikan, Unni (1990) Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wikipedia (2016) ‘Grindr.’Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grindr. Accessed 1 June 2016. Yoga Barn (2014) ‘The Yoga Barn – Bali Yoga Studio & Class Schedules, Ubud/Bali.’ http://www.theyogabarn.com/.

About the Author Craig T. Latrell is Professor of Theatre at Hamilton College, has published work in TDR, Asian Theatre Journal, Journal of Modern Drama, and Converging Interests: Traders, Travelers, and Tourists in Southeast Asia, edited by Jill Forshee et al. (Center for Southeast Asia Studies, University of California, 1999), and elsewhere. Latrell served on the advisory board of and contributed entries to the Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre (Greenwood Press, 2007), and is president emeritus of the Association for Asian Performance. A twotime Fulbright Award recipient to Indonesia, he also received a National Endowment for the Arts Director Fellowship. He holds bachelor’s degrees in psychology and theatre from Reed College, and a master’s and doctorate of fine arts from Yale University School of Drama. Besides Hamilton College, Latrell has taught at the National University of Singapore, the University of Denver and Cornish College of the Arts. Email: [email protected]

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Super Premium Soft Double Vanilla Rich and the Ideal of Convenience in Japan Peter Eckersall

Abstract Playwright-director Okada Toshiki is one of the leading theatre artists to emerge from Japan in last decade. With his theatre group chelfitsch he has developed a style of theatre that is intensely localized and at the same time suggestive of the characteristic ‘non-places’ of globalization (as identified by the French anthropologist Marc Augé). Okada’s work has an ambient dramaturgy that matches the everyday sense of dislocation and inertia that is one of the overwhelming experiences of globalization. I examine one of his plays set in a convenience store (konbini) and draw comparisons to the depiction of konbini in the visual arts work of Nakamura Masato. Both artists express cautionary messages about the human consequences of konbini as a chief manifestation of what will be discussed here as the convenience economy. Keywords: Japan, convenience store, visual arts, performing arts

Capitalist deterritorialization acts on desire such that it is no longer human, properly speaking, but machinic. Desire is not the expression of human subjectivity; it emerges from the assemblage of human and non-human flows, from a multiplicity of social and technical machines. − Lazzarato 2014, p. 51

The convenience store or konbini is a ubiquitous machinic presence in Japan’s urban landscape and spreads into most rural settings across the main islands. Konbini are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and are staffed by lowwage contract employees, many of them drawn from the so called ‘freeter

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generation’ ( furītā), people who have grown up in the lengthy economic and social malaise of the post-bubble era and who ‘float’ from one job to another without career prospects or job security. Customers like konbini for their clean facilities and regularized product lines – they are, in a word, convenient. Moreover, this experience of convenience is expressed in a double way. For the franchise owner, the convenience factor is that they are able to employ staff under liberal employment laws at low cost and circumnavigate urban planning laws designed to regulate the spread of large shopping malls. For the customer, the expectation that konbini will be always available and easy to access is the convenience; the products are also expressive of convenience as they feature a range of prepared and easily consumed foods and drinks, magazines, and other products that might be needed at short notice, ranging from portable phone chargers, to stamina pills, nylons and condoms. The convenience of konbini is so embedded in the Japanese everyday experience that it almost passes without comment: it is as if Japan always had konbini. They are a ubiquitous presence, so much so that they have come to be a particularly visible sign of Japan’s urbanization, economic development and remapping of community – a sign of Japan’s globality. Yet they have a darker side that has erased the human scale of community. They exploit low-paid workers and have changed patterns of sociality in Japan. In this essay, I examine how a critique of konbini is seen in works by artist Nakamura Masato and playwright and director Okada Toshiki. Both artists express cautionary messages about the human consequences of the overwhelming presence of konbini as a chief manifestation of what will be discussed here as the convenience economy or what Lazzarato, above, calls ‘capitalist deterritorialization.’

Traumatrauma While the general convenience of konbini is fully anticipated in the daily life of people in Japan, their ubiquity is also expressed in ways that suggest ambivalence. Traumatrauma, a 1997 artwork by Nakamura Masato, is interesting in this regard. Taking the store signs that feature the longitudinal bands of colour associated with each of the main convenience store chains, Seven 7, Lawson, Family Mart, and AM/PM, the work was originally exhibited at SCAI Bathhouse in Tokyo as a series of large-scale light box ready-mades. Nakamura succeeded in gaining permission from the corporations concerned to use their actual patented store signage. He followed this work in 1999 with QSC+mV, a work consisting of an arrangement of McDonald’s arches, again

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with permission from the corporation concerned. QSC+mV was included in the Venice Biennale in 2001. Having viewed Traumatrauma, I remember that the effect on the spectator was uncanny. With the store names erased, the colour bands are defamiliarized and the bright lighting also produced an oversaturated wash of lurid colours that was disorienting and cold. At the same time, the work conveyed a sense of recognition that tugs at the emotions and imparts feelings of déjà vu. People reacted with a fondness and sentimental longing (natsukashii) for these signs, perhaps likening them to a form of postmodern nostalgia or something that stands for a sense of place in contemporary globalized societies in which chain stores and franchises have become the norm. The fact of there were no actual names of the stores, which were represented only by their distinctive patented colour bands, was slightly disconcerting, giving off a sense of the phantasmic and suggesting a Jamesonian mode of blank parody, an empty template and a ‘superflat’ existence without history. Perhaps it also represents a moment of traumatic repetition where the sense of trauma is expressed in a ‘theatre and its double’-like naming of the work ‘trauma-trauma.’ This doubling is citational yet it ‘returns’ to become lodged in the mind as something playful and disturbing. Even without the names of the stores, they were unnervingly easy to recall. The colour scheme stood for the larger commodity enterprise of convenience capitalism. As John Clammer wrote in his study of consumption in contemporary Japan, ‘Where Weber saw the basis of capitalism in a system of ethics, in late capitalism in general and Japan in particular it is more realistic to seek it in a system of aesthetics’ (1997, p. 165). How do we characterize the system of aesthetics that is at play in these works and by extension in the effect of the konbini itself as an aesthetic space of hyper-consumption? Traumatrauma cannot be compared to the flat modernist abstraction of colour plane paintings from the 1940s or pop art’s 1960s minimalism, both of which show shifting registers of tint and hue, and subtle transformations. Such artworks feature painterly modes of abstraction that pose questions about colour field and the ocular experience of art. Traumatrauma offers no such aesthetic complexity or invitation to experience the aesthetic registers of art. These light box artworks are garish and banal, with perfectly shallow planes of colour, precisely lacking variation and bordered by their function as store signs. Nakamaura said in an interview that he was interested in the ‘process of generalization [that applies] to the way society makes urban space’ and the overwhelming rise of the service sector (Nakamura and Suzuki n.d.). The language of these signs is an expression of this idea that Nakamura terms as a generalization,

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something ubiquitous, flat and indicative of service industry convenience as the cultural sign of Japan’s urban landscape. The brilliance of these works is their simplicity and economy and in this sense they are realistic depictions of the konbini system.

Japan’s Konbini System Konbini first appeared in Japan in 1973. They experienced rapid expansion in number in the 1980s during Japan’s period of high economic growth and orientation towards the global economy. Yamashita Machiko’s 1996 study of the proliferation of konbini calculated their density in some urban areas as one per 1,500 residents (cited in Bestor 2006, p. 122) and the most recent figures put the number of convenience stores in Japan in 2013 at 49,000 (Ishiguro 2014). Konbini have largely replaced the small, family-owned general store with the shop at the front and living space at the back that was the norm until the 1980s and they have in many places taken over the typical neighbourhood shopping street (shōtengai). Theodore Bestor notes that: ‘Konbini are heir to this shopping and retailing pattern, but without any of the social relationships that typically existed between shop owner and customer’ (2006, p. 123). Konbini are a powerful manifestation of globalization and its effects on Japan. They were a product of the policy of administrative guidance of the powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). Chalmers Johnson’s influential 1982 book MITI and the Japanese Miracle examined how state policy created incentives for various modes of growth in the postwar era from promoting economies of scale first in heavy industry, then turning to light industry and manufacturing and finally to service industries and technology. While MITI’s influence declined in the 1980s this was in part due to the substantial rise of speculative models of global capitalism in the era known as the ‘bubble economy’ (baburu keizai). Convenience stores were well placed to participate in these transformations, which included a real estate boom and the celebration of conspicuous consumption. The era also ushered in modes of global capitalism in Japan, including internationalization of capital, management-driven centralization and a neo-liberal focus on rationalization and efficiency models of growth. Thus, for example, konbini’s centralized ordering and just-in-time delivery models largely replaced the dispersed, complex and supposedly inefficient networks that were many times based on intergeneration connections between families and small enterprises. Although the first convenience stores in Japan were the 7-Eleven chain operated by Itō Yōkadō under licence from the parent

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American company Southland Corporation, the stores in Japan were so successful that Itō Yōkadō acquired the controlling interest in Southland in 1991 (see Bestor 2006, p. 128). Large convenience store chains are owned by large retail and transport companies. While such stores in the US are considerably down-market and cater to low-income customers, according to Bestor, in Japan, they have ‘become general stores touted as “lifestyle centres” for young mobile, free spending Japanese consumers’ (2006, p. 122). One example of this is the recent trend started by the Lawson chain to establish green konbini. Their ‘Natural Lawson’ konbini feature muted colours and stock organic health foods, such as rice balls (onigiri) made from brown rice. Some stores include product lines from MUJI, a consumer phenomenon known for ‘non-branding’ and minimalist design aesthetic. The Natural Lawson website promotes the concept of Natural Lawson as embracing a beautiful and harmonious lifestyle while supporting sustainability; it is specifically focused on attracting female consumers (n.d.). The convenience store is also known for two other innovations: adapting the just-in-time delivery model that was pioneered in the Japanese car industry in the 1970s and point-of-sale (POS) data collection and the centralized inventory, ordering and delivery system that is based on this. Adopting the just-in-time system means that stores can be compact and yet sell a large variety of items, thereby giving an illusion of wide choice. Writing about the 7-Eleven chain, management specialist Kunitomo Ryuichi says that part of a strategy of what he terms ‘total merchandising’ is to market konbini food products as being freshly made several times a day. ‘Total merchandising’ also means that POS monitoring of consumer items enables the promotion and sale of high volume merchandise and his article about the successful management system of 7-Eleven suggests that unpopular product lines should be dropped quickly and the shelf space taken by other items with greater demand (Kunitomo 1997, p. 881). A case study comparing Japanese confectioners (who sell a large quantity of their products in konbini) with US companies shows that Japanese companies are under pressure to maintain a diversity of production lines: Compare Morinaga, which has 60 brands (after cutting more than 100), with its successful foreign rival Mars. Mars competes in 120 countries with only 40 brands. Japanese manufactures still introduce between 100 and 120 new items every year. One of the drivers of this meaningless product proliferation is Japan’s peculiar distribution channels, which expect each company to introduce a fresh lineup of products almost every month to maintain its shelf space allocation. (Porter, Takeuchi and Sakakibara 2000, p. 88)

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Product proliferation for Japanese confectioners and other food companies tends towards marketing variations on a theme. Regular point of sale ‘campaigns’ draw customers’ attention to a ‘new’ item for a limited time or as part of a seasonal promotion (a long-standing tactic of Japanese breweries, for example, who market newly brewed beers for each season). Marketing takes over from product development: for example, a chocolate might be advertised in a new wrapper, or with a quirky flavour (gouda cheese ‘Kit Kat,’ anyone?). Minoru Matsumoto, a spokesman for the Seven-Eleven Japan Co., told a reporter at The Japan Times: ‘In our 40 years of experience, we understand that our purpose must be to offer something new all the time’ (Japan Times 2015). As discussed below, this spectacle of newness (shinhatsubai) is a point that Okada Toshiki’s play uses to good effect. Such forensic analysis of patterns of supply and demand is enabled by the POS system pioneered by 7-Eleven and now universally applied. As Kunitomo notes: ‘In the POS system, data is entered on the following four elements: the items purchased, the time of the purchase (every 2 hours), the type of customer, and the place where the item was displayed. Under these four headings 13 pieces of data can be accessed’ (1997, p. 881; emphasis in the original). The combination of the two factors enables what Kunitomo describes as real-time ordering and same-day, small-unit delivery – a rapid rotation of stock with very little ‘dead’ inventory or storage is a model of systematic planning, rigorous measurement and the pursuit of efficiencies. Anthropologist Gavin Hamilton Whitelaw is a self-confessed ‘fan’ of konbini who conducted his research by becoming a convenience store employee. In an essay, he reports on how the vast web of data that each transaction generates is gathered. First, each terminal in the store is connected to a mainframe computer that keeps track of the sales and is used for ordering new stock. Barcodes on items are scanned for their price at point of sale, then combined with data that is automatically inputted by the register computer including time and date of sale, the weather conditions, and use of card or cash. This is further augmented when the store employee is required to inconspicuously input details recording the gender and approximate age of the customer. As Whitelaw notes, the register will not show price, calculate change, or open the cash draw until this data is received (Whitelaw 2006, pp. 137, 143). An interesting side issue is the relatively low use of debit or credit cards in these transactions in Japan, whereas in many other places where people use cards to pay at the point of sale, this data is generated by the card transaction. In another article Whitelaw acknowledges the critiques of convenience stores regarding their homogeneity, the deskilling of labour and the erosion of cultural difference. However, drawing on his experience of working as a

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service clerk, he wants to develop another more positive image of konbini and explore how the convenience store constitutes what he terms a ‘meaningful lifeworld and culturally embedded economic institution’; in short, he aims to show how an experience of ‘impersonal familiarity is constructed and contested within the context of this retail environment’ (Whitelaw 2008, p. 62). Having undertaken the standardized training and worked with others in convenience stores in Japan, Whitelaw sees a human side to the presence of the konbini in the contemporary urban landscape, one that is more familiar than alienating and an integral part of the everyday and its rituals such as buying a newspaper on the way to the train, getting a bentō for lunch or sending gifts via the takkyubin courier service (a rapid delivery service to the home). Some stores now offer free Wi-Fi and espresso coffee. Moreover, as Okada’s play points out, by providing clean toilet facilities to anyone (no purchase is required), konbini are seen as offering a community service. This more optimistic view, however, must be compared to the sober critique by Jonathan Crary of the collapse in the time-space relations of global capitalism and his cautionary note that: ‘A 24/7 environment has the semblance of a social world, but it is actually a non-social model of machinic performance and a suspension of the living that does not disclose the human cost required to sustain its effectiveness’ (2013, p. 9). This is a stirring critique of the meaningful lifeworld that is supposed by Whitelaw and one that once again draws our attention to the machinic dimensions of convenience capitalism and its adverse consequences for the human. To briefly summarize, just-in-time distribution and POS data-collection systems, when combined with the 24-hour cycle and widespread franchise replication of the stores and regularized training of low-wage staff are key signs of globalization. This paradigmatic unit of production, of standardization, profit-driven service industry, surveillance of the worker and customer and the collapse of time compares to an endless present of global time – a model of globalization with a unitary commodity functionalism at its core. This is a time of convenience that, to borrow from Crary, clearly does not disclose its cost.

Okada Toshiki and chelfitsch The playwright and director Okada Toshiki is one of the leading theatre artists to emerge from Japan in last decade. With his theatre group chelfitsch (a name chosen for its baby-like mispronunciation of the English word selfish), he has developed a style of theatre that is intensely localized and at

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the same time suggestive of the characteristic ‘non-places’ of globalization (Augé 1995). I have previously discussed Okada’s work as having an ambient dramaturgy that well matches the everyday sense of dislocation and inertia that is one of the overwhelming experiences of globalization (see Eckersall and Paterson 2011). Hence, such non-places are both familiarly inviting and dystopian. While for many people to survive in neo-liberal globality means to be subjected to efficiency regimes and measurement, another group of people might be said to be trapped in the experience of slow time. Freeter workers in low-paid service industries such as convenience stores and call centres are people outside the growth assumptions of neo-liberalism and yet subjected to its norms. They live in slow time, dulled by the repetitious servitude of corporation-mandated behavioural regimes in which their very existence is dependent on being cheaper than a machine. Several of Okada’s plays have considered contemporary patterns of work in relation to this. Enjoy (2006) is set in a manga café (manga kissa), where young people hang out, read manga comics and pass the time. Cody Poulton notes that Enjoy’s setting is ‘a place where people can hang out, drink coffee, read comic books, take a nap, and even have a shower – all this in Shinjuku, smack dab in the middle of Tokyo’ (2011, p. 151). Enjoy taps ‘into a global generational experience, though the particular social and economic conditions may be particular to Japan at this moment in time’ (Poulton 2011, p. 152). This experience of globality is variously defined in ways that emphasize the effect of disconnection from societal norms and lack of empowerment that is experienced by young people who feel that they have few options in life. They are often underemployed rather than unemployed and typically live with their parents, who continue to support them f inancially. This can lead to a tendency to withdraw (hikikomori), and to a sense of lethargy, feelings of alienation or what Anne Allison (2012) calls a constant state of precarity that is experienced by many people in Japan. In Freetime (2008), Okada used the setting of a so-called ‘family restaurant,’ a business model that shares similarities with convenience stores, to explore a similar sense of ambient malaise. In this play young people linger in the bland artificial space of the restaurant, a place that is known for offering a wide variety of foods both Western and Japanese but somehow none of them tasting as they should and everything made and served according to an easily followed set of instructions; food as a Fordist production line made by teenagers. The setting for his play featured a restaurant table and chairs sunk into the floor with only the table top and top of the backs of the chairs visible, as if the restaurant and its inhabitants found themselves to be always

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slowing sinking, a metaphor for the dystopian liquid flow of globalization and it deleterious effects on the young people in the play. Like all of Okada’s plays, this is not depicted as a dramatic rupture in the everyday, rather it is an ambient thing that exists as a smooth modality of capitalism, what Zygmunt Bauman (2012) terms as ‘the ambience of uncertainty.’ In Freetime, people are depicted as being alone and they seem to have little direction or purpose to their lives; they have time but there is nothing to do and the play marks the whiling-away of time in ambient and broken snatches of conversation and dissolute body movements. Okada returns to these themes in his 2014 play Super Premium Soft Double Vanilla Rich (Su-pa-Puremiamu Sofuto W Banira Ricchi), a work that explores consumerism, part-time employment and the social and cultural experience of konbini in Japan. Chelfitsch describe the play’s themes in the following statement: In his new work, Super Premium Soft Double Vanilla Rich, [Okada] turns his attention to convenience stores – the kind of 24-hour store that you can find on every street corner in Tokyo. These nightly meeting points are also places of communication, often near a metro station, and they have their own distinctive smell of coffee or food kept warm for hours on end. Especially in the light of the Fukushima disaster that had a strong impact on Okada’s works, they are also conspicuous for their waste of energy resources. (Chelfitsch 2014)

The play is set in a typical convenience store, teasingly called Smile Factory (such a name for a convenience store or chain restaurant is eminently possible). The stage is set with painted backdrops on two sides of the space on which are depicted rows of refrigerated shelving with the usual konbini drinks and food lines laid out making a repeating pattern of colourful shapes and brands. Black rectangular mats on the floor delineate spaces marking the aisles between the shelving and the service desk at one side. The lighting is flat and saturated throughout the performance. Three store clerks wear garish shirts with the Smile Factory logo and serve occasional customers, always performing the ritualized greetings and bowing and hand gestures when the customer enters and exits the store and when the clerk receives the money and gives change. Among the clerks depicted is a typical male ‘slacker’ named Igarashi who is slightly withdrawn and perhaps destined always to work in this kind of employment. He takes delight in misreporting the POS data, thinking mischievously that he is performing a ‘terrorist’ act against the capitalist system. A second male store

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clerk named Usami does the ordering and is fascinated by data entry and the informational systems and algorithms that are ultimately running the store. These determine when the store is at its busiest and how many staff will be needed so that customers wont have to wait too long to be served. Algorithms also predict when deliveries of new stock will be needed and when staff will be less busy with customers and able to put new items in the fridges and on the shelves. Usami expresses an enduring devotion for konbini as an idealized world view of mega-data and perfect systems. The third clerk is a young woman clerk named Mizutani who is overenthusiastic about her work. Although she seems keen to impress the management and the customers, she is also confused by the information that she is given by the other two clerks. Mizutani develops a rapport with a regular customer who comes to the store to buy one kind of ice cream, the double vanilla brand. Beyond these attributes, the clerks are depersonalized in the script and named as Baito 1, Baito 2, and Baito 3. The woman who visits is identified as Ms. SV (also called Mamiya), and the other characters are an officious visitor from head office and an ‘anti-consumer’ who visits the store in order to enact his ineffectual protests against conspicuous consumption. The word Baito comes from arubaito, taken from the German Arbeit or work. Arubaito is used to describe a part-time job in Japan, a type of job typically taken by students. Recently, however, in Japan, as in neo-liberal economies worldwide, part-time work involving regularized tasks and contract labour has become increasingly the norm. This globalized workforce is a replaceable part of a machinic system. It can ordered at short notice to fill busy periods and laid-off just as quickly. It is just-in-time labour without the on-costs that is regulated by the same data efficiency algorithms as any other part of the convenience system. In the play, the ice cream product line that the woman customer buys is discontinued due to low sales. The customer experiences a sense of emotional withdrawal as a result of this and becomes depressed when she is no longer able to purchase her favourite brand. Later the company relaunches the product as a ‘super premium’ item. The store clerks plan a small product launch and invite the customer back to the konbini to be the first to taste the new version of her favourite product. When she arrives at the store, all seems set for a bright future. However, on tasting the ‘super premium soft double vanilla rich’ ice cream the customer rejects the taste of the new version and leaves the store in a huff. The store clerks are disappointed and contemplate the failure of their launch. Soon, they return to their regular pattern of work and the rupture in their lives caused by the small drama of the ridiculously named ice cream is forgotten.

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The play also adopts a documentary theatre approach by introducing the viewer via the text and actions of the performers to the vast network of ordering, production and distribution that underpins the daily existence of these stores. The clerk Usami, who is fascinated by this procedure, might be compared to the figure of the otaku – computer or data ‘nerd.’ There is a long passage in the play where the Usami explains how the ordering system works. He expresses his fascination for the web of data: how many products, what time of day, the weather, news events and how all these factors make an invisible pattern of consumption. He imagines data as a network of transformations, flows and just-in-time arrivals of new products. The speech expresses an almost sexualized and luridly poetic desire for the perfect harmony of sales and ordering, products coming in and out of the store, and production flow and consumption as proof of the perfection of the data matrix. The hyperbole of the representations of these desires in Super Premium magnifies the insignificant lives of each of the characters and asks what kind of convenience-centred life the konbini system offers. The strongest desires in the play are of the clerk for data, for the ice cream and for a satisfied customer, in other words, human expressions of desire are experienced only through a sequence of ideas and practices that might be contained within a konbini clerk’s training manual. Konbini operate on a system of regularized and easily replaceable parts. Training for the operators is standardized, products come and go and customer satisfaction is measured by a series of bows and honorific formulae of address. The only expression of individualism in the play is seen in the desire of the customer to persist consuming a product that nobody else wants but this desire is also regulated by the sociality of consumption that operates across the whole spectrum of the konbini environment. On a macro-level we can also see how the play makes connections between this model of freeter capitalism and the wider situation of Japan. The play has a humorous and languid dramaturgical feel contrasting with the fact that it is also set to music and each short scene is accompanied by a section of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. This musical intrusion acts as a counterpoint for the play but it also becomes an efficiency regime as each scene must match the rhythm and duration of the musical sequences. Bach’s piece is known for its sequential development and creation of counterpoint and tension. Okada’s text follows this pattern in featuring the back-and-forth conversation in the music between prelude and fugue. The music plays throughout each of the scenes with the effect that the actors have to compete with it for attention. They have to moderate the pace of their dialogue in

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relation to the music and must end the scenes in time with the completion of each of the sections of Bach’s piece, some of which are very short. The result is that each scene is a fragment of a whole and the music overdetermines some of the emotional qualities of the play. The Well-Tempered Clavier is in this instance played on the pianoforte or harpsichord with the result that the tone is bright and sharp. It is fast and intrusive: overall, the music helps to give an impression of the stage being a formal precise presentation that is machine-like and regulated by outside forces. Here I recall Crary’s description of the speeding up and collapsing of time as something having the semblance of a social world, but actually being a machinic performance (2013, p. 9). This effect of the interplay between representational systems of performance, music and the eidetic space or sign of the konbini work to create just such an effect. A further significance of Super Premium is its exploration of the normative state of ‘impersonal familiarity’ (Whitelaw 2008). This is staged between the clerk and customer, where the desire for meaningful human relationships is mediated entirely by the protocols of employee relations and by the inevitable disappointment of the new product that breaks the supposed familiarity of their relationship. This is significant also when considering how konbini seem to have developed a sense of intimacy and intrusion in the way that they transform the sociality of urban space in Japan. This is not only a matter of the conspicuous waste of energy resources, mentioned above in relation to a renewed awareness of electricity consumption after the loss of the Fukushima power station. The convenience store is expressly visible in the landscape, made so by the Max Lumens lighting in stores and the constant to and fro of delivery vehicles coupled with the fact that these tiny spaces run heating and cooling equipment, multiple refrigeration units and computers 24 hours a day. Super Premium hovers between the depiction of social relations that are meaningful on the one hand and ridiculous on the other, a contraction that finds a certain resolution in this idea of human relationships inextricably mediated by capitalism.

Closing Comments This atomized and paradoxical notion of intimacy and intrusion takes us back to the reading of Nakamura’s Traumatrauma discussed at the outset of this essay. I suggested that there is a contradictory sense of recall in the artwork, one that is both intimate and traumatic. In other words, impersonal familiarity as a form of comforting alienation is suggested in the flat panels

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of colour. The contradiction inherent in this is one writ large in contemporary modernity, where we are constantly overwhelmed by consumerist modes of subjectivity. We resist this, but at the same time we no longer have the capacity for actual resistance. Instead, our subjectivity is measured and rearticulated as a mode of consumption. Perhaps what we desire most of all from this normative state is the endlessly accessible convenience of consumption that ultimately aims to define who we are. Traumatrauma and Super Premium both explore convenience as something much more political than the ubiquity, ease of access, and even fondness that we might have for the neighbourhood konbini. Instead of this, each of these works deconstruct konbini and explore ideological manifestations of the term convenience. They confront us with questions of desire and how the desire for convenience when defined as an endless access to commodities is an empty one. Is it convenience we see in these stores or something else? Both these artworks show the production of convenience and interpolate it as a machinic form of subjectivity by revealing its paradigmatic and imbricated technological systems of replication, repetition and, most of all, reduction.

Works Cited Allison, Anne (2013) Precarious Japan. Durham: Duke University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (2012) ‘The Ambience of Uncertainty’ YouTube, 29 January. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPRV8fTn3WQ. Bestor, Theodore (2006) ‘Kaiten-zushi and Konbini: Japanese Food Culture in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ In Richard Wilk, ed., Fast Food/Slow Food: The Cultural Economy of Global Food Systems. Lanham: Altamira Press, 115-130. Chelfitsch (2014) chelfitsch.net. Clammer, John (1997) Contemporary Urban Japan: A Sociology of Consumption. London: Blackwell. Crary, Jonathan (2013) 24:7 Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso. Eckersall, Peter, and Eddie Paterson (2011) ‘Slow Dramaturgy: Renegotiating Politics and Staging the Everyday.’ Australasian Drama Studies 58: 178-192. Ishiguro, Kaname (2014) ‘Food Access among Elderly Japanese People.’ Asian Social Work and Policy Review 8.3: 275-279. Japan Times (2015) ‘Konbini Magic Keeps Stores Precisely Stocked round the Clock.’ Japan Times, 18 October. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/10/18/business/ konbini-magic-keeps-stores-precisely-stocked-round-clock/#article_history. Johnson, Chalmers (1982) MITI and the Japanese Miracle. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Kunitomo, Ryuichi (1997) ‘Seven-Eleven Is Revolutionising Grocery Distribution in Japan.’ Long Range Planning 30.6: 877-889. Lazzarato, Maurizio (2014) Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Nakamura, Masato, and Singo Suzuki (n.d.) ‘Plugging into Public Space: An interview with Masato Nakamura & Shingo Suzuki.’ Art Space Tokyo. http://read. artspacetokyo.com/interviews/nakamura-suzuki/. Natural Lawson (n.d.) http://natural.lawson.co.jp/concept/index.html. Okada, Toshiki (2014) Su-pa-Puremiamu Sofuto W Banira Ricchi [Super premium soft double vanilla rich]. Play script. Porter, Michael, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Mariko Sakakibara (2000) Can Japan Compete? New York: Basic Books. Poulton, Cody (2011) ‘Krapp’s First Tape: Okada Toshiki’s Enjoy.’ TDR/The Drama Review 55.2: 150-157. Whitelaw, Gavin Hamilton (2006) ‘Rice Ball Rivalries: Japanese Convenience Stores and the Appetite of Late Capitalism,’ In Richard Wilk, ed., Fast Food/Slow Food: The Cultural Economy of Global Food Systems. Lanham: Altamira Press, 131-144. Whitelaw, Gavin Hamilton (2008) ‘Learning from Small Change: Clerkship and the Labors of Convenience.’ Anthropology of Work Review 29.3: 62-69.

About the Author Peter Eckersall is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies and Executive Officer of the PhD Program in Theatre at the Graduate Centre, City University of New York. He works on contemporary performance practices in Australasia and Europe, with particular interests in Japanese performance and on dramaturgy. Recent publications include New Media Dramaturgy: Performance Media and New Materialism (with Edward Scheer and Helena Grehan, Palgrave, 2017) and The Dumb Type Reader (co-edited with Edward Scheer and Fujii Shintaro, Museum Tusculanum Press, 2017). Peter is the dramaturge for Not Yet It’s Difficult (NYID), based in Melbourne, Australia.

5

Unearthing the Past and Re-imagining the Present Contemporary Art and Muslim Politics in a Post-9/11 World Leonie Schmidt

Abstract Contemporary Indonesian art shows how visual culture is a site of (Muslim) politics, creativity, contestation, and conflict, a site where issues associated with Islam are mobilized to come to terms with the present state of the world. But how are aesthetics mobilized as a way of negotiating and contesting political, cultural, and historical circumstances? This chapter explores this question by conducting an analysis of two contemporary Indonesian art works: Membuat Obama dan Perdamaian yang dibuat-buat (2009) by Wilman Syanur and 11 June 2002 (2003) by Arahmaiani. Through their aesthetics the works evoke fragments from the past to question the construct of the present. This chapter shows how these aesthetic strategies form the base of a (Muslim) politics. Keywords: Indonesia, contemporary art, politics, Islam, performance

In the world’s most populous Muslim country artists are embarking on an approach to Islam and art that deviates from the calligraphy and the abstract images that are usually associated with the pairing of Islam and art. − Bianpoen 2009

In Indonesia, Muslim and non-Muslim artists show how visual culture, especially in a post-9/11 environment, is a site of Muslim politics, creativity, and contestation. Indonesian contemporary art constitutes a site where issues associated with Islam are mobilized to come to terms with the present state

Hudson, Chris, and Bart Barendregt (eds): Globalization and Modernity in Asia. Performative Moments. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462981126_ch05

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of the world. Contrary to calligraphy or abstract images – often called ‘Islamic art’ – the work of these artists typically lacks Islamic signs and figures, favouring figurative art. Nor does their work praise Islam, as calligraphy and non-figurative work frequently does. Rather, this form of contemporary art makes references to Islam to articulate political, social, and cultural dissatisfactions with the current state of the world. This art is therefore not called ‘Islamic art,’ but is a form of contemporary art that through its references to Islam or issues related to Islam can be seen as practicing Muslim politics. It is often through tactics such as provocation, parody, self-reflexivity, and humour that critique is expressed and politics are practiced. These interpretations of art and Islam are part of a global trend. In the past few years, artists and curators worldwide have been exploring a fresh interpretation of contemporary art and Islam that moves away from abstract work. In 2006, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for example, held a prominent exhibition of artists of Islamic heritage living in the West (Bianpoen 2009). In the exhibited works, themes, questions, and issues associated with Islam were subject to political projects and unorthodox experimentation (Cotter 2006). Indonesian adherents of this trend are also increasingly exhibiting their work at a global stage (e.g., New York, Berlin, Sydney, Singapore, Venice), thereby contributing to the development of this form of art. But how does contemporary Indonesian art negotiate and contest political, cultural, and historical circumstances? What kind of critique is articulated and what tactics are employed here? And how might we understand the politics? This chapter explores these questions by analysing two contemporary Indonesian artworks. In the first part of the chapter, I analyse a performance artwork by Wilman Syahnur titled Membuat Obama dan Perdamaian yang dibuat-buat (The making of Obama and artificial peace, 2009). It depicts a dummy of Obama being driven around in a becak (pedicab) while campaigning for world peace. In the second part of the chapter, I analyse a performance piece by the Indonesian artist Arahmaiani. Her work, titled 11 June 2002 (2003), depicts a hotel room where Arahmaiani was detained as a ‘possible terrorist threat’ while travelling via Los Angeles to Canada. What unites Membuat Obama dan Perdamaian yang dibuat-buat and 11 June 2002 is an Islamic theme; they mobilize issues associated with Islam to come to terms with the present state of the world. Specifically, these two works were selected because their politics revolve around the same topic. The two objects negotiate and contest current geopolitics and the volatile position of Indonesia and Muslims in a post-9/11 world. Moreover, the works engage in different politics to formulate their critique. In this way, the objects enable an examination of different strategies and facets of these politics.

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Through conducting a visual analysis of these two Indonesian artworks, and by drawing on the works of Walter Benjamin and Pierre Nora, I suggest that a Benjaminian socio-historical politics underlies the artworks’ aesthetic strategies. The main argument that this chapter makes is that through their aesthetics the works evoke fragments from the past to question the construct of the present. The works keenly fragment the past and translate these fragments into images. These images – visual historical fragments – are reassembled within the present to critique unilateral histories, pluralize the notion of history, and lay bare the constructed nature of history. I suggest that these aesthetic strategies form the basis of a Muslim politics. The writings of Benjamin and Nora are both helpful to understand how history is always constructed and how politics underlie the construction of histories. This chapter’s analysis of Membuat Obama dan Perdamaian yang dibuatbuat and 11 June 2002 contributes to studies of contemporary Indonesian art. Contemporary art constitutes an important part of Indonesia’s visual culture and the art scene is currently more dynamic than it has ever been (Supangkat, Godfrey and Cruickshank 2010). It has however received relatively little scholarly attention (but see: George 2009, 2010; Ingham 2008; Jurriëns 2010; Rath 2005) especially when compared to its Asian counterparts (like China, India and Japan). The body of work the pairing of Indonesian contemporary art and Islam is even smaller, as most observers have devoted their attention to Middle Eastern artworks (see George 2009, 2010). Yet, approaches to art and Islam that differ from calligraphy and non-figurative work remain underexplored. This chapter offers a starting point for the discussion of these interpretations. In addition to providing insight into contemporary Indonesian art, this chapter also makes a theoretical argument when describing the Muslim politics practiced by the two artworks under study. Most studies that have analysed Muslim politics and visual culture have focused on the politics of representation to unpack the relations of power that underlie the construction of meaning about Muslims and Islam. Broadly two types of studies can be distinguished here. First, there is a large body of work that, inspired by Said, examines how Muslims are represented by Western visual culture (e.g., Shaheen 2001; Kabir 2006; Saeed 2007). Second, there is a smaller body of work (see, for instance, Bangura 2000; Khatib 2006) that analyses how Muslims speak for themselves, that is, how they represent themselves. Though often presenting excellent analyses, both sets of studies point to a methodological and theoretical quandary. These studies tend either to operate within a dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ or they align heterogeneous stories without being able to say much more about them than that they

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exist (Bröckling, Krasmann and Lemke 2011, p. 18). This raises the question of how to be critical and how to theorize Muslim politics while evading these traps. By drawing on Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk, I show that instead of stimulating either a single history of power structures or the many histories of this structure’s failure, the politics in Indonesian art allows a different ‘history.’ I propose that the works give way to a ‘critical history.’ This history opens up new possibilities for the practice of a Muslim politics while also offering a more productive approach to studying Muslim politics.

Membuat Obama and the Politics of Juxtaposition In ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ Walter Benjamin (1999b) rejects the past as a continuum of progress. To explain his alternative vision of the past and progress, Benjamin employs Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus (1920) as ‘the angel of history,’ a figure that has his back turned to the future. As Benjamin writes: ‘Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. […] That which we call progress, is this storm’ (Benjamin 1999b, p. 257; emphasis in the original). Benjamin here criticizes Marxist historical materialism, which was concerned with forecasting a revolutionary future. Instead, he suggests that historical materialism’s real task should be to look at, and save, the past. This is important as Benjamin observes that in the present, consciousness exists in a mythic state against which historical knowledge is the only antidote. Benjamin’s aim is to ‘destroy the mythic immediacy of the present, not by inserting it into a cultural continuum that affirms the present as its culmination, but by discovering that constellation of historical origins which has the power to explode history’s continuum’ (Buck-Morss 1989, p. 10). For Benjamin, it is thus dangerous to see the past as a logical narrative that is whole. Instead, we should see the past as fragmented. History picked up certain fragments – that are of interest to those in power – while leaving others behind to be forgotten. For Benjamin, it is these fragments that must be reoriented within the present in order to question its construct. Only in this way does history refrain from reasserting the overwhelming ideology of myth (Plate 2005, p. 15). In the following analysis, I suggest that among these fragments, amidst the ruins of history, the two artworks seem to be rooting around, looking for useful elements to assemble a new object that shows the pieced-together nature of the present. Each work here has its own way of looking at the rubble, and its own tactics of putting the fragments

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together. The works take up fragments and reassemble them within the present to question the construct of this present. The ‘ur-history,’ that is, the history of the origins of the present (Benjamin 1999a, p. 1045) that is created in this way, unravels unified ideological narratives and forms the basis of a Muslim politics. The first work, Membuat Obama dan Perdamaian yang dibuat-buat (The making of Obama and artificial peace) (see Figure 5.1), is a performance artwork made by Wilman Syahnur (b. 1973), a sculptor from Bandung who graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Institut Seni Indonesia (Indonesian Institute of the Arts) in Yogyakarta. In 2009, Syahnur created Membuat Obama dan Perdamaian yang dibuat-buat for the tenth Jogja Biennale (11 December 2009 to 10 January 2010), which was titled ‘Jogja Jamming, Visual Arts Archive Movement.’ The curatorial concept of ‘jamming’ stimulated the two hundred participating artists to literally jam, crowd and occupy Yogyakarta’s city streets with their artworks. In addition to the Biennale’s four main venues (Taman Budaya Yogyakarta, Jogja National Museum, Sangkrit Art Space and Bank Indonesia Yogyakarta), works were exhibited in two hundred public locations, including Jalan Malioboro (Malioboro Street), Jalan Ahmad Yani, Jalan Panembahan Senopati, Jalan Kusumanegara, and Jalan KHA Dahlan (Wahyuni 2009). In this way the event invited not only the Biennale audience (often middle-class people and students), but also other city residents to see and enjoy the artworks. Syahnur’s artwork was one of the Biennale Art Awards winners and was later that year (17-27 June 2010) also exhibited at the National Gallery in Jakarta. Membuat Obama dan Perdamaian yang dibuat-buat shows President Barack Obama sitting in a becak (pedicab). In keeping with the Biennale’s theme of jamming, Syahnur drives the becak through the streets of Yogyakarta. During Obama’s tour around town, the work’s aesthetic construction is modified. As I suggest below, the artwork practices a Benjaminian politics at two moments: first, at the moment we witness the initial aesthetic construction of the artwork; and then at the moment that these aesthetics are set in motion and the aesthetic construction changes. When first looking closely at the artwork’s initial aesthetic construction, we see that the work takes up two fragments from the past. By placing Obama in a becak, a symbolic Indonesian vehicle, the artwork first takes up a fragment from the president’s own past. Obama spent four years of his childhood (1967-1971) living in Menteng, a neighbourhood of Jakarta. The work also invokes Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Attached to the front of the vehicle are two American flags that make it clear that although Obama is sitting in a becak, he still represents the United States. The dummy wears

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Figure 5.1 ‘Membuat Obama dan Perdamaian yang dibuat-buat’ (2009) fibreglass and painted becak

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the president’s characteristic smile as he makes a peace sign. Positioned on the left side of the vehicle is a blue collecting box that contains banknotes, while at the bottom of the becak under Obama’s foot is a sign is attached that reads ‘Campaign for Peace.’ It thus becomes clear that the president is here campaigning for peace. On the becak’s side panel, the words ‘Yes U Can’ are painted as a reference to Obama’s famous ‘Yes We Can’ slogan used as part of his 2008 election campaign. By substituting ‘we’ for ‘u,’ the artwork points out that it is not the collective, but Obama himself who can establish world peace, a point made stronger by the expressions painted above: ‘Save Iraq,’ ‘Save Gaza Strip,’ ‘Viva Afghanistan,’ ‘Viva Palestine.’ These expressions also refer to Obama’s 2008 campaign, when he toured Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, and the West Bank. During this trip, Obama met with international leaders to talk about his plans and solutions for the region, while the world witnessed a spectacle of international peacemaking. It seems as if Obama is here successfully campaigning for world peace as he is driven around town and celebrated on his return to Indonesia. His confident smile and comfortable posture in the becak underscore this impression. But the images are also ambiguous. The president’s smile comes to seem treacherous and artificial when looking closer at the side panels of the becak. The background to the slogans features a landscape with a smoking volcano, which seems to refer to the ongoing military conflicts and the unstable situation in the Muslim countries that are mentioned in the expressions – conflicts that persist despite of or because of US military intervention. This means that the aesthetic construction of the artwork then produces a more ironic and critical commentary on the president and on the current geopolitical situation: Obama, who himself once lived in the world’s largest Muslim country, who is celebrated as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is still involved in military conflicts in other Muslim majority countries. The work here responds to several events of that moment. It was the end of 2009, one year after Obama was elected for the first time. Indonesian president Yudhoyono announced that Obama would visit Indonesia for the first time since his election. This news was hailed with pride, especially when Yudhoyono revealed that Obama could still speak some Indonesian (Jakarta Post 2009). But there were also rumours that his trip would be cancelled. The connection of Obama to Indonesia can be seen, therefore, as ambivalent. At that time, Obama had just been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and stated only a few days later that the US would send an extra 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. This was received with anger and scepticism in Indonesia: How could a Nobel Peace Prize nominee with alleged familial connections to Islam send troops to another Muslim majority society? (Subinarto 2010).

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In addition to the works’ context and content, its striking techniques merit discussion. The work resembles the tactics of Benjamin’s ragpicker, who sifts through piles of refuse and collects what has been thrown away, and from this creates a new object. Benjamin introduced the figure of the ragpicker in his writings on the work of Charles Baudelaire (2006). Ragpickers first appeared in Paris when the new industrial processes gave refuse a certain value (Benjamin 2006, p. 53). They made a living by sifting through piles of refuse to collect material for salvage. Paper could be turned into cardboard, broken glass could be melted and reused, and even dead cats could be skinned to make clothes. As Baudelaire wrote: Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. […] He sorts things out and selects judiciously; he collects, like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects. (Baudelaire, quoted in Benjamin 2006, p. 108)

For Benjamin, the historical figure of the ragpicker holds critical potential. The ragpicker shows the underside of the industrial revolution. His very presence – his poverty – demonstrate that the pile of refuse is filled with the promises of the revolution. Beautiful promises have become ‘rags of speech’ and ‘verbal scraps’; words of the past that have been thrown into the trash to be picked up at by the ragpicker. Benjamin comments: If we wish to gain a clear picture of him […] what we will see is [him] picking up rags of speech and verbal scraps with his stick and tossing them […] a little drunk, into his cart, not without letting one or another of those faded cotton remnants – ‘humanity,’ ‘inwardness,’ or ‘absorption’ – flutter derisively in the wind. (Benjamin 1999b, p. 310)

The ragpicker collects what has been thrown away, the lost and the forgotten, and creates a new object, while pointing out the deceit and inequality of the Industrial Revolution. By sifting through a pile of refuse, the artwork invokes tactics that are similar to that of Benjamin’s ragpicker. The specific pile the work is sifting through here is both history and Obama’s own pile of refuse. From this pile, Obama’s presidential rag cart picks up two allegedly ‘thrown-away/forgotten’ fragments: Obama’s own past in Indonesia and the (promises of his) 2008 presidential campaign. The work suggests that Obama has forgotten his own past, while constructing his ‘peace promises’ as ‘rags of speech’ and ‘verbal scraps’; deceitful words

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of the past that have now been thrown into the trash. In this way, the work criticizes the president himself as well as his uncritical supporters, including Indonesians, who are of course the main audience for the show. But it also criticizes the present geopolitical situation where the US stokes violent conflicts in Muslim regions. The artwork here thus invokes fragments of the past to critique the dominant narratives (at least in 2009), which optimistically celebrated what Obama represented, and his promise for world peace. The work also shows that a different selection of historical fragments constructs a different present. In the alternative present that is constructed here, the president is not on a campaign for peace, but on a ‘tour of deceit,’ something that becomes clearer as the tour continues. While driving on Jalan Laks RE Martadinata, a street in Yogyakarta, Syahnur suddenly lets the becak fall over. Syahnur and Obama tumble out of the vehicle and Obama breaks into pieces. The crash of the becak and Obama’s fall generate a threefold meaning: first, Obama’s tumble out of the Indonesian vehicle emphasizes the alleged forgetting of his own past in Indonesia; second, throwing Obama out of the becak and on the street, functions as a rejection. Indonesia should not embrace as one of its own this man who is still involved in conflicts in Muslim countries; and third, the crash of the becak indicates that Obama’s present ‘tour of deceit’ can no longer be accepted and should be brought to a halt. Importantly, it is then not, as we saw earlier, the past that is here broken up into fragments, but the already constructed alternative version of the present in which Obama is on a tour of deceit. Meanwhile, the president’s body parts are scattered on the street. With the help of bystanders, Syahnur picks up the pieces and drives them to the RS PKU Muhammadiyah hospital in Yogyakarta, an Islamic hospital. RS translates as hospital (rumah sakit), PKU is a political party – Partai Kebangkitan Ummat (Community Awakening Party) – and Muhammadiyah is a large Islamic social movement. When Syahnur later poses with a newly repaired and visibly bandaged Obama in front of this hospital (Figure 5.2), it is suggested that it is in this Islamic hospital that the president has been put back together again. The work suggests that Obama finds healing through Islam and is in this way able to get back into the becak. In the final aesthetic construction of the work, Obama is driven around again, although the traces of the crash remain visible via the bandages. Through the alteration of aesthetics, the artwork has here staged a humorous intervention – people standing alongside the road were laughing and clapping – in an alternative version of the present in which Obama is on a ‘tour of deceit.’ This tour, and thus this alternative present, was literally called to a halt by letting the

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Figure 5.2 A repaired and visibly damaged president posing in front of the PKU Muhammadiyah hospital

work crash and fall apart – thereby ridiculing Obama. The newly repaired work now imagines and fantasizes yet another version of the present. In this version, the president continues his campaign for peace, but has turned to Islam to repair the damage that his tour of deceit has caused. The work suggests that despite his war mongering, Indonesians are not yet ready to throw Obama into the trash. If he repairs his tour of deceit, he can still be one of them.

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Membuat Obama dan Perdamaian yang dibuat-buat practices a critical Benjaminian politics through the alteration of aesthetics. These politics may best be described as a politics of temporal juxtaposition. The work actualizes fragments from the past to question the present and to highlight its constructed nature. This happens both in the artwork’s initial aesthetic construction as well as at the moment aesthetics are on the move. In both cases a new object is created that is a pieced-together creation in which the lines of temporal juxtaposition show through. In the initial aesthetic construction, two past fragments – Obama’s own past in Indonesia and his 2008 presidential campaign – are juxtaposed with the present. And in the final aesthetic construction, three temporal layers are juxtaposed, namely: the past that was imagined in the initial construction, the present that was rejected – the traces of which are visible through the bandages – and the newly imagined present in which Obama has (re)turned to Islam. It is through this politics of juxtaposition that the work points out that there is no beautiful unified whole, no seamless blending of past and present (Plate 2005, p. 16); the fragments are merely temporarily frozen into an image of juxtaposition.

11 June 2002 and the Politics of Memory After September 11, airport security changed drastically. The scanning and screening of passengers ostensibly to lower the probability of new terrorist attacks has become routine, but does not go uncontested. Critics have claimed that measures are excessive and infringe on the rights of travellers. While every traveller is confronted with security measures, the repercussions of heightened security are perhaps most felt by Muslims, who are in practice those most often targeted by security. Arahmaiani’s installation 11 June 2002 responds to this situation. The Bandung-born artist Arahmaiani (b. 1961) is known for her performance art pieces, which in her early career often put her at odds with former president Suharto’s New Order regime (1966-1998). After a performance in which she criticized the military, she was held for a month. Today Arahmaiani is a key figure in the Indonesian art scene and one of the most prominent Indonesian female artists to traverse the global art world. She has exhibited widely in Southeast Asia, Japan, Europe, Australia and the US. She is also an avowed Muslim. In 2002, Arahmaiani was invited to speak at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. 11 June 2002, which was on display during the

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Venice Biennale in 2003 (15 June 2003 to 2 November 2003), is based on her memory of a stopover in Los Angeles while on her way to Canada to deliver her address. On 11 June 2002, Arahmaiani was arrested by US immigration officials at Los Angeles airport for not having a visa for the stopover. After being interrogated for four hours, it was expected that she would be locked up in a cell, but after lengthy negotiations it was decided that she was to be detained in the hotel room she booked. During her overnight stay, a male guard was instructed to closely watch her to ensure nothing would happen. The guard, himself a Muslim, stayed inside Arahmaiani’s room. The strict Islamic rules on the physical proximity between unmarried men and women were violated, much to the horror of the artist. 11 June 2002, which depicts a hotel room, recalls Arahmaiani’s memory of these events. During the performance, Arahmaiani would sit on the bed and quietly read the Quran. The performance took place once, after that the room was displayed as an artwork without Arahmaiani herself being physically present. In what follows, I suggest that the installation is what Pierre Nora called a lieu de mémoire, a site where memory crystallizes and secretes itself (Nora 1996, p. 7). As a lieu de mémoire, the installation offers a critique of a present in which Muslims are suspected terrorists, while pointing at the fragmented nature of our past. As I explain below, the work as a lieu de mémoire, echoes Benjamin. The emphasis of the work on the discontinuity and selectivity of history forms the basis of the politics it practices. Lieux de mémoire are sites of memory in three senses of the word – material, functional, and symbolic (Nora 1996, p. 18) – and these aspects always coexist. 11 June 2002 embodies all three. Arahmaiani’s memory materializes in a site which functions to communicate her memory. The site also references and symbolizes the larger plight of Muslims as frequent targets of policing. But these are not the only factors that construct the installation as a lieu de mémoire. What is equally important is that lieux de mémoire occur at a particular historical moment. Lieux de mémoire occur in the moment we realize that the process that carries us forward and our representation of it (history) are not of the same kind anymore, and therefore we deliberately create lieux de mémoire. They originate with the sense that without commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep these memories away (Nora 1996, p. 12). Lieux de mémoire come from the fund of our memory and are constructed as small fragments of history torn away from the main flow of history. As Nora writes:

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Indeed, it is this very push and pull [between memory and history] that produces lieux de mémoire – moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned: no longer quite life, not yet dead, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded. (Nora 1996, p. 12)

Like Benjamin’s historical fragments, lieux de mémoire thus too constitute small historical fragments torn away from the movement of history. As suggested above, for a lieu de mémoire to come into being, there must be a will to remember; the memory the site defends must be threatened. 11 June 2002 clearly speaks of a will to remember. The memory embodied in the installation is threatened as it constitutes a fragment of history that is likely to be buried because, as Benjamin would say, it is of no use to those in power. The fragment that is torn away from history here does not merely try to ‘complete’ history, but it rubs (the dominant order) of history against the grain. 11 June 2002 thus constitutes a lieu de mémoire. But how is this lieu de mémoire constructed? What is torn away from history, from memory? What is taking place in this fragment of history and what politics are practiced? I explore these questions through analysing the installation as a lieu de mémoire, that is, as a material, functional and symbolic site of memory. When observing first the material construction of the site, a contradiction is recognized between two permeable material layers. The first material layer constructs the hotel room as a cheerful site that expresses a love and desire for America. The room is a light, single-room space with a window. Beside the window sits a bed neatly made up with white sheets decorated with pink and red hearts. The heart pattern is repeated on a shower curtain, and there is a red rose on the bedside table, which further strengthens the ‘love theme.’ A large American flag looms in the far corner and insignia of a US consumer world are strewn around, including two shiny retro CocaCola vending machines, Coca-Cola bottles, and Coca-Cola wall signs, all of which contextualize the room as the site of the quintessentially American. One of the wall signs emphasizes America’s successful global expansion, reading ‘Erfrische Dich,’ German for ‘Refresh yourself,’ an advertising slogan Coca-Cola used in the 1920s. Displaying cheerfulness and uncomplicated love for American consumer culture, it is therefore ironic that the room is also the place of detention. The exhortation to ‘refresh yourself’ is in stark contrast to the cruelty of Arahmaiani’s confinement. A second material layer, which is constructed through the presence of Arahmaiani’s personal items, captures this cruelty. Strewn across the bed are a black lace bra and

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black pantyhose. Socks lay on the carpet. A variety of toiletries are added to the sink: Marvital tampons, Lux soap, Dreaming shampoo and a powder compact. Above the bed photographs are hung that depict Arahmaiani undressing herself, slipping into a bathrobe, brushing her hair and reading the Quran in bed. When Arahmaiani is not performing the work, the Quran itself is placed on the pillow. The display of these photos and other intimate personal items here work to construct the guard’s intrusive gaze and serve to emphasize the violation of the Muslim female body during Arahmaiani’s overnight stay in the room. The material construction of the site is thus characterized by a sharp contradiction. The first material layer constructs a cheerful room that displays a blatant love and desire for America. The America imagined here is not today’s America, but an America of the past, that is created through the retro vending machines and the old Coca-Cola slogan. Moreover, this ‘past America’ is a promising and optimistic America; it is the trouble-free consumer society that successfully exported its commodities abroad. But this more innocent vision of America is contradicted by Arahmaiani’s American nightmare that is constructed through the second material layer. For Arahmaiani, this is the America of the present. America is here imagined not as an optimistic and promising America, but as an America of surveillance, of paranoia, of the violation of privacy, and of discrimination against Muslims. If Arahmaiani had not been arrested, she would have stayed in the same room, but the guard would not have been there to observe her. This first material layer, in which the guard’s intrusive gaze is absent, thus represents ‘the way it should have been’ – it is the America of freedom, the America of the possible. The second layer shows what the room, and by extension America, became instead: a place of paranoia and surveillance. The installation here juxtaposes two different temporalities; two historical fragments; and two visions: the America that ‘was,’ and that ‘should have been’; and the America that ‘is,’ but ‘should not be.’ The lieu de mémoire is both a material and a functional site. It can have numerous functions, but here I would like to highlight just one. The installation functions to communicate Arahmaiani’s memory to an audience, which can be both Muslim and non-Muslim. The very way in which Arahmaiani’s memory is communicated keeps the memory alive and ties it to the present. To communicate the memory of Arahmaiani’s ‘America of surveillance,’ the installation tries to turn the spectator into a voyeur. By entering the installation and observing Arahmaiani sitting on the bed, her intimate items and photographs of her body on display, we practice (or at least are invited to practice) the guard’s gaze. In this way, the audience is

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(involuntarily) positioned to continue the violation of Arahmaiani’s body in the present moment. And even when Arahmaiani’s (living) body itself is absent – when she is not performing the work – it is through the materiality of the site that this process comes into being. The installation thus restates its entity as a lieu de mémoire. While Arahmaiani’s memory is materialized in the installation and moves away from the realm of living ‘unviolated’ memory (Nora 1996, p. 8), it is not yet dead either. It is through the interplay between the spectator and the specific material arrangement of the site that the memory revives. Paradoxically, to make the memory visible and to keep the memory alive, the Muslim female body is put on display (again) and continues to be violated by a larger audience. The gender politics and the violated female Muslim body also play a role in the construction of the installation as a symbolic site. In the way the installation communicates Arahmaiani’s memory, a particular politics of the body is practised. In the installation, the individual female Muslim body comes to stand for something larger than itself. In the work, Arahmaiani’s policed and violated body constitutes the central locus for a critique of the (American) present moment in which, in the name of security, Muslims are labelled and treated as terrorist suspects. In this way, the representation of her body comes to stand for the reality a larger group of Muslims face in a post-9/11 world. The fragment of history that 11 June 2002 as a lieu de mémoire constructs and embodies is a perceived historical moment. And contrary to those lieux de mémoire that cherish a memory that history would sweep away, this installation is highly critical of the historical fragment that it itself constructs, that is, a historical moment characterized by surveillance, paranoia, and prejudiced views about Muslims, a critique mainly directed at America. But the installation also reflects ambivalent discourses currently constructed about the direction of modernity in Indonesia. In these discourses America often functions simultaneously as the ultimate example of a glossy and desirable modernity on the one hand, and on the other as a capitalist, consumerist dystopia that is violent and antithetical to Muslims. It is paradoxically something simultaneously to aspire to and be wary of. Through its politics of memory, the installation, as a lieu de mémoire, echoes Benjamin by pointing out that we must see the past as fragmented. The work stresses that there are fragments that are taken up in a unified narrative of history and there are fragments that are likely to be forgotten. 11 June 2002 shows what (according to a symbolic Muslim community) is not taken up in dominant history, but what should be registered – the paranoia and prejudiced views about Muslims that are also part of our

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current historical moment. 11 June 2002 creates a fragment of history that it finds lacking in history. The work embodies a lost fragment of history, a fragment that is of no use to those in power. By creating this ‘extra’ fragment of history, the work disrupts any attempt at a unified or totalizing history.

Muslim Politics and Aesthetics: Practicing a Critical History Through their aesthetics the two artworks practice critical politics. These politics are twofold. First, the works are contesting current geopolitics and the volatile position of Indonesia and Muslims in a post-9/11 world. The works challenge specific realities and narratives that have come into being after 9/11, and that are antithetical to Muslims. Through a politics of juxtaposition, Membuat Obama dan Perdamaian yang dibuat-buat criticizes the current geopolitical situation of US and general Western hostility towards Islamic countries. And through a politics of memory 11 June 2002 responds to post-9/11 realities in which Muslims commonly or generally are cast as Islamic terrorists. A second critical politics is identified in the very way in which the two works contest these post-9/11 realities. We have seen that the works evoke fragments from the past to question and critique the construct of the present. Membuat Obama dan Perdamaian yang dibuat-buat and 11 June 2002 are evoking fragments from the past to point at the instability of the truth of the present. By juxtaposing multiple and different temporalities in the same object, the artworks underscore the multiple, different, and simultaneous temporalities of contemporary Indonesian society. Currently, the unequal speed of modernization makes the archipelago seem like a temporally fragmented entity. The works do not necessarily prefer ‘the modern,’ as the critique of the United States – the ultimate example of capitalist modernity – shows. Furthermore, as pieced-together creations the works embody the aesthetics of an ‘ur-history,’ a history of the origins of the present (Benjamin 1999a, p. 1045). For Benjamin, this ur-history frees the present from myth. And indeed, the re-actualization of fragments from the past here fractures and unravels unified ideological narratives that ostensibly transfigure the present. Consequently, just as the future – formerly a visible, predictable, well-marked extension of the present – has become invisible and unpredictable, so do the artworks suggest that we have moved from a visible past to an invisible one; from a solid and steady past to our fractured past (Nora 1996, p. 17). By emphasizing the selectivity in the act of reassembling fragments from the past the works suggest that (the writing of) history is merely a question of representation.

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In the introduction of this chapter, I pointed out how studies on visual culture and Muslim politics either pointed out a single history of power structures or directed our attention to the many histories of this structure’s failure. I want to propose here that the politics in Indonesian art allow a different ‘history,’ a ‘critical history.’ The artworks do not suggest an abandonment of the writing of history. Instead, they propose (the writing of) a different history – a history that critically points at its own constructed nature and avoids construction of unified ideological narratives. Echoing Benjamin, Membuat Obama dan Perdamaian yang dibuat-buat and 11 June 2002 point to possibilities for both artists and scholars to imagine and write histories that help to reconfigure and contest the ideological order that is imagined to be antithetical to Muslims. The works call for a critical ‘ur-history’; a history that unearths the past and that sketches a history of the origins of the present (Benjamin 1999a, p. 1045).

Works Cited Bangura Ahmed S. (2000) Islam and the West African Novel: The Politics of Representation Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Benjamin, Walter (1999a) The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Benjamin, Walter (1999b) Selected Writings, 1927-1934, ed. by Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, Walter (2006) The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. by Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bianpoen, Carla (2009) ‘Contemporary Islamic Art in Progress.’ MutualArt website, November-December. https://w w w.mutualart.com/Article/ Contemporary-Islamic-Art-in-Progress/7A5454DE0760A28D. Bröckling, Ulrich, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke (2011) Governmentality, Current Issues and Future Challenges. Routledge: New York. Buck-Morss, Susan (1989) The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cotter, Holland (2006) ‘What Does Islam Look Like?’ New York Times, 26 February. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/arts/design/26cott.html. George, Kenneth M. (2009) ‘Ethics, Iconoclasm, and Qur’anic Art in Indonesia’ Cultural Anthropology 24.4: 589-621. George, Kenneth M. (2010) Picturing Islam: Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Ingham, Susan (2008) ‘The Chosen Image, Indonesian Artists and the International Circuit.’ Paper presented at the 17th Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Melbourne, 1-3 July. Jakarta Post (2009) ‘Obama to Visit Indonesia This Year, Says SBY,’ The Jakarta Post, 4 April. http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/04/04/obama-visitindonesia-year-says-sby.html. Jurriëns, Edwin (2010) ‘Video Spa, Krisna Murti’s Treatment of the Senses.’ Bijdragen tot de Taal, Land- en Volkenkunde (BKI) 166.1: 1-24. Kabir, Nahid (2006) ‘Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Australian Media, 2001-2005.’ Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 26.3: 313-328. Khatib, Lina (2006) ‘Nationalism and Otherness: The Representation of Islamic Fundamentalism in Egyptian Cinema.’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 9: 63-80. Nora, Pierre (1996) Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. New York: Columbia University Press. Plate, Brent S. (2005) Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics: Rethinking Religion through the Arts. New York: Routledge. Rath, Amanda Katherine (2005) Taboo and Transgression in Contemporary Indonesian Art: Exhibition Catalogue. Ithaca: Herbert F. Johnson Museum. Saeed, Amir (2007) ‘Media, Racism and Islamophobia: The Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Media.’ Sociology Compass 1.2: 443-462. Shaheen, Jack (2001) Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. New York: Roundhouse Publishing. Subinarto, Ibrahim (2010) ‘Proses Kreatif Wilman dalam Membuat Obama dan Perdamaian yang Dibuat-buat.’ Journal Bali, 29 October. http://www.journalbali. com/visual-arts/mencitrakan-kembali-obama-menyuarakan-perdamaian.html. Supangkat, Jim, Tony Godfrey and Alan Cruickshank (2010) ‘Contemporaneity and Indonesian Art.’ Contemporary Visual Art + Culture Broadsheet 39.4: 257-262. Wahyuni, Sri (2009) ‘Biennale Jogja Rejects Commercialism.’ The Jakarta Post, 14 December. http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/12/14/biennale-jogjarejects commercialism.html.

About the Author Leonie Schmidt is Assistant Professor in Television Studies at the Media Studies Department of the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of Islamic Modernities in Southeast Asia: Exploring Indonesian Popular and Visual Culture (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). Email: [email protected]

6

Keeping Communists Alive in Singapore Chua Beng Huat Abstract Prominent Singapore filmmaker Tan Pin Pin’s documentary on nine ageing members of the Malayan Communist Party who were forced to leave Singapore decades ago, To Singapore with Love (2013), highlights the contentious issues around questions of exile, belonging, and the attachment to nation in a globalized environment. In an attempt to silence voices from exile, the film was banned by Singapore authorities. In examining the performance of such voices, this chapter considers the potential for film to generate renewed interest in the politics of nation in a global city. The power of cinematic narrative performativities to unsettle state-sanctioned orthodoxies and call into question the limits to civic freedoms is also discussed. Keywords: Singapore, film, performance, nation, voices from exile

In July 2014, the National University of Singapore (NUS) Museum and Cultural Studies Research Cluster, Asia Research Institute, NUS, along with the filmmaker, Tan Pin Pin, submitted the hour-long documentary film To Singapore with Love (2014) for censorship clearance. The film was to be included in a two-day screening of three of Tan’s films. After two months of waiting, the Censorship Board gave its decision. On 10 September 2014, the film was denied a classification or rating (Not Allowed for All Ratings, NAR), which effectively means that it cannot be commercially released. The film in question documents the film-maker’s interviews with nine Singaporeans in exile: Six are aging ex-members of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) who are disallowed a return to Singapore and currently reside in Thailand and Malaysia. The other three are self-exiled under different circumstances. Ho Juan Thai, expecting to be detained without trial under the Internal Security Act (ISA), amended the expiry date on his passport in order to get out of the country; medical surgeon Dr. Ang Swee Chai, who joined her husband the late Francis Khoo in self-exile

Hudson, Chris, and Bart Barendregt (eds): Globalization and Modernity in Asia. Performative Moments. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462981126_ch06

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(as Khoo faced imminent detention without trial as a political dissident); and Tan Wah Piow, who, after being released from jail for student activism, went into exile to avoid conscription into the national military service in the expectation that he would be ‘ill-treated.’ The three left Singapore at different times in the 1970s and 1980s and currently reside in London. The interviews cover primarily their current lives; less is mentioned of the activities that led to their voluntary or involuntary exile, although the ex-communists showed photos of themselves in army fatigues. All expressed a desire to return to Singapore; hence, the title of the film, To Singapore with Love. This chapter investigates the performative possibilities offered by film to generate renewed contestation over the nation’s history. The experience of the performance of event or spectacle – such as voices from exile – can be seen as a performative intervention that has the power to encourage re-examination of long-accepted meanings and the potential to destabilize orthodox understandings of national belonging. Outright banning of films is infrequent in Singapore. Usually, the Media Development Authority (MDA) is willing to negotiate with film-makers on making specific cuts in sex, violence and racial content, before rating the films for commercial release.1 The MDA’s reason for the outright ban was ‘security’ concerns. They argued that: ‘the contents of the film undermine national security because legitimate actions of the security agencies to protect the national security and stability of Singapore are presented in a distorted way as acts that victimized innocent individuals.’ Tan appealed to the Film Appeal Committee of the MDA: ‘As we approach our 50th birthday, I feel that we as a people should be able to view and weigh for ourselves, through legitimate public screenings in Singapore, different views about our past, even views that the Government disagrees with’ (Yong 2014). Her appeal was in vain. As is almost always the case, the public banning gave the film immediate publicity and stimulated curiosity and desire to watch the film, especially among the younger citizens. A 30-year-old Singaporeans said, ‘I didn’t know about the film before MDA made its decision. And now that we’re told we can’t watch it here, everyone wants to watch it.’ Following the ruling, it was announced that the film would be screened in Johor Bahru, Malaysia on 19 September 2014, at the Freedom Film Festival. Revealing the attitudes of a progressively better educated and liberal Singaporean population, which often goes undocumented by academic and 1 At the time of writing, ratings for commercial release has been withheld for the erotic film In the Room by leading local film-maker Eric Khoo after it had one screening during the 2015 Singapore Film Festival.

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journalistic critics who are fixated with the unchanging PAP one-party dominant state structure, a student in the Nanyang Technological University immediately announced that they would be organizing free bus rides for Singaporeans who wanted to go to Johor Bahru to watch the film, noting that there was a sponsor for two chartered buses. The overwhelming registration of interest to watch the film led to the need to change the venue for the screening, from one that could hold 150 persons to one that could hold 400. On the day of the screening, a long queue of primarily university students boarded the express bus from Singapore to Johor Bahru; others drove themselves. In all about 350 Singaporeans turned up at the screening (Au-Yong2014a). In addition, Yale-NUS (National University of Singapore) Liberal Arts College immediately made an appeal to the MDA to be permitted to screen the film in a course on documentary films, without any prior consultation with the film-maker, Tan. The MDA responded to this academic appeal with the concession that the MDA: recognizes that lecturers and students of media or related courses at tertiary institutions may require access to a wider variety of films, including films that are classified R21 or NAR. Some leeway is provided to these institutions to screen films for educational purposes, on condition that these films have either been previously classified by the MDA, or prior approval has been sought from the MDA before the films are acquired.

The film was subsequently screened twice at the NUS campus, first in a large auditorium to packed audiences and the second time at the Asia Research Institute to a smaller audience of research fellows; in both instances the film-maker was present for a post-screening discussion. The MDA also permitted the film to be screened in private. Friends of the film-maker reportedly arranged many private screenings, with or without the presence of the film-maker. Finally, according to the film’s website, in July 2015 a signed, limited edition DVD was released for sale outside Singapore: During the DVD’s production, the Media Development Authority of Singapore (MDA) clarified that the DVD cannot be mailed overseas from within Singapore as it could constitute ‘distribution,’ which is not allowed for Not Allowed for All Ratings (NAR) films. MDA also clarified that the producer cannot release the film on the web through a VOD portal so that it could be accessible to all, including those from Singapore for the same reason.2 2 http://tosingaporewithlove.com.

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Thus in spite of these restrictions, it is of course possible for Singaporeans to obtain the DVD, albeit through circuitous routes, and screen it to any audience in their private homes without breaking any laws. The ban apparently had not prevented anyone who wanted to watch the film to do so. Meanwhile, the hidden culturally and politically repressive hand of the state had unveiled itself.

Controversy The banning unavoidably generated public commentary. In this instance, public voices tended to be against the MDA’s decision. The undergraduate film audience at the Johor Freedom Film Festival suggested that ‘This film must be watched as the government and the media have glossed over this aspect of our history. It is also a good opportunity to hear stories that have not been heard’ (Au-yong 2014b). Chua Mui Hoong, a columnist from the mainstream newspaper, The Straits Times, wrote: When there are diverging interpretations of events, like the arrests of leftist activists in the 1960s to [the] 1980s, the best antidote is not a ban on some points of view, but more openness and access to information. The Singapore Government can try to set the record straight. It can put out its version of the Singapore Story. It can do its own documentary to counter views of the exiles in the film. But it must realize it does not have a monopoly on Singapore’s history. Singapore and its history do not belong to the ruling party. People who lived through crucial episodes of the nation’s history have their stories to tell too. If the versions do not match, let the people – and history, be the judge. A ban on a film serves little purpose, except to whet people’s appetite to watch it. (Chua, M.H. 2014b)

In addition, a petition signed by more than four hundred individuals, from artists to civil society activists to film enthusiasts, was generated and submitted to the MDA. The People’s Action Party (PAP) government was left to defend the ban. Among the first to respond was the incumbent Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong. Staying close to the militarized insurgents of the Malayan Communist Party, he insisted on the ‘historical context’ for the state’s refusal of their return to Singapore: ‘It was a violent struggle; it lasted 40 years from 1949. On one side, you had the non-communists, democratic groups; on the other side, you had the Communist Party of Malaya and their sympathizers in the Communist United Front. […] It was an armed struggle for power.’ ‘Forty

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years’ was the time between the 1949 to the 1987 ‘Marxist conspiracy’ in which sixteen young Singaporeans were detained under the ISA for allegedly plotting to ‘overthrow’ the PAP government! To counter the image that the PAP government had been ‘unforgiving,’ the Prime Minister pointed out that many of the ex-communists had indeed returned to Singapore ‘after owning up to their own actions,’ and having ‘cleared their accounts, made their peace, lived and died here.’ Among them were MCP leaders who lived for years in Beijing. Therefore, according to the Prime Minister, ‘It is their [the ex-MCP members’] prerogative’ and their expressed desire to return to Singapore is disingenuous. The press statement from the press secretary to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Home Affairs echoes the same points: They speak of yearning for Singapore, but gloss over their active involvement in the violent CPM insurgency that they have not renounced. They portray themselves as being prevented from returning to Singapore, yet their former CPM associates, including senior leaders, have returned to Singapore, accounted for their actions and re-integrated back into society. This option remains open to those who sincerely want to return and be reunited with Singapore. (Yap 2014)

Technically, the absence of counter voices from the government left the film vulnerable to critique of being ‘biased,’ a weakness seized on by all government commentators. For the Prime Minister the question was, ‘why should we allow them [the exiles], through a movie, to present an account of themselves, not of documentary history objectively presented, but a self-serving personal account conveniently inaccurate in places, glossing over inconvenient facts in others?’(Mohamad Salleh 2014a). Furthermore, he sees film as a particularly effective medium for communicating biased opinions, if not misinformation, in contrast to the ‘sobriety’ of books: You write a book, I can write a counter book. The book, you can read together with the counter book. You watch a movie, you think it’s a documentary. It may be like [Michael Moore’s 2004] Fahrenheit 9/11, very convincing, but it’s not a documentary. And I think that we have to understand this in order to understand how to deal with these issues. (Mohamad Salleh 2014a)

Furthermore, the bias is supposedly not innocent: The film’s one-sided portrayals are designed to evoke feelings of sympathy and support for individuals who chose to remain in self-exile and have not

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accounted for their past actions squarely. It is not a historical documentary presenting a factual account of what happened. (Yap 2014)

The same charge of ‘bias’ was made by the Minister of Communication and Information, who oversees the MDC and Censorship Board stated in parliament: The film allowed some Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) members and their Communist United Front sympathizers to whitewash their past actions by re-casting them as the expression of a peaceful and democratic difference of ideology and views. To allow public screening of a film that obfuscates and whitewashes an armed insurrection by an illegal organization and violent and subversive acts directed at Singaporeans, would effectively mean condoning the use of violence and subversion in Singapore, and thus harm our national security. (Mohamad Salleh 2014b)

Therefore: [N]ot taking action against films which contain distorted and untruthful accounts would give the false impression that there is truth to the claims, and the Government’s actions against those people could then be seen as unwarranted. This could erode public confidence in the government on security matters, even as the country deals with current threats like terrorism. (Mohamad Salleh 2014b)

Pushing this line of argument to the extreme, the Deputy Prime Minister’s office suggested that, ‘[t]o allow public screening of the film […] would be like allowing jihadi terrorist groups today to produce and publicly screen films that glorify their jihadist cause’ (Yap 2014). Finally, when countered with the argument that communism no longer poses a security threat to Singapore, the Prime Minister’s retort was: ‘Communism is now over, but I don’t think the people who used to support communism […] have given up the fight for a place on the winner’s podium,’ and to allow its screening ‘would sully the honour and the reputation of security forces, and the people who fought the communists to build the Singapore of today’ (Mohamad Salleh 2014a). The same sentiment was expressed in parliament by the Minister of Communication and Information: ‘It would also be a gross injustice to the men and women who braved violence and intimidation to stand up to the communists, especially those who lost their lives in the fight to preserve Singapore’s security and stability, and secure a democratic, non-communist Singapore’ (Mohamad Salleh 2014b).

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Contest over History While the MDA and the government in general might want to displace the controversies surrounding the banning onto the issue of ‘national security,’ this is largely a non sequitur, especially the line that compares the film to jihadist recruitment videos. Firstly, no cause was being promoted in the film; the aging ex-members of the MCP in their eighties were not trying to recruit new members as the MCP had been disbanded decades ago. Secondly, the era of communism as a revolutionary ideology is now past; the world’s biggest communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, has elected to be integrated into global capitalism rather than promote revolution against it. As in the current conjuncture, public security threat is more likely to come from religious fundamentalists than communism, thus the ‘jihadist’ comparison. Rather than the ‘ruse’ of national security, the banning and the controversy is over the ‘history’ of Singapore, particularly the history of the period between 1960 and the early 1980s. Singapore’s ruling party, the PAP, was initially constituted by two factions: a British university-educated faction and a faction of local unionists, Chinese educated students and fellow socialists, united under a shared interest in decolonization. The inevitable falling out of the factions left the British education faction, who subsequently labelled themselves as ‘moderate’ social democrats, as inheritor of PAP and state power, while the left faction split off to form the political party Barisan Socialis (Socialist Front). The subsequent rise of the PAP to its hegemonic position as a single-party parliament was a path paved with a series of heavy handed political repressions. Using the Cold War rhetoric of the contest between a ‘free’ liberal-democratic capitalist world and ‘totalitarian’ communism, anti-PAP political dissidents were liberally branded as ‘communist’ or ‘pro-communist’ or ‘communist sympathizers,’ to prepare the ground for their detention without trial, under the ISA. To the extent that the government alleged that the general interest of these various shades of ‘communists’ was insurrection against the ‘freely elected’ PAP government, they constituted a ‘threat’ to the national security. Politically the most critical of the detentions was the 1963 Operation Coldstore, in which more than one hundred individuals were detained in one night (Poh, Tan and Hong 2013), among whom were the leaders of the breakaway Barisan Socialis. It was alleged that Barisan was the ‘Open Front’ organization of the illegal and underground MCP, doing the biding of the latter. To the extent that the allegation of communist affiliations and activities of political detainees has never been publicly established in court, it remains in this sense unsubstantiated, let alone proven. It is this allegation and

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the injustice of lengthy detention – the longest being 23 years – that are now being contested by the counter memories of the detainees, and the counter-histories of what the government calls ‘revisionist’ historians. New archival materials have enabled historians to produce ‘counter-histories’ to the official narrative (Harper 2001; Thum 2013). Drawing from the British colonial archive, Thum ‘exposes’ the backroom political bargaining that went on between then Prime Minster Lee Kuan Yew, the Malayan Prime Minister Tengku Abdul Rahman and the British Colonial Office that led up to the execution of Operation Coldstore. His more ‘damning’ charge is that Lee Kuan Yew had ‘invented’ the ‘United Front’ and the idea was rejected by the Security Liaison Office of the Special Branch. Furthermore, according to Thum, Lee conceded in private meeting with then British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan in 1962 that ‘the Barisan leaders were merely “stooges” and not leading Communists, and that the trade unions were no more communist than the Electrical Trades Union in Britain’ (2015, p. 17). However, the Malayan Prime Minister, fearing that the popular Barisan could win the general election after the merger, was insistent that the arrests of the Barisan leaders be the price to be paid by Singapore for the merger. After much delay and a change of Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations in the British government, the Colonial Office agreed with the detention order. In recent years, the aging 1963 Operation Coldstore detainees have been publicly, categorically denying, in memoirs (Zahari 2001; Poh, Tan and Hong 2013) and in film documentaries, they were ever members of the MCP and those who confessed to such membership were coerced into making bogus confessions to escape long-term detention. They further suggest that they were victims of Lee Kuan Yew’s authoritarian political repression on the eve of the 1963 general election which the Barisan Socialis under the charismatic and organic leader of the working masses, Lim Chin Siong, could win or would win.3 Two short documentaries on two of the Operation Coldstore detainees had been banned by the MDA; in 2007, a documentary on Said Zahari, who was detained for seventeen years without trial and, in 2010, a documentary on the late Dr. Lim Hock Siew, detained for close to 20 years – both by local film-maker Martin See – were banned by MDA. The banning of To Singapore with Love was thus not without precedent.

3 Some of these individuals have passed away recently, leaving behind incomplete memoirs, notably Dr. Lim Hock Siew, who was detained for twenty years without trial; see Poh, Tan and Hong (2013, pp. 203 and 267).

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The official history, as taught in schools and disseminated through the pro-government mass media, of decolonization, political independence and subsequent economic prosperity and social and political stability of Singapore is of the ‘moderate faction’ of the PAP, now elevated as the ‘founding’ generation of the nation, defeating the underground communists and their ‘Open Front’ comrades. Without the defeat of the ‘communists’ there would be no industrial peace and, thus no economic prosperity as it is in Singapore today; without the defeat of the ‘communists’ there would be communal strife instead of the current ‘racial harmony,’ as the communists were manipulating the ethnic Chinese majority population to destabilize the multiracial society by championing Chinese chauvinism, especially the promotion of Chinese language and culture. To defeat the ‘communists’ all means fair and foul were permissible; hence, the heavy hand of political repression, including deportation of non-citizens and long-term detention without trial for the rest. In the face of new challenges to the official history of the PAP government the educated public has become more sceptical towards the triumphal official narrative, especially its broad brush tarring of individuals with various shades of communism, while the government sticks to its ‘factual’ and ‘objective’ historical account. In this contest, the PAP government has its own writers to counter the detainees’ written memoirs and its own historians to counter the revisionist historians. In memoirs there is nothing less than the two-volume autobiography of Lee Kuan Yew himself, among his other published recollections (Lee 2015). In academic history, there are those which hew closer to the official history (Lau 1998; Tan 2008) and others who, citing different segments of the same British colonial papers, sought to ‘prove’ the communist connection of the detainees and the overall ‘communist’ threat (Gafoor 2014). However, it has not produced any films of its own to counter the banned documentaries. This possibly accounts for the distinction Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong makes between books and films as a medium of contestation of histories. With reference to the government’s ‘objective’ and ‘factual’ version of history, the documentaries, including To Singapore with Love, are one-sided, ‘distorting’ and aimed at eliciting public sympathy for the detainees/exiles: ‘The Singapore government will not allow individuals who have posed a security threat to Singapore’s interests in the past to use media platforms such as films to make baseless accusations against the authorities, give a false portrayal of their previous activities in order to exculpate their guilt, and undermine public confidence in the government in the process.’4 4 http://news.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne+News/Singapore/Story/A1Story20100713-226663.html.

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The government’s different stances towards books and films are politically and conceptually important. First, the process of dissemination and potential size of readers/audience of the two media are significantly different. Singapore is not a reading nation, a fact reflected in the paucity of bookshops, especially for academic books. History is not a compulsory secondary school curriculum subject. One could thus surmise that there is little interest among Singaporeans at large to read any long-form history of Singapore. On the other hand, the heavily abbreviated version from colonial underdevelopment to the economic success under Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP has been repeated ad nauseam, which only causes Singaporeans to turn away from reading history. In contrast, in spite of being one of the most wired nations, Singaporeans are very high movie theatre goers. Film is thus a very popular entertainment medium with far greater reach than books. (I exclude consideration of the television screen in this instance because the television stations are state-owned and unlikely to screen To Singapore with Love.) Second, the radically different volumes of readers versus film audience is a reflection of the different modes of reception of the two media: reading is a slow process of abstract cerebral imagination, while the instantly visually available performance on screen elicits immediate affective responses, whose impact may be reinforced or diluted by post-screening reflections as afterthought. It is for similar reasons to do with the immediacy of impact of performance that theatre performances are still subject to censorship; established theatre companies, which are regularly supported by public funding, can be exempted from submitting scripts to the censorship board if they agreed to exercise their own discretion, namely exercise self-censorship, a process that has been rejected by local theatre practitioners. It is this difference in reception that undergirds the government’s different attitudes towards books and films and other modes of performance, including performance art, which was banned for a decade, from 1994 to 2003. In a state where economic pragmatism and instrumental rationality are the basis of governance, the preference for ‘cold objective facts’ over non-rational affective responses which are beyond the control instruments of the state is entirely understandable. With specific reference to To Singapore with Love, it was unlikely to garner a mass audience, so ‘popularity’ would not be an issue, although the audience it would draw would be politically minded and those with higher education. What worried the government was the sympathy it could potentially engender among the audience for the exiles, especially the aging communists. This was the likely cause for its banning for general theatre release. Indeed, observations at private screenings

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showed that sympathy for the exiles – including incomprehension about why the government would deny the aging exiles the right to return to die in Singapore, their homeland – was palpable.

Communism as the Ideological Foundation of the Nation The history of repression in the PAP’s hegemonic ascendancy is of great interest to Singaporean public intellectuals – visual artists, theatre practitioners, film-makers, civil society activists and critical academics – because it casts a wide and lasting shadow on the subsequent social, cultural and political development of Singapore until today. As the legal instruments of repression – such as the ISA, which ‘empowers’ the Minister of Home Affairs to detain an individual without trial indefinitely, without judicial review – are still in place, the public sphere has always been and continues to be rightly seen by the citizens as political ‘unfree’ space (Rajah 2012). Significantly, the contestation over the history of the 1960s is only one among many challenges to the government’s ideological stances and legal and/or administrative constraints on the public sphere on several fronts, for example: critical politically themed theatre, LGBT activists making gay rights a constitutional issue, environmental and heritage groups protesting against destructions caused by urban and infrastructure plans. Unlike the uncompromising top-down style of the Lee Kuan Yew government (1965-1990), successive generations of PAP leaders have responded to these challenges by progressively ‘liberalizing’ the cultural sphere. For example, the government has assigned a public park, Hong Lim Park, as a free speech space. This space has been used in the past few years by civil society groups to organize protests and voice their grievances; one of the most notable is the LGBT community, which uses the space for an annual national ‘Pink Dot Day’ (Chua, L. J. 2014), in celebration of ‘love.’ The government has exercised less censorship on theatre performance although it expresses its displeasure with particular theatre groups by cutting government funding. It has relaxed censorship on commercial films by introducing a rating system. Finally, it has expanded and extended its outreach activities to gather public opinion on different social and cultural issues for public policy purposes. This change of attitude is arguably ‘extracted’ from the government by various developments both domestically and internationally. Firstly, at the international level, the Cold War is over for Singapore and the world would not readily tolerate excessive repression without ‘good reason’; second, due to its capitalist economic success, Singapore has a voice in

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global forums that far exceeds its size. This global standing is of immense economic, political and legitimacy value to the PAP government, and could be easily be jeopardized by excessive repression at home. Domestically, as the education of the citizens and political leaders become progressively more equal, the citizenry is less and less inclined to readily concede to a ‘government knows best’ attitude, unlike the Lee Kuan Yew generation when a group of university educated professionals governed over a population of largely lowly educated or illiterate citizens. The PAP government has long been well aware of the increasing ‘discomfort’ Singaporeans feel towards its absolute hold on parliamentary power. To alleviate the political pressure and to appease the increasing demand for alternative voices, it has invented different means of introducing ‘opposition’ voices into parliament. Two new categories of members of parliament have been introduced. One is the ‘Nominated’ MP (NMP). The initial rationale was to allow members of the public to nominate notable independent-minded individuals, whom if accepted by a parliamentary select committee, would be inducted as MPs. However, the scheme was soon captured by interests groups which nominated their own representatives as NMPs, transforming the scheme into a functional group representation; for example, women’s groups, trade unions, chambers of commerce, the arts community and academic institutions. Current provisions allow for up to nine NMPs, with a two-year-term appointment. The other is the Non-constituency MPs (NCMP) scheme. Individuals who stood and lost in the general election but had garnered the highest number of votes among the losers are to be inducted as parliamentarians. Since the electoral constituencies have already elected their parliamentarians, the MPs so inducted technically in fact represent no particular constituency. The number of NCMPs in each parliament is to be fixed with reference to the number of non-PAP, that is, opposition parties, elected. The constitution had been amended to allow up to at least nine opposition MPs in each parliament; if fewer than nine are elected, the shortfall would made up by NCMPs. The current parliament has seven elected opposition MPs, thus it has two NCMPs. Although both schemes were initially resisted by opposition parties, they have come to accept the arrangement in order to increase their presence and voice in parliament. Ideologically, since the early 1990s, when Lee Kuan Yew stepped aside as the Prime Minister after more than 30 years, the next two generations of PAP government leaders have been lamenting the absence of a ‘social compact,’ that is, ideological consensus, between themselves and the citizens. In this context, several attempts have been made to develop a national ideology to ‘recover’ the ‘strong bond’ between the first-generation leaders and the

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governed. Two of these ideological attempts were: first, neo-Confucianism which was quickly abandoned when the supposed link between it and rapid economic development in East Asia was found wanting; and second, the attempt to develop a set of ‘shared values’ supposedly to be distilled from the three Asian civilizations of the Chinese, Indian and Islam. A parliamentary white paper was tabled in 1991 containing these invented ‘shared values’: ‘nation before community, community before self; family as the basic institution of society; consensus instead of contention; concern and regard for the individual.’ However, the document was never incorporated into the national constitution and its utility still remains unclear even today. By the time of current incumbent (third) Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, in the face of intensifying social and economic inequalities talks of ‘social compact’ has all but disappeared, as the differentiated interests and demands on the state, generated by the inequalities have made the idea of ‘nation as a community’ increasingly problematic, if not illusory. The emphasis is now on building an ‘inclusive’ society, as the government began to take a ‘left-of-centre’ turn in its public policies, with greater social welfarism and social redistribution. Given the configuration of the present conjuncture, it would appear that ideological consensus of the long-ruling PAP government, built in part on its ability to produce economic development and improvement in the material life of the population, has been slipping away steadily. For this reason, it has to hold on even more tenaciously to the founding myth of its legitimacy to govern: that the current prosperity and global stature of Singapore and Singaporeans have been possible only by the defeat of the communists in the early years of nationhood. Indeed, the PAP’s refrain is that if the moderates did not defeat the communists, ‘Singapore would be very different today,’ without ever specifying what the differences would be. Without this ‘myth of origin,’ there would be no means of dressing up the nakedness of the political repression of the early years and the firstgeneration PAP leaders, despite the great success they have engendered and bequeathed to contemporary Singapore, would be called to account for their repressive authoritarianism. It is in this sense that the incumbent PAP government has to insist on its version of history as ‘objective’ and ‘factual’ and admits no other possible narratives. Coincidentally, and one might add conveniently, in the current context of global terrorism, the defeat of the communist ‘terrorists’ could be reinterpreted as symptomatic and suggests that the current leaders have to emulate the first generation in taking similar repressive measures against any terrorist threat to national security. Indeed, the only individuals currently in detention without trial under the ISA are

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Muslim fundamentalist radicals with alleged affiliations to Islamic terrorist organizations. In view of the past and present of terrorism, the government ‘had’ to ban the documentaries that it did, knowing fully that such an act of censorship in the context of progressively liberalizing cultural sphere is a very blunt instrument that exposes the naked coercion of the state and inevitably alienates a significant segment of the citizenry.

Looking Ahead The contest over history of the process of decolonization and the early years of independence has hitherto been largely focused, first, on the supposedly ‘life-and-death struggle’ between the ‘moderate’ PAP and the radical left Barisan Socialis, which was allegedly the ‘Open Front’ of the proscribed and underground MCP, and, second, on ‘proving’ that the Operation Coldstore detainees were either card-carrying communists or, at the very minimum, ‘used’ by the MCP to further the latter’s cause, while the detainees have insisted that they were falsely accused and see themselves as ‘nationalists’ fighting for a democracy for the new nation, by contesting the authoritarian PAP. So structured, the national history is one of ‘winners’ and ‘losers.’ The protagonists are cast thus: the Barisan ‘victims’ cast the PAP as ‘authoritarian villains,’ while the PAP ‘winners’ cast the Barisan as ‘anti-nationalists.’ Thus, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong sees the counter-narratives of the detainees as fighting ‘for a place on the winner’s podium’ now that Singapore is a ‘successful’ nation. Historians generally agree that there is no ‘singular’ version of any history. Events are necessary building blocks for a history; however, the significance attributed to any event is no more than interpretations of the historians. Furthermore, the way events are strung together to constitute a historical narrative is largely a textual accomplishment of the particular historian. The PAP government’s insistence that its version is the only ‘factual’ and ‘objective’ history of Singapore does no more than intensify scepticism among educated Singaporeans at best and at worse, it is seen as using its power to suppress other possible interpretations of the same events because it has something to hide. To get beyond the impasse of current structuring of the ‘winner and loser’ historical narrative, the national history could be read as one of ‘co-production’ of the protagonists. Questions still remain, however, about whether the PAP leaders would have taken the path they had taken if it had not been pressured by the radical Barisan Socialis. Firstly, the PAP would not have been propelled into parliamentary power in the very first

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general election of 1959, were it not for the mass support generated by the radical left partners in the party. Secondly, given the bourgeois background of the British university educated would the self-labelled ‘moderates’ be as committed to the welfare of the masses had they not been thoroughly impressed by the dedication and asceticism of the radical left in their commitment to serve the people? In short, much of what has come to be seen as the character of the long-governing PAP was forged through the early partnership and subsequent separation with the radical left. In this sense, it is entirely conceivable that the history of contemporary Singapore can be narrated as one of ‘co-production’ between different parties rather than of one ‘winner’ and one ‘loser.’ The intensity of the recent contest over history of decolonization and early nationhood is in part driven by the need of the aging protagonists to get their ‘stories’ out before they die. With the passing of Lee Kuan Yew in March 2015, the main target of the Operation Coldstore detainees and their sympathetic historians is no longer materially present. The negative affect that his presence would draw from the detainees and their sympathizers will also inevitably be weakened in time. The possibility of more reconciliatory versions of the political history of the formation of independent Singapore seems to have already showed itself in the staging of Lee Kuan Yew: The Musical in July 2015 at the Marina Bay Sands theatre. In it, reviewer Corrie Tan writes: Lee Kuan Yew is at turns steely and tender, stubborn and sympathetic, intelligent and insecure’ while, Lim Chin Siong, ‘the charismatic left-wing leader, with his compelling oratory and rapport with the common man’ and, ‘is thankfully not relegated to the ranks of villainy and one-note declarations.’5

Finally, there is further evidence that even the film censorship regime has been relaxed. In November 2015, Untracing the Conspiracy, a film by Singaporean film-maker Jason Soo, was cleared for one screening during the Freedom Film Festival, held for the first time in Singapore. In this film, several detainees of the so-called ‘Marxist conspiracy’ in 1987 publicly detailed on camera the physical abuse they had experienced when they – as part of a group of seventeen young Singaporeans who were allegedly Marxists – were detained without trial under the Internal Security Act for 5 http://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/arts/theatre-review-adrian-pang-turns-in-a-stirringperformance-in-the-lky-musical.

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conspiring to overthrow the government. Their claim to have been abused by the government had never been believed by the members of the public, including the journalists who reported the event. Their testimony in the film, however, thoroughly refuted the government’s long-standing claim that no physical abuse has even been used on political detainees. Indeed, several detainees were detained again when they issued a public statement proclaiming the fact and were forced into retracting the statement before being released again. Coming on the heels of the banning of To Singapore with Love, the release of Untracing with an R21 rating (restricted to those 21 years old and above) belied all expectations of the civil society and film community in Singapore. Since then, the film has been screened again commercially in a local arthouse theatre. As a Singaporean, one is tempted to speculate that with the passing of the unapologetic authoritarian ‘founding father’ of the nation, Lee Kuan Yew, cultural liberalization will f inally flourish in Singapore, though not liberal political pluralism. If the future brings new forms of cultural liberalization, we would be indebted to performative media in which acting, speaking and recounting stories has had the greatest impact on broadening and changing understandings of Singapore’s contested history.

Works Cited Au-Yong, Rachel (2014a) ‘Singaporeans arrive for Johor Baru screening of documentary To Singapore with Love.’ The Straits Times, 19 September. Au-yong, Rachel (2014b) ‘Exiles film okay for classroom use’ The Straits Times, 20 September. Chin Peng (2003) My Side of the Story. Singapore: Media Masters. Chua, Lynette J. (2014a) Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State. Singapore: NUS Press. Chua, Mui Hoong (2014) ‘To JB, for a movie’ The Straits Times, 28 September. Gafoor, Burnhan (2014), ‘Response to Poh Siew Kai’s allegations.’ New Mandala, 18 December. http://asiapacif ic.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2014/12/18/ reponse-to-poh-soo-kais-allegations/. Harper, T.N. (2001) ‘Lim Chin Siong and the “Singapore Story.”’ In Tan Jing Quee and K.S. Jomo, eds., Comet in the Sky: Lim Chin Siong in History. Kuala Lumpur: Insan, 3-55. Lau, Albert (1998) A Moment of Anguish: Singapore in Malaysia and the Politics of Disengagement. Singapore: Times Academic Press. Lee Kuan Yew (2015) The Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, 1923-2015, 2 vols. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish.

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Poh Soo Kai, Tan Kong Fang and Lysa Hong, eds. (2013) The 1963 Operation Coldstore in Singapore: Commemorating 50 Years. Kuala Lumpur: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre. Rajah, Jothie (2012) Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse and Legitimacy in Singapore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salleh, Nur Asyiqin Mohamad (2014a) ‘Exiles shouldn’t get to air “self-serving accounts”’ The Straits Times, 4 October. Salleh, Nur Asyiqin Mohamad (2014b) ‘Film on exiles contains “untruths and deception” ’ The Straits Times, 8 October. Singapore Parliament (1991) White Paper on Shared Values. Tan Tai Yong (2008) Creating ‘Greater Malaysia’: Decolonization and the Politics of Merger. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Teo, Soh Lung (2010) Beyond the Blue Gate: Recollections of a Political Prisoner. Kuala Lumpur: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre. Thum, Pingtjin (2013) ‘The Fundamental Issue Is Anti-colonialism, Not Merger’: Singapore’s “Progressive Left,” Operation Coldstore and the Creation of Malaysia.’ Working Paper 211. Singapore: Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Yap, Neng Jye (2014) ‘Why public screening of film not allowed’ The Straits Times, 14 October. Zahari, Samad (2001) Dark Clouds at Dawn: A Political Memoir. Kuala Lumpur: Insan.

About the Author Chua Beng Huat is Professor, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Social Science, National University of Singapore, where he has previously served as Research Leader, Cultural Studies in Asia Research Cluster, Asia Research Institute, and Head, the Department of Sociology. His research interests include East Asia pop culture, cultural studies in Asia and comparative urban and housing studies in Asia. His most recent books are Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore and Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture. He is a founding co-executive editor of the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. Email: [email protected]

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Performative Pedagogies Lifestyle Experts on Indian Television Tania Lewis Abstract In this chapter, I discuss the question of performative publics in India through examining lifestyle experts on popular factual television, in particular lifestyle and reality formats. In countries around the world, popular TV experts, from celebrity chefs to makeover gurus, have come to play an increasingly important role in promoting particular modes of life conduct, selfhood and citizenship. India has undergone dramatic social, political and economic changes in the past three decades. The emergence of these figures on popular television offers crucial insights into shifting and emergent norms, expectations and aspirations around how to live. In this chapter, I am interested in the increasingly central role and status that these popular life advisors have as cultural gurus and guides within public Indian life today and what the kinds of advice they offer and the manner in which they perform it might tell us about India’s complex social and media landscape. Keywords: India, lifestyle television, celebrity chefs, makeover gurus

India today has a large and unruly televisual landscape. As a central and widely popular cultural institution, television plays a particularly complex role in the context of a globalized, postcolonial nation state characterized by a plurality of TV markets, publics, as well as, I would argue, ‘uses of television’ (to borrow John Hartley’s phrase [1999]). In this chapter, I discuss the question of performative publics in India through examining the growing role of lifestyle experts on popular factual television, in particular lifestyle and reality formats. In countries around the world, popular figures of expertise, from celebrity chefs to makeover experts, have come to play an

Hudson, Chris, and Bart Barendregt (eds): Globalization and Modernity in Asia. Performative Moments. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462981126_ch07

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increasingly important role today in promoting and performing particular styles of life conduct, selfhood and citizenship, that is, in shaping the values and life practices of media publics (Lewis 2008, 2011, 2014; Lewis, Martin and Sun 2016). One of the ways in which popular experts can be seen to function is as cultural intermediaries in Pierre Bourdieu’s classic sense; that is, as tastemakers and shapers in shifting and emergent consumer markets (Lewis 2014; Powell and Prasad 2010). In the context of countries such as India they can also be seen as figures that offer ways of negotiating a variety of systems of belief and value, including secular and non-secular, individualized and collectivist ontologies. As I’ve argued elsewhere, popular experts ‘can be seen in terms of their role as an antidote to a growing sense of risk and doubt and as a source of new codes for living’ (Lewis 2008, p. 12). In a country like India that has undergone dramatic social, political and economic changes in the past three decades, the emergence of these figures on television offers particularly interesting insights into shifting and emergent norms, expectations and aspirations around how to live. In this chapter, then, I am interested in the increasingly central role and status that these popular life advisors have as cultural gurus and guides within public Indian life today and what the kinds of advice they offer and the manner in which they perform it might tell us about India’s complex social and media landscape.

From Aspirationalism to Spiritualism: Popular Experts on Television in India Contemporary Indian television has proven a particularly fertile place for a variety of public and popular forms of expertise to flourish, from more ‘traditional’ figures such as religious yoga gurus, marriage brokers and astrologers to newer performative icons of capitalist modernity such as celebrity chefs, ‘gadget gurus,’ and travel, taste and fashion advisors, as well as a range of more ‘scientific’ health and wellbeing experts, including popular psychologists and doctors, both ayurvedic and allopathic (Chakraborty 2007). While these figures are extremely diverse in terms of their modes of address and ‘embodied expertise’ (Lewis 2008), the rise of the public popular expert I would argue speaks to significant shifts in lifestyle and selfhood in late modern India; transitions shaped by ongoing differences and divisions around class, caste, gender, religious and regional/local identity (Harindranath 2013; Lakha 1999).

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Figure 7.1 Billboard at Star’s Mumbai headquarters

Photograph by Tania Lewis

In Shoveling Smoke, William Mazzarella’s fascinating ethnographic study of the advertising industry in India, Mazzarella argues that, from the 1980s onwards, broad shifts brought about by economic deregulation and the opening up of Indian markets to foreign players laid the foundations for a new ‘social ontology of global consumerism’ (Mazzarella 2003, p. 12), a transition crucially mediated by television. If Indian aspirations were once tied to images of nation-building, development and raising up the poor, television and the rise of consumer culture saw a new vision of India centred around the hopes and desires of the middle classes but legitimated via ‘the democratization of aspiration’ (Mazzarella 2003, p. 98). While in economic terms the middle classes represent a rather small percentage of the population, Indian sociologist Leela Fernandes argues that the consumer middle class, and consumer-based aspirationalism more broadly, have come to play an important symbolic role in constructing a sense of a national imaginary or public (Fernandes 2006). In this next section then I want to discuss a mode of programming and expertise that, while aimed at a small audience, exemplifies the important symbolic role of consumer aspirationalism in India. One of the main spaces on Indian

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television where this kind of aspirational consumer culture is perhaps most celebrated and visible is on dedicated lifestyle cable channels. Aimed at an imagined public of aspiring middle- and upper-middle-class viewers, these include TLC India (the lightly localized version of Discovery’s lifestyle channel) and a host of other glossy high-end channels such as NDTV Good Times, Travel XP, Zee Trendz and Fashion TV. While many of these channels import large amounts of English programming, NDTV Good Times, one of the top lifestyle cable channels, offers a rather more interesting example of Indian lifestyle programming as it largely consists of locally made and, as we will see, at times highly culturally hybridized shows featuring home-grown hosts and experts.

Aspirational Advisors Targeting well-heeled urban viewers and focusing on f itness, beauty, parenthood and marriage, cars and technology, travel, cookery and pets, NDTV Good Times was launched by NDTV (formerly New Delhi Television) in 2007 and offers a range of locally produced, largely English-language lifestyle and advice programming. The channel produces a variety of lifestyle genres from highbrow chat and advice shows (One Life to Love) through to magazine-style travel (The Single Female Traveller), car (All about My Car, Honey) and pet shows (Heavy Petting), all featuring experts of some kind. Good Times has also more recently moved into producing reality-based lifestyle programs such as Daddy’s Day In, a fly-on-the wall show about hapless men attempting to run a household, and Band Baajaa Bride, a show featuring a reality makeover-style wedding format, which I discuss below. While predominantly Indian, the channel’s experts and hosts consistently embody and enact a mode of cosmopolitanism that badges them as members of a highly elite class. The channel also marks out its high-end status by featuring the odd French chef (to ‘demystify French cuisine’ for culinary-minded viewers). Although many popular cable channels aimed at young, upwardly mobile urban cosmopolitans, such as MTV and Zee TV, increasingly offer programs in Hinglish, the expert-personalities on Good Times for the most part speak English, often with a born-to-rule, ‘British English’ accent, exhibiting a blend of privileged transnational and postcolonial embodiment. As NDTV executive in Mumbai Arati Singh notes, the use of English-speaking anchors and experts on Indian TV signifies that ‘our program[ing] is very very very aspirational.’

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The shows and their experts are for the most part also highly transnational in their mode of address, habitus and aesthetics, with many of the shows being Indian versions of recognizably Western lifestyle formats. The kinds of pedagogies and modes of expertise on offer here are quite varied: ranging from ‘straighter’ consumer advice and magazine-style shows featuring an infotainment mode of address, through to the more embodied ‘experiential’ expertise on display in the lifestyle-oriented food, wine, health, spa and travel shows that dominate the channel, where viewers are often inducted by the anchor and the various experts she or he meets into ‘good’ modes of consumption, cosmopolitan habitus and taste. Art Beat, for instance, is a series where Noopur Tiwari, previously NDTV’s Europe correspondent, travels to various European cities introducing the audience to the work of famous artists such as Picasso and meeting various locals and art experts. Filmed at various tourist sites, Tiwari offers viewers the opportunity to vicariously travel to famous European cities while also gaining extensive knowledge and cultural capital: on the show he provides extensive background history to the cities and artists profiled while various art experts and curators offer lessons in taste and interpretation. At the infotainment end of the spectrum, Gadget Guru is one of Good Times’ more popular shows, airing across the NDTV network. Introducing audiences to the newest high-tech consumer goods, the studio-based format offers a rather more playful take on consumer advice programming, with the show aiming for the combination of irreverent humour and obsessive product knowledge that has made the British motoring show Top Gear such an international success. As on Top Gear, the show’s ‘experts’ include two highly confident key hosts and gadget obsessives, Vikram Chandra, ex-news anchor and current CEO of NDTV, and Rajiv Makni, an ex-model, technology journalist and anchor of various other NDTV lifestyle shows. The two well-known host-personalities provide detailed, often highly critical, run-downs on the gadgets they review. As such, they perform the role of idealized consumer-citizens or what McCracken terms ‘super consumers’; that is, they are positioned as ‘exemplary figures [who have] have created the clear, coherent, and powerful selves that everyone seeks’ (McCracken 2005). These two highly successful professional men thus promote the need for viewers to have the latest products at the same time as embodying a combination of informed consumer-citizenship and entrepreneurial subjecthood (Figure 7.2). At the higher end of NDTV’s programming spectrum is the luxury-oriented lifestyle show Royal Reservations, hosted by Mahatma Gandhi’s great-grand daughter, Amrita Gandhi. Taking the audience on a journey to royal palaces across India, our hostess, with the help of various experts, designers (and

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Figure 7.2 Vikram Chandra and Rajiv Makni, the hosts of Gadget Guru

occasionally members of royal families themselves!), translates upper-class forms of taste and cultural capital into everyday modes of consumption by teaching the audience how to recreate royal lifestyles in their own homes. On one episode Gandhi visits ‘the chic city home of Princess Rajyashree of Bikaner, who tells us how to bring a piece of palace life into flats with three easy-to-do decor secrets [before we then] create step by step, a bedroom fit for your inner Rajkumari [or princess].’1 Royal Reservations thus has a consumer-oriented, lifestyle makeover dimension to it while Gandhi and her various guests, most of whom have upper-class British-Indian accents and exhibit a sense of effortless style and taste – promote and embody upward mobility via particular regimes of aesthetically oriented consumption.

Brokering Culture Gandhi and the gadget gurus etc., like many of the anchors and experts featured on NDTV Good Times, present ‘soft’ modes of lifestyle pedagogies that are as much embodied in their own highly confident, worldly forms of habitus and presentation of self as they are displayed through specific lessons in taste and savvy consumption. These shows address their publics as highly cosmopolitan, globetrotting and enterprising upper-middle-class subjects via depictions of lifestyles well beyond the reach of the majority of Indian viewers, begging the question of what kind of person actually watches the show. As Arati Singh, head of fashion at NDTV Good Times in Mumbai, comments: 1

See http://royalreservations.ndtv.com/royal-reservation/.

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Figure 7.3 The Princess of Rampur (centre), assisted by an unnamed cook, shows host Amrita Gandhi how to host a soiree on an episode of Royal Reservation entitled ‘Party Like the Nizams’ (nizam is a title for sovereigns of Indian states).

[W]e aim to be upper middle class, but you know and I know that the upper and upper middle class doesn’t even watch that much television. So our numbers do come from the middle classes. […] [A] lot of viewers come to just watch something which they can aspire to. I think India is looking for that. It’s the same reason everybody enters the malls on Saturday and Sunday. I don’t think they buy that much.2

Aspiration is a key element here, however, while the emergence of a ‘middle class’ in India has been a recurrent theme in triumphalist neo-liberal discourse, much care needs to be taken with how this term is used in the Indian context (Baviskar and Ray 2011; Derné 2008; Lakha 1999). Disposable income may have risen considerably in India since 1990 for certain sectors of the population. There is, however, evidence of a growing gap between the poor and the increasingly wealthy urban upper middle classes, with the ‘new rich’ constituting a small minority of Indians (Times of India 2011). In our interviews with lifestyle TV producers in Mumbai, there was a strong awareness of the potential disjuncture between the values and lifestyles promoted on their programming and the everyday lives of Indian viewers. NDTV Good Times’ recent attempt to embrace reality formats, a mode of programming more associated with the ‘mass’ audiences of the Hindi General Entertainment Channels (GECs), who watch Bigg Boss (the Indian version of Big Brother), suggests a recognition of the need to target a rather 2

Interview conducted in Mumbai, 12 December 2010.

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Figure 7.4 Anchor Ambika Anand and fashion designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee (centre) meet the bride, groom and their respective mothers in Band Baajaa Bride.

different set of publics. A case in point is the Good Times show Band Baajaa Bride, a highly culturally hybridized reality makeover-style wedding format now into its fourth season. With a tagline that promises ‘A makeover for everything. Including fate,’ the show quite literally marries aspirationalism and consumer spectacle with a diversity of family values and religious traditions, with experts playing a key role as cultural intermediaries. On Band Baajaa Bride a variety of hosts and experts support the bride, who is most often an educated professional, during her makeover, a process which is at times as much a negotiation of culture and religion as a style transformation. The show also includes ‘a mentor,’ in this case Sabyasachi Mukherjee, a male ‘design genius who with a single touch can transform the girl next door into a vintage diva.’3 Band Baajaa Bride also features a range of makeover gurus, from cosmetic dentists and physicians to more traditional adornment specialists and ceremonial face decorators. These various figures teach the bride everything from style, health and lifestyle tips to how to make a cross-cultural, and sometimes cross-caste, though this is rarely openly discussed on the show, marriage work. With the help of the various gurus and the young stylish anchors (ex-male model Bharat Arora and attractive Good Times female fashion anchor Ambika Anand), the show deftly moves between a celebration of customary marriage traditions – advising and mentoring the bride, groom and the parents along the way – and the bride’s style makeover ‘journey.’ The anchors, sometimes dressed in ‘Western’ clothes and sometimes in traditional garb, and brides, 3

See http://goodtimes.ndtv.com/bandbaajabride/default.aspx.

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often wearing a kurta, move seamlessly between speaking in English and Hindi while discussing the ‘romance’ that led up to the wedding – the partnerships are often the result of arranged marriages of some kind, which are still largely the norm in India (Lewis 2016a; Titzmann 2011). The bridal makeover typically involves a ‘traditional’ transformation, whether being made over to look like the bride of Krishna, or being dressed in a kanjeevaram saree, a lavish silk sari that hails from southern India. Through focusing on the apparently neutral realm of consumerism, beauty and fashion, the anchors and various experts and consumer advisors on the show work to guide and mentor families, who come from a range of cultural and caste backgrounds and are juggling a range of aspirations and expectations. The experts here are in some ways cultural intermediaries in the Bourdieu-ian sense, teaching the show’s participants and in turn audiences how to consume tastefully. However, their role on the show is also as cultural brokers in a broader sense: Sabyasachi Mukherjee’s position as cultural and linguistic mentor, mediating between the bride-to-be’s natal and marital families, is as important as or even more important than his fashion and style ‘expertise.’ In one episode, which Sabyasachi Mukherjee describes as his ‘greatest makeover challenge ever because this is about two families with completely contrasting culture coming together in holy matrimony,’ Mukherjee asks, ‘What happens when a Gujarati girl falls in love with a Bengali boy?’ The audience of course knows exactly what is going to happen – a makeover – but in this case, the makeover process involves Mukherjee mentoring the bride in question and helping her to negotiate the wishes of the two families. In the end this ‘negotiation,’ however, within the confines of the reality format is less about a real engagement with different cultural conceptions and norms around ways of living and expectations around gender roles but instead is reduced to a visual display of fashion and style on the show, with the two mothers placated by ‘a Gujarati twist to a Bengali wedding.’ Thus, through a combination of prescriptive guidance and the ‘gift’ of whitened teeth and luxurious handmade traditional clothes and jewellery, the show’s team of experts assists the families and viewers in navigating a complex contemporary marriage culture in which Western-inflected desires for consumerism and romance are brought together with notions of fate and familial duty.

Managing Fate, Fortune and Risk: Tele-astrologers I now want to turn to a group of lifestyle experts who may at first seem starkly different from the figures on NDTV Good Times – spiritual and

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religious gurus on entertainment television. Religious television, far from being a marginal genre, is very popular in India and there is an increasing overlap between religious and lifestyle programming to the point where a new genre of spiritual lifestyle programming has emerged (Lewis 2016b; Lewis, Martin and Sun 2016). Further, most general entertainment channels or GECs in India feature some kind of spiritual programming. Religious programming, both in its more traditional guise and in its more ‘lifestyled’ variations, is watched by a wide range of groups from the urban middle classes to the rural poor. The Indian TV landscape is thus inhabited by a huge array of spiritual gurus, from fairly downhome figures on provincial cable channels to rather more glitzy gurus on the bigger Hindi general entertainment channels. Here I want to discuss two somewhat different groups of gurus – on the one hand, astrologists and related figures, popular with a wide range of publics, and on the other hand, experts on dedicated spiritual lifestyle channels aimed at more elite audiences. These figures provide a particular insight into the distinct and different ways in which lifestyle experts address their audience and speak to questions of performativity and public selfhood in India today. The first set of TV gurus I discuss essentially blend spiritualism with questions of fate and fortune. Astrologers, tarot readers, fortune tellers, experts in vaastu (the Indian version of feng shui), and mystical shamans of all kinds represent a common and increasingly popular feature of Indian programming across news, general entertainment channels as well as cable channels devoted to religious programming. While they draw on a range of belief systems and spiritual traditions, what is common to many of these mystical figures is their claims to offer life solutions and advice for dealing with an increasingly complex, stressful and risky world. 4 In his book A God of One’s Own (2010), Ulrich Beck contends that we now live in an age in which, far from becoming more secular, religion and spiritualism are on the rise around the world though in forms that are more and more tied to individual needs and desires. Certainly, astrologers and other soothsayers on Indian TV can be seen as increasingly framing their advice and proposed solutions in terms of lifestyle choices and investments in the family and the self. However, as we will see, this advice is not necessarily 4 Vedic astrological charts are drawn up by the family priest for everyone at their birth, placing the planets in twelve different houses, according to their position in the sky at their time of birth. Vedic scriptures present a complex and detailed ontology connecting all observable aspects of the universe – the sensorial, vegetal, mineral, aural, linguistic. Each star sign is allocated with certain alphabets that are to be used for names for the newborn, and specific gemstones are prescribed depending on the planetary alignments.

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Figure 7.5 Pawan Sinha, resident astrologer on Astro Uncle, uses astrology to give psychological counselling for irritable children. The text in the panel reads: ‘The combination of Saturn-Mars, Mars-Rahu, Rahu-Saturn, in one’s planetary alignment makes one prone to anger.’

framed in terms of individual empowerment, that is, taking control of one’s destiny, but instead often involves externalizing of risk and giving oneself over to larger forces such as the alignment of the planets (Lewis, Martin and Sun 2016). Astrologers are very popular in India and, as noted, are found on a wide range of channels. On the major Hindi news channel Aaj Tak, the popular show Astro Uncle features an amiable if rather ordinary middle-aged man, Pawan Sinha, who offers general astrological advice as well as one-on-one feedback to audience call-ins on matters relating to parent/child relationships. On one episode of Astro Uncle, for example, the show’s female anchor, introducing the topic for the day in a playful conversational tone, talks about how her friend’s four-year-old daughter is very irritable. Offering a ‘prediction’ with a psychological edge, Astro Uncle explains that irritable children will not do well socially or academically, and face medical problems with their nervous system later in adult life. Here we are told that the planets mangal (Mars) and rahu5 affect irritability and temper and that, while rahu’s irritability is seasonal, mangal’s irritability makes people too self-absorbed and arrogant, implying an ability to change behaviours and shape personality. The show then features a call-in from a woman who complains that her daughter is very irritable and often gets high fevers. Astro Uncle, reading her charts, suggests that since he can’t see a lot of anger in the girl’s constitution (as the moon is in the right place), her fever 5 Rahu and Ketu are not actually visible luminaries, but mathematically calculated as shadow planets that cause solar and lunar eclipses.

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Figure 7.6 In this episode of Live Vaastu, its star, Dr. Chawla, offers advice on what colours improve the energy of a house. In this clip (solution Number 5), the audience is told to avoid the colours blue or black.

and irritability may be due to an abdominal or urinary infection. His advice here is both magical and modern – he tells the mother to book the child in for a medical check-up while also adding that the girl must wear a copper bangle and float a copper coin in a river. In contrast to the very broad appeal of Astro Uncle, a show with a kind of friendly, neighbourly feel to it, a range of tarot readers, numerologists and feng shui experts offer rather more niche advice to middle- to uppermiddle-class viewers. Live India, a Hindi news channel, for instance, has a dedicated show on the ‘ancient science’ of vaastu called Live Vaastu where a suit-wearing expert, Dr. Puneet Chawla, who looks more like an architect than a fortune teller, responds to questions about the impact of vaastu, that is, household design and the placement of furnishings and objects, on a variety of life issues from troubled relationships to alcoholism to misbehaving pets. Featuring anchors in a news-style studio setting, the show sports a newsstyle split screen with Dr. Chawla on one side advising on the topic for the day and answering calls from viewers, while we see a flow of images of luxurious, Western-style home interiors on the right. On one episode, for example, a rather informed caller rings in and explains that, despite his gate and kitchen being in the ‘right’ place from a vaastu perspective, his family had been faring badly. Dr. Chawla tells him to get the gate painted in a lighter colour, and to put a mirror in the north side of the house so that it reflects back the energy of his kitchen, located in the southeast part of the house.

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Figure 7.7 A segment of Live Vaastu where Dr. Chawla (compass in hand) visits an audience member’s house to do a vaastu reading.

While Live Vaastu’s content deals with ancient Indian knowledge, its mode of address is cosmopolitan and aspirational while the show’s resident vaastu expert, Dr. Chawla, is suave and well dressed, shifting between English and Hindi with ease. An interesting component of the show is that every week Dr. Chawla visits an audience member’s house and provides a vaastu reading and suggestions to improve the home. Drawing upon elements of the Western home makeover show, Live Vaastu enacts a mixture of magical risk management and consumerist self-expression for an imagined urbane and middle-class public (Lewis, Martin and Sun 2016).

‘Meet Your Better Self’: Religious TV, Enterprising Enchantment and Neo-spiritualism Armed with the sacral power of Hindu religious systems and borrowing techniques from psychology and self-help literature as well as managerial practices in business, spiritualism in its present form concentrates on individual self-making on an unprecedented scale. Spiritualism and ideas of enterprise inflect each other and offer hopes of self-transformation and worldly success. Within an all-pervading environment which promotes aspirations, spiritual teachings purport to provide the actual tools with which individuals can realise their dreams and goals. Spiritualism thus assembles the essential components of enterprise culture through amalgamation of aspiration and action. (Gooptu 2013, p. 16)

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In this section I want to turn to a rather more globally recognizable example of spiritual advice on Indian TV, that is, forms of programming that combine spiritualism with enterprise and self-help-style therapeutic discourse. In her work on enterprise culture in India, Nandini Gooptu (2013) suggests that Indian citizens are increasingly becoming neo-liberalized, framed as essentially flexible, innovative and resourceful subjects in an era of globalized and immaterial labour. Drawing upon Nick Rose and Paul du Gay’s work on enterprising and entrepreneurial modes of selfhood, Gooptu argues that spiritual gurus are playing a key role in integrating psychologized models of self-actualization together with spiritual aspirationalism in India. In this context, the performative role of Gooptu’s post-secular spiritual gurus is to enable Indian publics to negotiate apparently disparate modes of social ontology – consumerism, individualism, spiritualism – via personal development discourse. There is a growing market in India for modes of lifestyle advice TV that combine Indian spiritualism with a highly psychologized, enterprising notion of selfhood. Though much of this mode of programming is aimed at an elite group of well-travelled, often English-speaking young urban professionals navigating global and vernacular identities and lifestyles, such a shift can be seen to mark a set of broader social and cultural transformations in identity and sociality in India towards the embrace of more privatized, consumer-based social relations. Here, we see spiritualism transition from a mode of faith-based belief, to being part of a broader ‘lifestyle’ based on personal choice and self-fulfilment (Warrier 2004). As a TV executive I interviewed at NDTV Good Times in Mumbai put it, ‘We [our channel] doesn’t have religion at all. We do yoga.’ This neo-spiritual turn has seen the rise of a number of lifestyle channels in India which offer spiritually inflected forms of lifestyle programming – shows on yoga, meditation, psychology, ayurveda and alternative medicine are interspersed with more secular lifestyle shows, such as cookery, parenting, relationship and beauty shows. Pragya TV (pra being Sanskrit for ‘moving forward’ and gyan meaning ‘knowledge’), where I interviewed high-level executives at their head office in Gurgaon near New Delhi, is a particularly interesting case in point.6 Calling itself a ‘wellbeing’ channel and servicing a young (24-45 years) educated and aspirational upper-middle-class market with a 40:60 male: female audience split, the channel’s tagline is ‘Aapko milaye behtar aapse’ (Meet your better self), while the channel’s ‘philosophy’ espouses a mix of self-development discourse, spiritualism, pop psychology and anti-materialism, somewhat paradoxically combined with high-end lifestyle-oriented consumerism and an entrepreneurial edge. 6 See http://www.pragyatv.com/About-Pragya.aspx.

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Figure 7.8 ‘Wisdom comes with responsibility’: Pragya TV website, featuring five categories of life-advice videos, including beauty, relationships, good living, food (smart kitchen) and living wisely

Pragya’s range of programming and content reflects this eclectic grab bag of concerns. The channel offers what might be seen as a cosmopolitan blend of neo-spiritualism, self-help and self-improvement. (For example, the creative director spoke in the same breath of the teachings of the famous nineteenth-century Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda and the American positive thinking guide The Secret, a best-selling 2006 self-help book by Rhonda Byrne.) In addition it offers lifestyle and consumer tips and information for optimizing every aspect of one’s life from parenting and home décor to beauty and health – ‘to channelize sensibilities, capacities and productivity of individuals,’ as the mission statement on the website puts it.7 Morning programming tends to be focused more on the spiritual end of the channel’s programming spectrum; here the schedule includes shows like Dhyan Pragya (Meditation knowledge), Pragya Prabhat (Knowledge morning) and Vichar Sanjivni (Elixir of thought), which aim to provide the audience with a kind of psychological/wellness pep talk to get their day started, with the shows’ guests offering a variety of advice on ‘science of meditation’ and ‘religious teachings.’ At the more secular lifestyle-oriented end of the spectrum in the evenings, Pragya also offers a number of magazine-style infotainment shows, often featuring audience call-ins. Menz, for instance, is a studio-based show 7

See http://www.pragyatv.com/Mission.aspx.

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focused on the stresses of being a man in contemporary India and providing advice on psychological, social and physical wellbeing. On one episode the female host, Professor Navjot Sidhu (a media academic and TV host and producer) who is dressed in casual Western clothes and sports short hair, offers an in-depth introduction to the topic of concern: managing life and work balance. Just for Women is a rather more glossy fast-paced magazine show featuring two glamorous young anchors wearing casual kurtas rather than saris. Reflecting the complexity of the channel’s neo-spiritual engagement with both ‘traditional’ and secular lifestyle and consumerist culture, the show moves between reenactments of various lifestyle issues from hypertension to sibling rivalry, followed by interviews of people with lifestyle problems on camera and advice (relevant to the issue at hand) from various experts (usually shot in their place of work). These shows nicely capture the way in which spiritual ‘holism’ on Pragya TV has been refigured as a market-based privatized pursuit where the individual gets to pick and mix from a cornucopia of life skills, knowledge systems and lifestyle products and services. Pragya’s shows epitomize Gooptu’s argument that the new spiritualisms in India are increasingly tied to a neo-liberalized notion of enterprise culture. There is considerable debate, however, as to the usefulness of applying a one-size-fits-all model of neo-liberalism to India’s complex evolving post-socialist social and cultural landscape, a landscape marked by a range of mediated social and cultural imaginaries that are in turn shaped in complex ways by class (the continuing presence of) caste, ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity. In India familial and ethnic ties continue to reign supreme while, despite the lifestyle turn on high-end spiritual TV, many sections of the population continue to identify with religious faith and aff iliation and, as our discussion of tele-astrologers suggests, often hold to magical, externalized conceptions of fate and fortune. Similarly, while channels like Pragya TV promote and celebrate forms of self-actualization, they do so in ways that often tie wellbeing and spiritual integration to the familial, communal and national good, where the ‘self’ is seen as a continuation of the collective. For Pragya, the channel’s ‘mission’ is not purely ‘to enable individuals to meet their better self’; it also aims to ‘discipline and reform thoughts’ and ‘to empower societies and nations,’ indicating that Pragya’s notions of holistic wellbeing are characterized by both individual and collective elements in ways which are arguably not just synonymous with the disciplined subjectivities associated with globalized forms of late or neo-liberal forms of governmentality as suggested by scholars such as Gooptu.

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Conclusion In this chapter I’ve been interested in understanding the public function of popular experts in India in a contemporary context in which, as Graeme Turner argues, the entertainment media have become key players in ‘the construction of cultural identity’ (2009, p. 3). More specifically in relation to Indian lifestyle media, my concern has been with the socio-cultural role played by the swathe of ‘ordinary experts’ (Lewis 2008), from aspirational advisers and gadget gurus to tele-astrologists and self-help guides, that now populate lifestyle media, offering a wide variety of life models for publics negotiating how to live in a complex and shifting Indian social and cultural landscape. As I’ve suggested, popular experts on television play an important pedagogical role for Indian audiences, teaching various media publics to juggle, on the one hand, pressures of commitment to family and to religious and cultural values with, on the other, the growing influence of individualizing models of self-shaping and consumer-driven enterprise. Here the function of many life gurus is not purely informational or advisory; rather, they increasingly work to embody and enact particular engagements with modern modes of citizenship through their own embodied personae and televisual modes of address (Lewis 2014). As we’ve seen, aspirational advisers on NDTV Good Times such as the cosmopolitan male stars of Gadget Guru model a form of rational, informed consumer citizenship while on luxury lifestyle shows like Royal Reservations, popular personalities like Mahatma Gandhi’s great-grand daughter, Amrita Gandhi, act as classic cultural intermediaries, in Gandhi’s case embodying and translating upper-class forms of taste and cultural capital for an upwardly mobile, middle-class audience. Meanwhile the life guides on Band Baajaa Bride offer lifestyle solutions geared to a more ‘ordinary’ middle-class public, with the glamorous Western-styled female anchor and her kurta-wearing male counterpart quite literally enacting an engagement with customary and contemporary consumer-oriented values. By contrast, tele-astrologists, vaastu experts and other spiritual gurus on television would seem to be very different from the experts on display on NDTV Good Times. As we’ve seen, however, the astrologer on Astro Uncle and Dr. Chawla on Live Vaastu bears something in common with the cultural brokers on Band Baajaa Bride in terms of enacting an engagement with both customary spiritual concerns and with globalized, enterprising modes of being. This is particularly evident on the programming aired on lifestyle spiritual channel Pragya TV, where its array of experts often quite blatantly blend US self-development discourse with ‘ancient’ vedic knowledge, performing a distinctly hybridized Indian cosmopolitan identity.

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A proviso needs to be added to this somewhat neat account of Indian lifestyle expertise. While religious studies scholar Maya Warrier (2003) sees the rise of such popular spiritual gurus as marking a thorough secularization of religious publics, the ongoing role in India of forms of magical thinking and alternative collective understandings of subjectivity suggests we should be cautious about assuming that the ‘lifestyling’ of Indian social relations means a shift to privatized secularism. The continued centrality of religion in everyday life would suggest that the performative publics on Indian television also need to be understood in non-secular terms, that is, in the ways in which they integrate media communities with collectivized models of enchantment. For instance, in the case of tele-astrologists and vaastu experts, while these risk-management gurus are marketized figures – speaking to the audience on the one hand as Homo economicus – on the other hand, astrological TV also represents an enchanted space where perceptions of being able to shape and have agency in the world is framed by a range of (often combined) logics – from fate and magic to rationalism and spiritual ‘science.’ What are we to make of this unruly mixture of modes of expertise and belief systems? First, they indicate the impossibility of speaking of a coherent shared public in the context of a mediascape marked by a large diversity of linguistic, cultural and regional markets. Despite focusing only on Hindi and English programming, this chapter has hopefully provided something of a glimpse into the social and cultural complexity of India’s varied televisual landscape. Second, they complicate arguments put forward regarding the universal rollout of globalized consumerism and neo-liberalism in India. While India’s televisual imaginary is one largely underpinned by a privatized consumerist political economy, as we’ve seen, lifestyle experts offer a range of performative ontologies to their publics. This chapter has not engaged with questions of audiences’ practices and issues of reception but numerous scholars have suggested a gap between India’s media content, especially in its more aspirational neo-liberal forms, and people’s lives on the ground (Derné 2008; Lewis, Martin and Sun 2016). For instance, discussing the contemporary Indian TV landscape, Chadha and Kavoori contend that: despite the medium’s potential for facilitating a shared narrative, the television universe in India constitutes an increasingly divided terrain between the haves and the have-nots – paralleling the most fundamental trend within Indian society – so that it is not simply the real but also the imagined worlds of citizens that are profoundly disparate and disconnected. (2012, p. 599)

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As this chapter has argued, this diversity of worlds, while perhaps not reducible to the binarized terms suggested by Chadka and Kavoori, is also evidenced by the range of ontologies on display on Indian lifestyle television – a diversity that suggests the limits of viewing India’s varied media modernities purely through the prism of (late) liberal secularism.

Acknowledgements The research upon which this chapter is based was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant.

Works Cited Baviskar, Amita and Raka Ray, eds. (2011) Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Class. New Delhi: Routledge. Beck, Ulrich (2010) A God of One’s Own: Religion’s Capacity for Peace and Potential for Violence. Cambridge: Polity. Chadha, Kalyani, and Anandam Kavoori (2012) ‘Mapping India’s Television Landscape: Constitutive Dimensions and Emerging Issues.’ South Asian History and Culture 3.4: 591-602. Chakraborty, Chandrima (2007) ‘The Hindu Ascetic as Fitness Instructor: Reviving Faith in Yoga.’ International Journal of the History of Sport 24.9: 1172-1186. Derné, Steve (2008) Globalization on the Ground: New Media and the Transformation of Culture, Class, and Gender in India. Los Angeles: Sage. Fernandes, Leela (2006) India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gooptu, Nandini (2013) ‘Introduction.’ In Nandini Gooptu, ed., Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal India: Studies in Youth, Class, Work and Media. London: Routledge, 1-24. Harindranath, Ramaswami (2013) ‘The Cultural Politics of Metropolitan and Vernacular Lifestyles in India.’ Media International Australia 147.1: 147-156. Hartley, John (1999) Uses of Television. London: Routledge. Lakha, Salim (1999) ‘The State, Globalisation and Indian Middle Class Identity.’ In Michael Pinches, ed., Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia. London: Routledge, 252-274. Lewis, Tania (2008) Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise. New York: Peter Lang. Lewis, Tania (2011) ‘Making over Culture? Lifestyle Television and Contemporary Pedagogies of Selfhood in Singapore.’ Communication, Politics & Culture 44.1: 21-32.

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Lewis, Tania (2014) ‘Lifestyle Media.’ In Jennifer Smith Maguire and Julian Matthews, eds., The Cultural Intermediaries Reader. London: Sage, 134-144. Lewis, Tania (2016a) ‘Adventures in Love, Risk and Romance: Navigating Posttraditional Social Relations on Indian Dating Shows.’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 20.1: 56-71. Lewis, Tania (2016b) ‘Spirited Publics? Post-secularism, Spiritualism and Civility on Indian Television.’ In David P. Marshall, Sharyn McDonald, Glenn D’Cruz, and Katja Lee, eds., Contemporary Publics: Shifting Boundaries in New Media, Technology and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 283-299. Lewis, Tania, Fran Martin and Wanning Sun (2016) Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Lives in Asia. Durham: Duke University Press. Mazzarella, William (2003) Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. Durham: Duke University Press. McCracken, Grant D. (2005) Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning, and Brand Management. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Powell, Helen, and Sylvie Prasad (2010) ‘“As Seen on TV”: The Celebrity Expert: How Taste Is Shaped by Lifestyle Media.’ Cultural Politics 6.1: 111-124. Times of India (2011) ‘India’s Income Inequality Has Doubled in 20 Years.’ Times of India, 7 December. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Indias-incomeinequality-has-doubled-in-20-years/articleshow/11012855.cms. Titzmann, Fritzi-Marie (2011) ‘Medialisation and Social Change – The Indian Online Matrimonial Market as a New Field of Research.’ In Nadja-Christina Schneider and Bettina Gräf, eds., Social Dynamics 2.0: Researching Change in Times of Media Convergence: Case Studies from the Middle East and Asia. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 49-66. Turner, Graeme (2009) Ordinary People and the Media: The Demotic Turn. London: Sage. Warrier, Maya (2003) ‘Processes of Secularization in Contemporary India: Guru Faith in the Mata Amritanandamayi Mission.’ Modern Asian Studies 37.1: 213-253. Warrier, Maya (2004) Hindu Selves in a Modern World: Guru Faith in the Mata Amritanandamayi Mission. Oxon: Routledge.

About the Author Tania Lewis is Professor and Deputy Dean of Research & Innovation in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne. Known internationally for her work on emerging trends in lifestyle and consumption, she has authored and co-authored three books: Smart Living (Lang, 2008), Digital Ethnography (Sage, 2016), and Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Lives in Asia (Duke University Press, 2016). She has also edited

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four collections with Routledge, including Lifestyle Media in Asia: Consumption, Aspiration and Identity (2015) and Green Asia: Ecocultures, Sustainable Lifestyles, and Ethical Consumption (2016). She is chief investigator on the Australian Research Council Discovery project ‘Ethical Consumption: From the Margins to the Mainstream’ and on ‘Work-life Ecologies: Lifestyle, Sustainability, Practices’. In addition, Tania is the author of more than 50 refereed articles and book chapters. Email: [email protected]

8

Performing Cities The Philippines Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai International Exposition William Peterson Abstract With an attendance exceeding 70 million, the 2010 Shanghai International Exposition was the largest mass event in human history. With its theme of ‘Better City, Better Life,’ the expo offered the Philippines an opportunity to ‘perform’ the nation on a global stage. Their country pavilion featured live performance, while also seeking to demonstrate that it was a country of well-performing cities. This chapter seeks to determine what happened between design and execution and the eventual habitation of the pavilion by performers, audience members, and performing audiences, taking into consideration the flows of culture, capital and politics, while demonstrating how intra-Asian and intranational Filipino subjectivities appear to have hijacked the operation of the imagination as a cultural practice. Keywords: Philippines, international expositions, cultural flows, artistic curation, politics and performance

With attendance in excess of 70 million, the 2010 Shanghai International Exposition was the single largest mass participation event in human history. Reflecting the enormous potential of expositions to have a direct, experiential impact on tens of millions of Chinese – many of them young and upwardly mobile – it was also one of the few expos successful at attracting the participation of virtually every country in the world. Significantly, among the larger free-standing pavilions were not only those from the wealthy Western countries, but also those of China’s Asian neighbours, providing an unparalleled opportunity for intra-Asian cross-cultural communication and exchange. With its forward-looking theme of ‘Better City, Better Life,’

Hudson, Chris, and Bart Barendregt (eds): Globalization and Modernity in Asia. Performative Moments. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462981126_ch08

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the expo offered Asian nations a chance to showcase their aspirational visions for a better urban life in a country that has witnessed the largest rural-urban migration in history. Particularly complex in terms of the way it situated itself before a Chinese audience was the country pavilion of the Philippines, which both offered up live performance, and sought to demonstrate that it was also a country of well-performing cities. Building on its much-vaunted image as a country of performers, Marion Pastor Roces, curator of the pavilion, recalls how she ‘was able to sell the idea of performing cities, with performance having two registers,’ adding that their approach would offer up ‘a more organic view of cities’ (Pastor Roces 2014). Thus both in the external design of the pavilion, which provided a colourful and graphic display of the labour of human hands, and in the handmade quality of the live performances offered within the structure, Chinese audiences would potentially respond to the warmth and human qualities present in a city in the Philippines. The bold, human-focused concept for the pavilion and plans for urban street performances inside were at odds with my own experience when I came to it in September 2010, as I encountered exhibits largely reflecting the twin narratives of promoting tourism and the consumption of Filipino goods. Five months after the expo opened, the de facto resident performance company appeared to be an ensemble of musicians playing bamboo instruments, the Banda Kawayan, with most of the remaining space devoted to quasi-ethnographic displays of traditional instruments, a café offering Filipino signature dishes, and the sale of Filipino merienda, or snacks, such as dried mango. This research seeks to answer the question of what happened between design and execution and the eventual habitation of the pavilion by performers, audience members, and performing audiences, taking into consideration the flows of culture, capital and politics, while demonstrating how intra-Asian and intranational subjectivities within the Philippines functioned as process that re-directed what Arjun Appadurai has identified as ‘the imagination as a social practice’ (1996, p. 31).

The Pavilion Imaginary and Performance Since the first modern international exposition in London in 1851, these events have catered to and served the interests of a wide and often quite disparate range of communities. While the earliest expositions were essentially trade fairs, tapping into the desires of future consumers of mass-produced goods, by the time of the Paris Exposition Universelle of

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1889, they had also become flash points for national pride and international engagement as well as markers of status, demonstrating that the host city had the resources, the population and the sophistication to pull off such a logistically, economically and culturally complex event. Thus, it is hardly surprising that following from the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the stakes were high for China at the Shanghai Expo, while participating nations were offered an unparalleled opportunity to make a direct, experiential connection with Chinese citizens. That virtually all nations on earth participated in the 2010 expo reflected not just the rise of China, but the paramount importance of initiating, developing, and nurturing meaningful relationships with Chinese citizens and consumers. For the Philippines, a country with significant trade links to China 1 and a large, culturally hybridized, and complex community of wealthy Filipinos with Chinese ancestry, the pavilion offered an opportunity to set out a narrative about their nation and its cultures to a domestic Chinese audience with little prior experience of or knowledge about the Philippines.2 Such complex transactional exchanges reflect what Appadurai has identified as a ‘new role for the imagination in social life’ (1996, p. 31). This role, he observes, involves, ‘the old idea of images,’ especially ‘the idea of the imagined community (in Anderson’s sense), and the French idea of the imaginary (imaginaire) as a constructed landscape of constructed landscape of collective aspirations’; in short, ‘the image, the imagined, the imaginary,’ are all directed through a process that he calls, ‘the imagination as a social practice’ (ibid., p. 31; emphasis in the original). Thus the Philippines Pavilion, like others at this event, offers the spectator-participant entering into the space an encounter with individual images, an imagined community expressed through a collection of images, and a larger cultural space that extends beyond the contents of the pavilion to conjure and emplace into individual Chinese bodies an experience of ‘Filipinoness’ – a Filipino imaginary. The Philippines Pavilion was relatively unique in that it was conceptualized not by a committee of business leaders, politicians, or government bureaucrats, but was co-designed by architect Ed Calma and curator Marian Pastor Roces, a team that had previously worked together on the 1 China is poised to soon overtake the US and Japan as the largest export market for goods from the Philippines (Yap 2013). 2 The territorial dispute between the Philippines and China over the Spratly Islands, while perhaps the major flashpoint in relations between the two countries today, did not heat up until 2011, one year after the expo.

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country pavilion at the smaller off-year expositions in Aichi, Japan (2006) and Zaragosa, Spain (2007). Pastor Roces’ collaboration with Calma in Aichi had resulted in the requirement that ‘a curator was required as part of the bidding team,’ something that she felt ‘was special and personally moving,’ given the long history of expo pavilions being focused exclusively on architectural practices (Pastor Roces 2014). She notes that the Philippines Pavilion theme of ‘performing cities,’ while responding to the overall exposition’s guiding theme of ‘Better City, Better Life,’ set out performance as having ‘two registers,’ the first being ‘performance itself.’ As Pastor Roces observes, ‘you can’t walk down any street in the Philippines without encountering performance or having it in your field of vision.’ My years of fieldwork into community-based performance in the Philippines aligns with Pastor Roces’ observation; performance seems to be everywhere, from the street dancing connected to religious festivals, to the week-long chanting of the passion of Christ in home-made altars throughout the country during the week between Palm Sunday and Easter to the ubiquitous open-air karaoke bars in rural areas and poorer urban barrios. Pastor Roces recalls: ‘I hoped the pavilion could convey a strong sense of the performative in Philippine cities. Not the officially sanctioned representation, but street-level singing, dancing, and jumping around. In bars, cafes, basketball courts, homes, small theatres, streets on f iestas’ (Pastor Roces 2014). While acknowledging that ‘pavilions in expos do not exactly perform like streets’ (Pastor Roces 2014), the spectator was to be offered a kind of peripatetic encounter with a range of popular performance forms, not high culture or the usual folk dance routines made famous by the Bayanihan Philippines National Folk Dance Company, but rather the cultural imaginary of the street. The second register of performing cities, according to Pastor Roces, ‘involved measures of performance in economic growth, social stability, food security, environmental health, and equilibrium between nature and culture’ (2014). Yet this framework was to be modulated by what she termed ‘a more organic view of cities,’ ‘signalling that the Philippine pavilion was not going to offer master plans for successful urbanization.’ As Jon McKenzie has observed: In a certain sense, performativity is the postmodern condition: it demands that all knowledge be evaluated in terms of operational efficiency, that what counts as knowledge must be translatable by and accountable in the ‘1’s and ‘0’s of digital matrices. But performativity extends beyond knowledge; it has come to govern the entire realm of social bonds. (2001, p. 14)

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Similarly, Pastor Roces, one of the country’s most experienced museum curators, envisioned the space as a performative environment which would extend beyond the metrics for ‘successful urbanization’ and offer up an experience that reflected the larger ‘realm of social bonds’ identified by McKenzie as a defining feature of postmodern performativity. In her presentation at the official launch of the pavilion in Shanghai on 23 April 2010, Pastor Roces set out the ‘key qualities’ of the space as ‘an animated pavilion, an evocation of lively, resilient Filipino cities’ which stressed ‘the human factor in city-building.’ The ‘design intent’ was set out against the following oppositions: – future-oriented instead of nostalgic; – abstract instead of literal; – cosmopolitan instead of nativist; – robust instead of sentimental. In each of these oppositional pairings, Pastor Roces seems acutely aware of the power of this pavilion to counter-stereotypes other nations – and particularly China – might have of the Philippines. Much of what has been exported of Philippine performance culture reflects a deep nostalgia for an imagined past that never really existed; most famously, following its ‘triumph’ at the 1958 Brussels International Exposition, the Bayanihan folk dance company has for over two generations presented slickly packaged dances that celebrate, exoticize, and construct an image of the Philippines as the inheritor and preserver of dance traditions that are variously folk, ethnic, and indigenous, while being a-historically situated. Noting that Bayanihan in the 1960s and 1970s was ‘the most toured performance company on earth,’ Pastor Roces sought to offer an experience that challenged the ‘expo aesthetic’ of Bayanihan that ‘became dogma’ during the Marcos period, one ‘built on anxiety: trying ever so twistedly to prove the nation civilized, performing “Spanish” dances within an imaginary of an aristocracy (that only existed unstably, if at all, in the Philippines); or “tribal” dances within an imaginary of opportunistic othering’ (2014). ‘This surreptitious seductiveness,’ she observes, ‘is the Philippines ideal representation,’ ‘at least in leadership circles,’ and ‘this come-hither hauteur is strangely tenacious.’ Thus Roces, quite consciously, boldly set out an agenda that sought to recuperate agency, presenting a Filipino imaginary that was future-oriented, cosmopolitan, and robust using tools and a visual and performance field that favoured the abstract over the literal. Furthering the human dimension and its imprint on the performing city was the abstract use of the hands – a prominent design feature of the

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Figure 8.1 Philippines Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo 2010

exterior – which Pastor Roces identified as the pavilion’s major visual statement’ at the April 2010 launch, used ‘to emphasize the human dimension in urbanization, and to assert the Filipino’s genius at (hand) crafting vital relationships through work, art, and play’ (Pastor Roces 2010). Adrian Jones, an advisor on the concept for Pastor Roces’ curatorial services company, TAO Inc., ‘came up with the hands motif for the façade,’ one that, she observes, ‘palpated the ticking heart of the Philippine city,’ one ‘shaped by thousands of hand activities’ (2010). In both the preliminary designs and final execution of the pavilion’s front side, giant-sized, brightly coloured open hands with fingers splayed extend from the base of the building’s exterior towards the sky on the front elevation, while the remaining sides position hands in a range of positions – in action, in supplication, or reaching down to a sea of outstretched hands. Based on photographs by Neal Oshima, these are hands in ceaseless motion that express purposeful and joyful human activity, that touch other hands, that grasp batons and microphones, suggesting while ‘the post-industrial world may look at Filipinos as retrograde, […] there is something to be intuited about the hardiness, tenacity, inventiveness, in literally crafting cities by hand’ (Pastor Roces 2014).

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Encountering the Pavilion Indeed, when I set eyes on the pavilion in October 2010, I was thrilled to see such a bold visual statement, particularly for the ways it talked back to its immediate neighbours at the expo, the Singapore pavilion, a steely cold circular structure proclaiming a kind of prickly and soulless high modernism, and Malaysia’s ‘big house’ pavilion, an appropriation of minority Minangkabau architecture, used to trumpet the country’s clichéd ‘unity in diversity’ campaign. Though Pastor Roces and architect Calma could not have anticipated the final design of the pavilions of their Southeast Asian neighbours, their decision to feature human hands in a way that was stylized and emotionally charged provided a welcoming invitation to the wandering fairgoer seeking out a direct encounter with other humans. While the Malaysian pavilion offered the public a pan-Asian cultural show in its forecourt with the requisite nods to Malay, Chinese and Indian performance cultures bedecked in all of their neo-ethnic finery, the Philippines reduced the visual field to the power of the human hand. Yet as I approached the pavilion entrance, I found myself facing a large panel with a map of the country, with lines drawn from six Chinese cities to major tourist destinations in the Philippines, complete with travel time and inserts of images showing attractive beaches in Cebu and Puerto Galera. While the exterior had prepared me for a personal, human encounter, this display, seen while entering the space, suggested that building Chinese tourism was on the agenda, that regardless of the bold design choices of the exterior, the national Department of Tourism would have a hand in shaping the pavilion’s message. Inside, a raised stage offered up a dance performance by two black-clad male dancers carrying out a choreographed routine that fused traditional martial arts moves with contemporary dance. Along the edges near the entrance and roped off by red velvet cords were quasi-ethnographic displays of traditional instruments, notably the kulintang, a metallophone instrument similar to the Javanese gamelan, and a range of bamboo instruments and time markers such as gongs and drums. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett observes about such displays: ‘ethnographic objects are made, not found, despite claims to the contrary. They did not begin their lives as ethnographic objects. They became ethnographic through process of detachment and contextualization’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, p. 3). These instruments, much used in popular Filipino Cultural Nights at universities in the US, particularly in southern California, are the traditional instruments most identified with the Philippines in the global diaspora,

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Figure 8.2 Panel with map of the Philippines

though they have only become widely used by non-Muslim Filipinos outside the far south in the twentieth century. The kulintang has come to represent traditional music in the Philippines, though it is at considerable geographic and cultural remove from the cultures of those who play these instruments both in the Philippines and overseas. Framing the display of these

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instruments was a large image of a beautiful white sand beach, ringed with seaside huts, with a catamaran occupying the central part of the frame. Once again, the agenda of tourism was foregrounded. Next in view was the Philippines ‘Travel Café,’ occupying roughly a quarter of the pavilion space, and offering Filipino specialties such adobo and halo-halo, as well as dishes clearly designed to appeal to Chinese diners, notably Shanghai-style lumpiang (spring rolls) and the Chinese-Filipino fried noodle dish, pancit bam-i. Largely devoid of business when I was there on a weekday afternoon, many spectators had gathered in front of a stage featuring the Banda Kawayan, a group created in 1973 at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines which uses bamboo instruments handcrafted by its founder, Professor Siegfredo Calabig. Clad in red formal wear with a kind of generically traditional look, the band of eleven performers played bamboo instruments ranging from the marimba3 on large, stationary racks, to the handheld angklung and bamboo mouth pipe organs. The mode of participation was gendered, with a row of attractive, smiling young women in front moving and swaying as they tapped out the melody on the marimba, while the men played the large handheld mouth organs or occupied positions at the back of the stage. The manner and style of presentation aligns with Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s observations with respect to how performers can themselves morph into ethnographic objects: ‘A tightly coordinated ensemble of trained professionals, often more or less the same age and physical type, wear stylized, often uniform, costumes while executing highly choreographed routines with great precision’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, pp. 64-65). One of the defining features of the music of this ensemble was that because all of the instruments with the exception of a standing cymbal were made of bamboo, every tune they played regardless of musical style was infused with an upbeat, jolly quality, the kind of music one might expect to encounter when stepping off the boat at some Polynesian island resort paradise or while at an evening cultural show sipping mai tais. Furthering the association between the music and tourism was a large side panel displaying a slide show of still images of beautiful beaches, colourful tropical flowers, a close-up of a purple, tropical fruit drink, underwater diving scenes, women dancing in colourful, indigenous costumes, and a blond woman paddling a kayak through clear, sparkling waters. 3 Originally of Mexican origin, the standard marimba has keys of hardwood with metal resonators underneath. This marimba was unique in that both the keys and the resonators were made from bamboo.

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Figure 8.3 Band playing bamboo instruments

By this point in my encounter with the pavilion I found myself both angry and sad. I was upset that an opportunity to provide a counter-narrative to the image of the Philippines as a nation marked entirely by its exoticism and islandness was undercut by a pavilion imaginary populated with friendly, smiling musical natives performing for spectators unwittingly transformed into tourists. I was saddened because the pavilion experience provided an uncanny parallel with what I have repeatedly encountered over the course of a decade of field work in the Philippines; I have routinely witnessed people creating extraordinary work or making powerful statements asserting and defining communities through performance only to have it hijacked by oligarch politicians working in cahoots with local and national officials from the Department of Tourism. But nothing prepared me for the coup-de-grȃce waiting behind my back. As I turned from the stage, I took in a vast market of trinkets and snack food items known in the Philippines as merienda, neatly packaged and branded products being hawked by bored-looking young women standing behind these displays. On the sign board behind them was the Filipino word sulyap and the English phrase ‘a glimpse of the Philippines.’ Sulyap translates as ‘glimpse,’ but can also mean ‘glance,’ ‘leer,’ or ‘ogle.’ By this point I began to feel as though I was part of an exchange for which I did

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not sign up. I had become part of an encounter between tourist and native, much like the one that Edward Bruner has observed operating in Bali: The touristic borderzone is like empty space, an empty stage waiting for performance time, for the audience of tourists and for the native performers. The natives, too, then, move in and out of the touristic borderzone. But the perceptions of the two groups are not the same, because what for the tourists is a zone of leisure and exoticization, is for the natives a site of work and cash income. (1996, p. 158)

What I saw unfold in the pavilion’s handicraft/merienda zone was all the more distressing in that it replicated the structure I have seen at countless festivals around the country; so-called ‘trade fairs’ routinely piggyback onto large community-based events and use them as an opportunity to display and sell locally produced goods but are often overshadowed by the larger business and commercial interests in a particular region. While there is perhaps little difference between this and exiting a museum through the gift shop or leaving the cavernous US pavilion through a sea of corporate logos or the French pavilion by taking a right towards the exit at the Louis Vuitton display (Peterson 2012), the vibrant, joyous very human display of hands creating and connecting with others on the exterior of the pavilion had prepared the spectator for a different kind of experience, one more organic and handcrafted, one that offered opportunities for more randomly selected experiences on the part of the spectator-participant. Pastor Roces’ original concept of invoking the experience of the street, one that the big box interior would have supported, and for which the pavilion’s exterior prepared the participant, was ultimately undercut during the final execution of the pavilion and by what filled it. Rather than putting together my own experience, as I might do on the streets of the Philippines, I was directed down a narrow tourist path, reduced against my will to playing the role of the consuming tourist. Thus the obvious question presents itself: What happened between design and execution? In an interview, Pastor Roces was candid in identifying the forces that hijacked the concept, confirming many of my own suspicions. And in a country where performance is the centrepiece of virtually all significant events that bring people together to celebrate the bonds of community, what happened inside this pavilion was never going to completely escape the scrutiny of the country’s political and economic elites. Given that the fair straddled two national governments, one headed by the discredited and deeply unpopular President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, and a new administration under the leadership of Benigno ‘Noynoy’ Aquino III,

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Figure 8.4 Handicrafts zone at the Philippines Pavilion

who swept into power dramatically in May 2010, there were always going to be additional offstage dramas directly impacting Filipino participation in the expo. Yet because the complexities at work here are not just a product of Filipino domestic politics, my analysis in the following section will rely on the model set out by Appadurai with his five so-called ‘scapes’ used to track multiple flows in socio-cultural exchanges, namely ‘ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes’ (1996). Each may work in opposition to one another, and when placed in the context of complex intra-Asian cultural exchange, may create additional internal oppositions. Thus I seek to unpack the forces operating within and between these scapes – fields that function much like related landscapes rather than integrated fields – in order to shed further light on the dynamics that undercut the grand design of the pavilion.

‘Fractal’ Formations: Flows and ‘Scapes’ Appadurai defines the ethnoscape as ‘the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we life: tourists, immigrants, refugees,

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exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals’ (1996, p. 33). Though these categories can achieve some measure of internal stability, he observes that, ‘the warp of these stabilities is everywhere shot through with the woof of human motion’ (ibid., pp. 33-34). The ethnoscape of the Philippines Pavilion was also determined by expectations that one group had about another they were yet to encounter. Ethnic Chinese constituted the overwhelming majority of the 73 million who, between 1 May and 31 October 2010, experienced the largest mass-participation event in history. While the fair and its audience were drawn from vast numbers of Chinese who can now afford to travel domestically as well as from residents of the Shanghai megalopolis, the expense of an entry ticket relative to wages4 meant that those attending were drawn disproportionately from the upper middle class. Some pavilions, such as the French Pavilion, seemed to attract at large youth audience, due perhaps to what I have argued elsewhere (Peterson 2012) are the associations that young, aspirational urban Chinese have with France and French culture. Domestic courtesy campaigns leading up to the expo and published guides setting out appropriate fair behaviour suggested that organizers wanted to ensure the domestic audience left a positive impression on any foreigners they encountered, while the fair experience was viewed as having a potentially civilizing effect on aspirational Chinese through exposing them to high status patterns of refinement and consumption (Tomba 2009). Though the Filipino ethnoscape within the pavilion included a few star performers who came for short periods of time, it was anchored by the youthful members of the Banda Kawayan. Serving as a kind of residential company from July to October, within the controlled space of the pavilion they were presented as neo-ethnic objects, playing music on handcrafted bamboo instruments that most spectators might have incorrectly assumed were widely used throughout the Philippines. The ethnoscape external to the building included the artistic and curatorial team, bureaucrats at the national Department of Tourism, the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Macapagal-Arroyo administration that oversaw the planning and development of the pavilion, the new administration that took over following the election of Noynoy Aquino, and a large and powerful group of Chinese-Filipino businessmen operating behind the scenes. Pastor Roces observes that while there was very little scrutiny of the pavilions she worked on with Calma at the two prior expos, in Shanghai the situation ‘was further complicated by the too 4

Day entry ticket prices were between 160 (US$26) and 200 (US$33) yuan for peak days.

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obvious lay of the land: this is China.’ Here ‘the dense networks involving extremely rich people in both China and the Philippines, meant big league stakeholders [were] at play’ (Pastor Roces 2014). Stakeholders included wealthy and influential Filipino-Chinese businessmen and the Federation of Filipino Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FFCCCII). Not surprisingly, in her remarks at the pavilion’s opening, Philippine Deputy Rosario G. Manalo acknowledged the support of the FFCCCII as well as other pavilion sponsors, including Chinese-Filipino George Siao Kian Ty, chairman and founder of Metropolitan Bank and Trust, the country’s secondlargest bank, and according to Forbes (n.d.), the nation’s seventh-richest person. Filipino-Chineseness is further complicated by the fact that ethnic Chinese disproportionately control a large segment of the nation’s wealth, while extended families with Chinese bloodlines which were rebadged as ‘mestizo’ by the end of the Spanish colonial period dominate the list of the nation’s most powerful and influential ruling families, marking them as among the nation’s de facto oligarchs. The assimilated Chinese families that adopted the values and customs of the Spanish were rewarded with land, privileges and power during the Spanish period, and that elite continues to dominate the economic and political landscape of the country to this day. To suggest that a mestizo-identified family is in fact more likely to be ethnic Chinese than Spanish is hugely problematic in the Philippines, as this elision of ethnicity from Chinese to Hispanized mestizo is widely and virtually unquestioningly accepted. When in the company of the urban poor in the Tagalog-speaking regions of the country, it is not uncommon to hear them trading in stereotypes about Chinese-Filipinos as if they were foreign nationals, or suggesting that ‘the Chinese take care of their own.’ Thus the Filipino ethnoscape informing the conceptualization and the ultimate content of the pavilion was built on unstable, fluid and complex flows where ethnicity, culture and nation exist as slippery and at times interwoven categories. Appadurai sets out the second category of technoscapes as ‘the global configuration, also ever fluid, of technology and the fact that technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informational, now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries’ (1996, p. 34). Filipinos navigate and are deeply imbricated in these complex global flows. While in 2011 the Philippines overtook India as the call centre capital of the English-speaking world (Bajaj 2011), in 2014 Bloomberg ranked the contributions of the Philippines as second only to Mexico as the driver of overseas ‘imported talent’ supporting innovation in Silicon Valley, one of America’s most powerful economic engines, placing Filipinos ahead of the

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contributions of professionals from China and Japan. Not surprisingly, a prominent position for technoscapes was built into the physical environment of the pavilion and was part of its conceptualization. Screens for digital and video material were integrated into the streetscape of the pavilion in the designs presented at its launch in April 2010 and their placement suggested they were to be used dynamically to interact with and complement the displays and the human environment. The photographs of Neal Oshima, recruited by Pastor Roces for the project, were to have been featured on these screens. Oshima’s photographs of people and the places they create and inhabit are complex and multilayered, reflecting a deep understanding of and empathy for the subject and the communities he photographs. Unlike photos designed to entice the tourist, his photographs do not invite consumption, but rather cause the viewer to pause and seek to understand and respect difference. Pastor Roces recalls that artistic direction of the project was ‘usurped,’ as consular officials stepped in ‘covered over’ Oshima’s photographs ‘with paltry tourism promotion pictures. And ads of the goods of one donor/ sponsor’ (Pastor Roces 2014). Because the technoscapes imbedded into the pavilion were primarily visual fields, they were easily compromised as images that reflected the narrative of tourism were selected, creating an environment where the spectator/participant becomes a virtual tourist. In the case of the pavilion, financescapes are deeply interwoven into the preceding two scapes, a point that Appadurai argues is built into the ‘mysterious, rapid, and difficult’ flow of global capital (1996, p. 34): But the crucial point is that the global relationship among ethnoscapes, technoscapes, and financescapes is deeply disjunctive and profoundly unpredictable because each of these landscapes is subject to its own constraints and incentives (some political, some informational, some technoenvironmental), at the same time as each acts as a constraint and a parameter for the movements in the others. (1996, p. 35)

We have already seen how ethnicity and financial power are interwoven in the Philippines, and how slippery ethnicity can be where the legacy of colonization has created another layer of meaning with respect to ethnicity and cultural orientation. What Pastor Roces observed retrospectively as ‘a perfect storm’ (2014) was brewing as an ‘extraordinarily corrupt’ and unpopular government was heading off a cliff, leaving those in the top positions within the major departments contributing to the pavilion – notably the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Department of Tourism, and the

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National Commission for Culture and the Arts – to fend for themselves. She recalls the swift departure of ‘the surprisingly un-corrupt Department of Tourism Secretary,’ Joseph Durano, with whom they had worked on the two prior expos, observing that ‘all the man wanted to do at that point is get out of government service’ (Pastor Roces 2014). His distance, she notes, left a vacuum for the rich and powerful to intervene and circumvent the process: ‘the consular officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Shanghai found the perfect opportunity to impose their own taste on design development and subsequently, on pavilion operation,’ adding, ‘[b] asically no one was in control’ (2014). The power vacuum meant that ‘the presence of these parties and their largesse created a situation: lowlife among tourism and consular officers had a field day brown-nosing the rich. In this situation, this lowlife started designing the pavilion’ (Pastor Roces 2014). In addition to the eliminating Oshima’s images from the pavilion’s internal landscape, she also cites the interference of ‘a two-bit consular official’ into the artistic programming of pavilion director Bart Guigona and the dance choreography of Denisa Reyes, a former artistic director of Ballet Philippines, because the official ‘did not think Chinese audiences would be pleased’ (2014). The ‘perfect storm’ worsened after Noynoy Aquino was sworn into office on 30 June 2010 as the individuals he put in charge of the Department of Tourism were roundly seen as hugely incompetent and lost their positions within a few months of taking them up, again all within the timespan of the Expo. Mediascapes similarly contribute to this mix, adding another layer to the flow that cuts through the other scapes. As Appadurai observes: Mediascapes, whether produced by private or state interests, tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of elements (such as characters, plots, and textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places. (1996, p. 35)

We have seen how image-driven content flashed on the pavilion screens, particularly when paired with live action in the case of the Banda Kawayan musicians, created ‘strips of reality’ (Appadurai 1996, p. 46) which invite the spectator to enter into the field as a tourist. New lives are imagined, ones in which the individual can emplace themselves into a tropical island paradise while being serenaded by smiling, graceful young women, swaying as they tap out sweet-sounding melodies on beautifully crafted (though

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largely recently invented) bamboo instruments. A projection of such images of the Philippines extends back to the Marcos era (1965-1986), when under the watch of First Lady Imelda Marcos, a massive arts infrastructure was created, resulting in expensive, unwieldy and massive edifices built to showcase high culture imports and folk, indigenous and neo-ethnic forms cherry-picked from around the country and presented at the Folk Arts Theatre or integrated into the Bayanihan dance repertory. The central position of the arts in representing the Philippines internationally and as an indexical symbol for nation and its cultures was perfected during the Marcos years and its legacy lives on even within self-identified progressive elites. My own experience supports Pastor Roces’ asserting that ‘the cultural engines of representation in the Philippines are unable to outgrow the Marcos era’ (2014). I have witnessed the despair of many Filipino artists in the global diaspora as they are attacked by prominent artists and peers in the Philippines for failing to present their country and its culture in a uniformly positive light as if it were the payment for being allowed to leave the country and build a life abroad. As long as positive representation along a narrow spectrum of cultural expression is deemed to be so centrally connected to the nationalist project that it demands a continuous public performance of pride in being Filipino, those who can will continue to derail future attempts at more playful and fluid approaches to representation. And where the mediascape can be partially controlled through a technoscape within a pavilion environment as we have seen here, images can be selected to reflect the narrative of tourism, creating an environment where the spectator/participant becomes a virtual tourist in a virtual Philippines. These ‘scapes’ collectively contribute to the overall ideoscape generated by the encounter, what Appadurai identifies as ‘concatenations of images,’ ones that ‘are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and counterideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it’ (1996, p. 36). In its initial conceptualization, the ways in which ideas within the pavilion concatenated were to be constructed by the spectator/participant, following from the logic and experience of being on the streets in a city where performance and performances were happening all around, where they imprint on the peripatetic subject in a way that is organic, where what stays in the sedimentation of the experience is based on choice, the speed through which one moves through the space, and what was on offer that particular day. Instead, a countering ideoscape was offered, one that came from the wealthy elites rather than from the bottom up, one that was received rather than created. Thus the desired end point, the dual understanding of performing cities, so central to Pastor

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Roces and Calma’s initial design concept, was hijacked and replaced with narratives of tourism and consumption, reflecting the truth of Appadurai’s hypothesis that ‘the relationship of these various flows to one another as they constellate into particular events and social forms will be radically context-dependent’ (1996, p. 47). By considering the context-driven nature of each of these overlapping and intersecting scapes what has been mapped out here is configured as ‘fundamentally fractal’ (Appadurai 1996, p. 46) rather than linear, reflecting the intricate complexity of transnational transactions played out in an intra-Asian context in a single pavilion at an international exposition.

Works Cited Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bajaj, Vikas (2011) ‘A New Capital of Call Centers.’ New York Times, 25 November. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/business/philippines-overtakes-india-ashub-of-call-centers.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Bloomberg (2014) ‘Tech Immigrants: A Map of Silicon Valley’s Imported Talent,’ 6 June. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-05/ tech-immigrants-a-map-of-silicon-valleys-imported-talent. Bruner, Edward M. (1996) ‘Tourism in the Balinese Borderzone.’ In Smadar Lavie and Ten Swedenburg, eds., Displacement, Diaspora, and the Geographies of Identity. Durham: Duke University Press, 157-179. Forbes (n.d.) Prof ile of George Ty and Family. Forbes http://www.forbes.com/ profile/george-ty/. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (1998) Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press. Manalo, Rosario G. (2010) ‘The Human Urban: City-Building for and with People.’ Opening remarks presented at Forum on Urbanization, Shanghai Urban Planning and Exhibition Centre, 23 April. United Nations Public Administration Network. http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/apcity/unpan039007.pdf. McKenzie, Jon (2001) Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London: Routledge. Pastor Roces, Marian (2010) ‘The Philippine Participation at the Shanghai Expo 2010.’ PowerPoint presentation, United Nations Public Administration Network, ‘Launching of Philippine Participation in Shanghai World Expo 2010.’ http://www. unpan.org/Events/Conferences/tabid/94/mctl/EventDetails/ModuleID/1532/ ItemI D/1545/Default.aspx. Pastor Roces, Marian (2014) Personal interview, 15 September 2014.

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Peterson, William (2012) ‘La Ville Sensuelle: Seeking a “Better City, Better Life” in the French Pavilion.’ Access 31.2: 39-51. Tomba, Luigi (2009) ‘Of Quality, Harmony, and Community: Civilization and the Middle Class in Urban China.’ positions 17.3: 592-616. Yap, Karl Lester (2013) ‘Philippines’ Domingo Says China May Become Biggest Export Market.’ Bloomberg, 7 October. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-07/ philippines-domingo-says-china-may-become-biggest-export-market.html.

About the Author William Peterson is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Flinders University and former Director of the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University. He was foundational academic staff in Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore, Lecturer in Drama at the University of Waikato, and Associate Professor of Theatre at California State University San Bernardino. Author of  Theater and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and Places for Happiness: Community, Self, and Performance in the Philippines (University of Hawai’i Press, 2016), he has published widely on religious performance in the Philippines, Māori and Pākehā theatre in Aotearoa/New Zealand, intercultural theatre practice and international theatre festivals. His current research focuses on performing publics at international expositions. Email: [email protected]

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Mobile Performance and the In-between Yogyakarta Comes to Melbourne Chris Hudson Abstract Certain events that took place during the 2012 Melbourne Festival linked Jalan Malioboro (Malioboro Street), Yogyakarta, and Swanston Street, Melbourne – two streets some 4,500 kilometres apart. Swanston Street and other parts of the city of Melbourne became the locations where, to use Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift’s gloss on the potential of cities to organize experience, ‘the far became near and distance was redefined.’ A performance called Grobak Padi that was staged as part of the Festival formed transnational urban connections through activities in the squares and the streets and created a moment in which distance was redefined and the world could be inhabited from afar. A grobak is an Indonesian food cart that typically sells cheap local dishes as it moves through urban and other spaces in Indonesia. Several grobaks were imported from Yogyakarta for the 2012 Melbourne Festival. After being dismantled in Yogyakarta and reassembled in Melbourne, they became travelling objects in more ways than one as they negotiated the streets of Melbourne and stopped in squares and on the riverbank to sell satay and other dishes. Festival-goers who clustered around the grobaks became not only spectators or consumers of the food, but also part of the performance. The official Grobak Padi flyer announced that the performance offered ‘a little piece of Java in the heart of the city’ that would take the form of ‘an intimate exchange between cultures and cities.’ Described also as ‘a deliciously cross-cultural performance piece,’ what made this intimate exchange and the cultural interaction across distance possible was the addition of media technology to the grobaks. Through mediated exchanges between citizens in Melbourne and Yogyakarta, the grobaks created the conditions for global connections that went beyond the need for physical proximity to develop social relations across distance. This chapter examines the ways in a performative moment conquered physical distance to create an imagined presence of the global other.

Hudson, Chris, and Bart Barendregt (eds): Globalization and Modernity in Asia. Performative Moments. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462981126_ch09

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Keywords: Yogyakarta, Melbourne, mobile performance, food carts, travelling objects, technology

Grobak Padi and the Melbourne Festival Events that took place during the 2012 Melbourne Festival connected Jalan Malioboro (Malioboro Street), Yogyakarta and Swanston Street, Melbourne – two streets some 4,500 kilometres apart. Swanston Street and other parts of the city of Melbourne became the locations where, to use Amin and Thrift’s terms, the far became near and distance was redefined (Amin and Thrift 2002, p. 33). A performance called Grobak Padi that was staged as part of the festival linked the two cities through activities in the squares and the streets to create an imagined world animated by a sense of ‘the presence of the global’ (Appadurai 1996, pp. 2-3). A grobak (or gerobak) is an Indonesian food cart that can be pushed or ridden from place to place by means of bicycle wheels (Figure 9.1). For the Melbourne Festival several grobaks were imported from Yogyakarta by Multicultural Arts Victoria.1 Many cities in the world are familiar with the concept of mobile food and food carts have long been a fixture of Indonesian life. Any visitor to Yogyakarta, and elsewhere in Indonesia, will be struck by the proliferation of grobaks selling food and drinks at all hours of the day. Grobaks move along streets and town squares and in and out of kampungs and other neighbourhoods. Mobilities of all sorts can transform public life and create complex and fluid hybrids, as Sheller and Urry have shown (2003), but mobilities can also transform life in other ways and create various hybridities at different spatial scales. While Melbourne is no stranger to mobile food or Indonesian cuisine, novel transformations generated by grobaks at the Melbourne Festival created the sort of hybrid ensembles common to a postmodern global culture, including the exotic and the indigenous; the banal and extraordinary; the mobile and the static. More importantly, the activities associated with their presence went beyond hybrid formations to create a liminal space, neither completely local nor really global, but somewhere in-between defined by corporeal mobility, or certain kinds of performance. 1 The grobaks were presented by Melbourne Festival and Multicultural Arts Victoria in association with Playking Foundation. Supported by City of Melbourne, Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia, Australia-Indonesia Institute, Performance Klub (Yogjakarta), Federation Square and Arts Centre Melbourne.

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Figure 9.1  Grobak in Swanston St. Melbourne

Photograph by Fergus Hudson

This chapter examines three aspects of the grobaks’ performance: first, the question of travelling objects and the reconfiguring of space as translocal; second, narrative and sense of place; and finally, how these activities can generate a third space, both local and global out of which can emerge an expanded consciousness and a radical openness to the cultural other. The remainder of this section of the chapter describes the context of the two streets and their established links with the global through their position in the nation; following that, I examine how travelling objects can reconfigure place; then I consider narrative performance in the mediated public space and the shaping of moments of ‘globalness’; finally, I explore the transspatial dimensions of performance and their imaginative possibilities through the

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framework of Homi Bhabha’s third space of enunciation, and Edward Soja’s thirdspace of spatial trialectics. Swanston Street and Jalan Malioboro are both significant thoroughfares of substantial sized cities; the former is a pedestrian mall that features trams, cheap Asian restaurants, a small square built in the style of an Italian piazza, and an assortment of variety and specialist stores and cafes. At the northern end where the central business district proper ends is a university campus and a student dining precinct; in the centre is the Melbourne Town Hall. At the southern end close to the Yarra River, the street turns into a tawdry and somewhat unsavoury precinct pervaded by the smell of McDonald’s and other fast food outlets, and features homeless citizens sleeping on the streets. It is an eclectic environment that somehow defies categorization. Jalan Malioboro, once a slightly seedy, run down street of shops and stalls selling cheap clothes and tourist goods, and featuring makeshift restaurants in lean-to constructions and broken pavements, now boasts shopping malls. Chronic traffic congestion is a prominent characteristic. It is the main thoroughfare of the city, and leads to the alun-alun kidul (south square) and the keraton (palace), the heart of the city and a centre of artistic activity. It is crowded with tiny pavement stalls where patrons sit on stools to eat the local culinary specialities. Located along the street is the Malioboro Mall which houses a McDonald’s outlet, a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut along with indigenized versions of burgers, French fries and other global foods. Apart from being hubs of global fast food, these two streets have characteristics in common that are important for this study. They both stage street festivals of national and local significance; they both constitute a specific, culturally significant locality of high symbolic value in a complex of localities within their respective nations; they are both, like many cities, nodes in translocal cultural flows; and they are both sites where the local is reinvented and renewed within the framework of the global, and a form of ‘transnational urbanism’ (Smith 2001) develops. They both promote themselves as national centres of the arts. Both streets are sites of the emergence of a performative public linked to other publics through their status as locations in the ‘flow’– now such a commonplace metaphor to describe a predominant feature of the global era. That everyday life in the twenty-first century has been colonized by the global to a greater extent than ever before need not be rehearsed here. Rather, this chapter focuses on a moment of global connection that provided a deeper relationship that transcended the flows to establish a dialogic relationship between two locales ordinarily separated by time and space. These deeper connections confound the idea,

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suggested by Anthony Giddens (1990), that one of the significant features of modernity is that mobility and the general flows of culture are disengaged from the particularities of locales. While spaces of flows and transnational processes may transcend all spatial scales of the global, national and local, processes and activities may also be anchored in specific locales. The local is not globalism’s ‘other’ (Smith 2001) rather, the global is imagined and reinvented through cultural practice at the level of the local. If it is possible to inhabit the world from afar, as Szerszynski and Urry (2006, p. 115) have suggested, then the necessity for physical proximity for social relationships has given way to multiple forms of imagined presence of the global occurring through objects, people, information and images travelling, carrying connections across, and into, multiple other spaces (Urry 2000; Elliott and Urry 2010, p. 15). While there is of course no single integrated global moment, the grobak performance engendered a new sense of place, one that could be understood in Massey’s terms as progressive, not self-enclosing but outward looking (Massey 1991, p. 24). Swanston Street and other locations in the city of Melbourne were transformed into spaces where a specific time-space compression could be experienced, where global connections of an intimate kind were established, where a new sense of proximity and distance was created, and where the socio-spatial relations of Swanston Street and other parts of the city of Melbourne were transformed. A public consciousness of existing in an interconnected domain of transnational urbanisms was created in both Yogyakarta and Melbourne and everyday life itself became part of global community, a form of ‘virtual commonality,’ one in which terms like ‘far,’ ‘deep’ and ‘distant’ are replaced by ‘rhythms which fold time and space in all kinds of untoward localizations and intricate mixtures’ (Amin and Thrift 2002, p. 47).

Travelling Objects For five days between 17 and 21 October 2012 the grobaks sold Indonesian dishes as part of a mobile performance. On the menu was the typical everyday Indonesian street food sold from grobaks in Yogyakarta: nasi goreng2; satay with lontong3; bakso4; and wedang ronde.5 While some grobaks 2 3 4 5

Fried rice. Meat on skewers and small cakes of compressed rice. Soup with meat balls. Glutinous rice balls stuffed with sweet peanut paste floating in sweet ginger tea.

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remained stationary at the Festival Hub, others set off to wander around the city, creating certain spatio-temporal rhythms, just as they would do in Yogyakarta. At each new location, crowds gathered around to eat, chat and admire the grobak. It was not so much the food that attracted people, since Indonesian food is commonplace in Melbourne, but the grobak itself. After travelling from Java for the festival, the grobaks created itineraries and negotiated spaces around Melbourne. In doing so, they transformed places and created an imagined presence of the global in the various sites of temporary immobility. Yi-Fu Tuan distinguishes between space and place, arguing that undifferentiated space becomes place when it is endowed with some value (1977, p. 6). Place is also a pause in the movement that space has allowed (ibid., p. 6) and it is that pause that allows localities in Melbourne such as the City Square, Federation Square, the Alexandra Gardens and the banks of the Yarra River to be transformed into places of renewed meaning and value, albeit transitory. At each stop, the grobak attracted a crowd of citizens whose assembly created new meaning, a new identity and a renewed sense of place. As exotic objects they were a novelty that provided a moment of transcendence of the local and the ordinary while participants engaged in the banal practice of eating. After a day of itinerancy the grobaks gathered on the river bank for an after-dark dance performance by Tony Yap, an Asian-Australian dancer and choreographer, and Agung Gunawan, a classically trained Javanese dancer flown in from Indonesia for the festival. Each pause created ‘place’ in varying degrees of boundedness and tangibility. Each pause temporarily anchored the grobak in the space of flows, and while its temporal and spatial instability prevented establishment of place in the sense that Augé uses it of identity, of relations, of history (1995, p. 52), neither was it a non-place of transience. The squares and the riverbank provided a temporary resting place for the grobaks, a transitory home (Figure 9.2). The locations where the grobaks paused become places that were somewhere in between proximity and distance, between mobility and fixity, and between transience and permanence, thereby confounding the distinction between space and place. Urry has approached the problem of the complexities of understanding place as a site to be found somewhere at the intersection of propinquity and immediate interaction, and networks of flows: Places can be loosely understood as multiplex, as a set of spaces where ranges of relational networks and flows coalesce, interconnect and fragment. Any such place can be viewed as the particular nexus between, on the one hand, propinquity characterized by intensely thick co-present

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Figure 9.2  Grobak by night on the banks of the Yarra River

Photograph by Fergus Hudson

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interaction, and on the other hand, fast flowing webs and networks stretched corporeally, virtually, and imaginatively across distances. These propinquities come together to enable performances in, and of, particular places. (Urry 2000, p. 140)

In Grobak Padi the moment when propinquities come together was contingent on the mobility of objects. In their analysis of flows, Lash and Urry consider the question of mobile objects and describe ‘an endless profusion of “space odysseys” of subjects and objects travelling at increasingly greater distances and speeds’ that empties them both of meaning and material content (2002, p. 15). Material objects that have travelled might not only be divested of meaning but reinvested with new meaning. Appadurai’s study of the social life of things, privileges travelling objects over others when he argues that for human actors ‘it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context’ (Appadurai 1986, p. 5). The grobak is a thing-in-motion – unremarkable in Yogyakarta; an exotic curiosity in Melbourne – that, through media technologies, illuminates human and social contexts across time and space. The grobaks’ pause created a place of temporary belonging or what James Clifford has called ‘displaced dwelling’ (1992, p. 99). Extending Clifford’s work on problematizing the binaries of dwelling and travelling, Celia Lury (1997) has analysed the ways in which the relations embedded in the travelling-indwelling, dwelling-in-travelling dyad can be understood through the capacity of objects to travel and stay still. In the same way souvenirs or consumer goods acquired as part of a journey can reconstitute their meaning through dwelling elsewhere, the grobaks could reconstitute their meaning through relocation. They became objects dwelling in the local landscape, but at the same time confounded definition because their movement in relations of travelling/dwelling locates them, as Lury puts it in her description of objects in general, ‘in between open and closed in their meaning, and in between here and there in their journeying’ (ibid., pp. 78-79). What ultimately gives travelling objects their meaning in a fluid range of meanings is, as Lury suggests, their ‘self-conscious location in mobility’ (ibid., p. 80). In travelling to Melbourne, the grobaks located themselves in mobility, reconstituted their meaning as objects whose meaning depends on their status as both travelling and dwelling objects and became embedded in an in-between-ness. Lury has also suggested that the specific relations of travelling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in-travelling are more or less indistinguishable and are the relations of flows that are conduits for a space of global cosmopolitanism (ibid., p. 89).

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Narrative, Performance and the Mediated Public Space The Melbourne Festival, like arts festivals everywhere, invaded public spaces with performances in which the festival-goers who clustered around the grobaks became not only spectators or consumers of the food, but also part of the performance. Described as ‘a deliciously cross-cultural performance piece’ (Our House 2012), the everyday practice of eating and talking became a performative moment. This intimate exchange in the imagined presence of the global was made possible by the addition to the grobaks of multimedia technology in the form of screens displaying video art and images of people in Jogyakarta devised by media artist, writer and video-maker Michael Hornblow (Figure 9.3). As they showed images of grobaks in Yogyakarta selling food they captured the sounds and rhythms of life in Indonesia while ‘fostering an amicable culinary and cultural bond across the Timor Sea’ (Our House 2012). Other forms of narrative also helped to construct consumers as participants and reconfigure the urban landscape in the imagination. The official Grobak Padi e-flyer (2012) announced that the performance would offer ‘A little piece of Java in the heart of the city’ that would take the form of ‘an intimate exchange between cultures and cities.’ Hornblow had been involved Figure 9.3  Grobak with images from Yogykarta

Photograph by Fergus Hudson

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in a multimedia dance performance in Yogyakarta in August 2010 called TransGrobak. It was billed as an outdoor multimedia event that recognized the unique importance of ‘mobile restaurants’ in Indonesia. Hornblow’s website states that: The food gerobak has an intimate relation to the body through cooking and livelihood. In fact it’s like a body, or a species of bodies that service the city with their endless compartments for transforming ingredients and their noisemakers for calling out to customers. The gerobak is a body their operators depend upon. Theirs is a daily journey of transformation, from kampung to city, from the gifts of the earth to cooking and conversation, from the action of skilled hands to the gratitude of their customers. (Hornblow 2013) Figure 9.4  Grobak with skype technology

Photograph by Fergus Hudson

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More importantly for this study, the ‘multimedia fusion of food, film and dance’ (Grobak Padi e-flyer 2012) by Michael Hornblow, Tony Yap and Agung Gunawan was further intensified by the tablets hung in frames on the sides of the grobaks (Figure 9.4). These tablets provided by Skype the means to talk to people on Jalan Malioboro who were also eating breakfast or lunch from a grobak. Consumers, now part of the performance in Swanston Street, were able to wave at other performers in Jalan Malioboro or the alun-alun kidul in Yogyakarta. Spontaneous conversations in broken English or Indonesian erupted and discussions about food and weather became part of the performance. People in Melbourne could see children in Indonesia jumping and waving at them, grobak customers munching on satay and other foods, and people on the street stopping to greet them. As people gathered around the grobak on both sides of the screen, they became part of a mediated intercultural performance that calls into question the notion of the totalizing power of flows. Nigel Thrift has questioned the myth of global flows of information that decentre the subject through time-space compression and argues that cities should not be seen as places that are leaking away into the space of flows; rather, we should imagine an interruption to the flows where the city becomes a key storytelling node for the world as a whole (1997, p. 140). The translocal connections made possible through the grobaks as mobile objects escaped the space of flows to emerge in a displaced dwelling, a place of urban storytelling. Despite the language difficulties that most people encountered, the activities of excited and curious children and intrigued adults waving, smiling, gesturing and eating lunch told a story of human connection and turned the streets into a discursive spectacle of intercultural narrative. Multicultural Arts Victoria put the grobaks into a context that transcended the local when they told this story about life in Java, the soul of Indonesia and the cultural bonds that could be formed across distance: For f ive days of the Festival, a delegation of gerobak food carts from the Indonesian city of Jogjakarta wend their way through Melbourne, bringing the flavours and culture of Java’s bustling street scene directly to our CBD. Based at the vibrant Foxtel Festival Hub, Grobak Padi brings together free multimedia art installations and contemporary dance with authentic Javanese street food – sold at modest prices – creating a cross-cultural dining experience like no other. Like a staple diet for the soul, the rice of the padi field symbolises a way of life in Indonesia.

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Its humble sustenance reminds us to say thank you for the abundance we already have. While several gerobaks remain at the Festival Hub displaying video art inspired by the padi, others set out across the city, dispensing delicious Indonesian food. As they serve the hungry people of Melbourne, the carts show live video of gerobaks plying their trade in Jogjakarta, fostering an amicable culinary and cultural bond across the Timor Sea. After sunset, the roving carts return to the Hub to serve up a free outdoor event. (Multicultural Arts Victoria 2012)

Indonesian media told a similar story of transurban connection in a mobile space. Kompas, the national daily broadsheet, reported that: Sebuah pergelaran seni yang mengombinasikan makanan, tari, dan f ilm berjudul Gerobak Padi akan memeriahkan Festival Melbourne, 17-21 Oktober 2012. Selama lima hari, jalan-jalan di pusat kota Melbourne di Australia ini akan didatangi gerobak padi yang menyediakan menu masakan Indonesia. Sambil menikmati makanan, pengunjung akan disajikan tarian dan video mengenai suasana kehidupan di Yogyakarta. Menurut laporan koresponden Kompas di Australia, L Sastra Wijaya, panitia Festival Melbourne menyebutkan ini adalah bentuk pertunjukan yang pertama kalinya diadakan di dunia. Para penjual makanan yang merupakan para tukang masak asal Indonesia di Melbourne akan didampingi oleh penari Agung Gunawan dan Tony Yap, sementara film mengenai Yogyakarta dibuat oleh Michael Hornblow. […] Di saat Anda tiba, dekati penjual makanan, pesan apa yang Anda mau, dan beri salam untuk Yogyakarta lewat layar. Nikmati pertunjukan. (Wijaya 2012)6

According to the Melbourne newspaper, The Age, the performance opened up newly aestheticized spaces of understanding and enjoyment for people not normally involved with the festival:

6 Translation: An artistic performance combining food, dance and film entitled Gerobak Padi will liven up the Melbourne Festival, 17-21 October 2012. For five days, streets in the centre of Melbourne will be visited by gerobaks offering an Indonesian menu. While enjoying the food, visitors will be served dance and videos showing life in Yogyakarta. According to Sastra Wijaya, Kompas’ correspondent in Australia, this is the f irst time a performance using this format has appeared in Australia. The food vendors are cooks, originally from Indonesia, who will be accompanied by dancers Agung Gunawan and Tony Yap, while the film about Yogyakarta was made by Michael Hornblow. […] The moment you arrive, go up to the food seller, order what you want, and send greetings to Yogyakarta via the screen. Enjoy the show (Wijaya 2012).

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We love to be the first to track down that hard-to-find new eatery, so it’s likely the city’s streets will soon be invaded by hungry swarms eager to find the Indonesian food carts arriving as part of the Grobak Padi event. Along with dance, installations and video art, the carts will travel around the central business district serving up the kinds of meals you’d find on the ground in Yogyakarta and, like some of the best events, will probably find more than a few customers who wouldn’t otherwise have known the festival is even on. Taking art to the people, and all that. (Bailey 2012, p. 8)

The establishment of distanciated social relations afforded by Skype technology provided people in the streets and squares in Indonesia and Australia with an alternative sense of place. Arguing for places to be imagined not as areas with boundaries around them, but as ‘articulated moments’ in networks of social relations and understandings, as unique intersections of networks, Massey argues that: The uniqueness of a place, or a locality, in other words, is constructed out of particular interactions and mutual articulations, social processes, experiences and understandings, in a situation of co-presence, but where large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are actually constructed on a far larger than that we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, a region or even a continent. (1993, p. 66)

Giddens describes the transformation of society from a social life dominated by localized activities that were dependent on co-presence, to one where relationships are possible with absent others. Under these conditions of modernity ‘place becomes increasingly phantasmagorical: that is to say, locals are thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them. What structures the local is not simply that which is present on the scene: the visible form of the local conceals the distanciated relations which determine its nature’ (Giddens 1990, pp. 18-19; emphasis in the original). The social relations made possible by the presence of the travelling object stretched over time and space and manifested as an excited babble of halfunderstood conversations, gestures and laughter. A global storytelling node came alive as an enchanted moment. Experiences and understandings were constructed in a larger context than the location itself. The stories continued through reviews in the media, festival brochures and websites. ‘A little piece of Java in the heart of the city’ became a phantasmagorical

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dimension, linking Melbourne with Jalan Malioboro and the alun-alun in Yogyakarta in which relationships with strangers could be formed, however fleetingly, through a mediated co-presence.

Magical Moments in Thirdspace Bhabha’s conceptual investigations into the hybrid and ambiguous spaces of cross-cultural engagement and the question of cultural identity are useful for understanding the magical moment that was Grobak Padi. The figure of ‘third space’ has transcended its early iteration by Bhabha as a theoretical approach to the postcolonial condition. As Frank SchulzeEngler has suggested, the concept of thirdspace is not only to disrupt the cultural and political homogeneity on which both the Western nation and the prevalent understanding of modernity are based, but it can also be productively used to explore other transcultural dimensions (2008, p. 149). Despite its elusiveness, it is not hard to imagine its possible application to the problems of spatial scale encounters, or global/local encounter if, as Bhabha argues, the production of meaning requires that locations of communication be mobilized through a Third Space (1994, p. 36). He explains the productive capacity of third space to generate an alternative epistemology by examining Marlow’s encounter with the Congolese native in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness at the point where he notices the piece of white worsted tied around the native’s neck. As Marlow focuses on trying to interpret the meaning of the object from beyond the seas and the ambiguity and enigmatic qualities of the gesture that leave the object open to questions, he is transported into a third space. In that dimension he begins to probe not just the object, but the consciousness of the wearer. He reaches out to the specific thought of the other and acknowledges not his ‘identity’ but his unreadable desire (Bhabha 2008, p. xii). If the reterritorialization and domestication of satay and other Indonesian dishes are a reminder of the history of the European colonization of Southeast Asia, the material consequences of the spice trade and other global processes, the grobak says something more. Like the white worsted, the grobak is a signifier that ‘goes beyond any notion of respect for the other’s identity or humanity as a universal subject that has an a priori right to representation.’ Rather, it is ‘an identification, in third space, with the thought and action of the other [with] […] a “thickness” of culture that is as enigmatic as the as the obliquity of the signifier through which it is enunciated’ (ibid. p. xii). The grobaks established a dimension where dualities and certainties

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of cultural difference are broken down, to be replaced by a thirdspace, of which Bhabha argues: ‘we should remember that it is the “inter” – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture’ (1994, p. 39). Not every inter-cultural encounter can create the conditions for a third space. Something must lie beyond the face-to-face encounter, which, like the white worsted, will provide a mediating, material element from the object world that ‘talks back’ as the viewer probes its origin and function (Bhabha 2008, p. xiii). As they landed temporarily in their ‘space odyssey,’ the grobaks brought with them material elements and the means of mediation to generate the sort of questions that not only acknowledge the identity, but also go so far as identifying with the unconscious of the other (ibid., p. xiii). Although Australians in the twenty-first century might be more in touch with the global than Conrad’s Marlow, on encountering the grobak they nevertheless might have wondered about ‘the staple diet for the soul’ of Indonesia contained in the grobaks’ new place of dwelling. Edward Soja also introduces alternative ways of thinking about social spatiality, and acknowledges the obliqueness of the term when he says: ‘In its broadest sense, thirdspace is a purposefully tentative and flexible term that attempts to capture events, appearances, and meanings’ (1996, p. 2). Reimagining Lefebvre’s trialectics of spatiality (ibid., pp. 65-79), Soja conceptualizes cities as ‘firstspace’ (a lived reality, the city itself, fixed on the concrete materiality of spatial forms, spaces that can be mapped); secondspace (ideas about space, cities understood through discourses, literary forms, imagined space, representatations of space, mental or cognitive maps); and thirdspace, a combination of these two which breaks down the binary to create a space that is simultaneously real and imagined. This framework creates a new trialectic of spatiality-historicality-sociality that offers a mode of understanding that draws the imagined and symbolic (language, aesthetics, art) into a new combination with the real, concrete spaces (city spaces, urban landscape). In this synthesis the grobaks’ pause creates a new space which is not global nor local but a thirdspace which could be perceived as a fluid combination of the other two, bringing together space and time, the symbolic and the real. The phantasmagorical imagined spaces created by festival promotions, media reports, statements by dramaturges and production designers, dancers, film makers, itineraries, participants’ cognitive maps of their city, the succession of floating images, and so on, are anchored in the streets, the alun-alun, the riverbank, the parks and gardens to create spaces that were both real and imagined – a

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combination of Yogyakarta and Melbourne, of the local and the global. As a spatial model, thirdspace can take account of the collapsing of the scales of global, national and local into one another, as described by Sassen (2007, p. 22), but it can also accommodate the notion of a dialogue between cultures and provide the epistemological framework for what a performative encounter between cultures that have escaped the constraints of time and space might produce. Soja argues that thirdspace is an ontological hybrid. It is contradictory and ambiguous; restricting and liberating. ‘It arouses a space of radical openness […] of various representations, which can be analysed in binary terms but where there is always a third additional dimension’ (Soja 2008, p. 56). The radical openness that translocal encounters that have escaped physical restrictions and entered into a phantasmagorical dimension is made possible because: Everything comes together in Thirdspace: subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history. (Soja 1996, p. 56)

Conclusion The commodif ication of culture and the constraints of the economic imperatives of the arts festival did not diminish the magic of the grobaks’ dwelling-in-travelling in Melbourne. Each stop became the site of the liminal, a threshold to another world, another local. The grobaks’ peregrinations, the buzz of excitement around them as participants spoke to people in Jalan Maliboro and the alun-alun kidul, and in particular the performances by Tony Yap and Agung Gunawan on the riverbank, were, of course, moments of the carnivalesque. Carnival, it has been argued, has lost the transgressive and licentious mode and the subversive potential described by Bakhtin (1984) and the pre-industrial carnivalesque tradition has been appropriated by capitalism (Featherstone 2007, p. 22). It has been argued that the juxtaposition of carnival time against the routine of daily life is a false binary (see Aching 2010) since many of the excesses of physical and aesthetic pleasures of the carnival, such as excitement, enchantment, novelty and indulgence are now capitalist commodities (Featherstone 2007, p. 22). The performance did, however, retain some of the qualities of the

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carnival. While it did not introduce a topsy-turvey world of subversion of the pervasive order, it enabled the emergence of a productive site where difference and commonality could be explored, where dialogue with strangers could initiate entry into a domain of the real and the imagined. Unlike the pre-industrial carnival which took place at the temporal and spatial margins – liminal spaces where social transgressions could be carried out with impunity – the performance occurred in the spaces of everyday life, appearing more like the ‘liminoid symbolic repertoires’ that Mike Featherstone has identif ied (Featherstone 2007, p. 77) – isolated expressions of liminality somehow embedded in ordinary life. It was a site of enunciation, of storytelling, and of the awakening of the imagination to other possibilities. The grobaks, if examined through the framework of Soja’s trialectic of historicality, sociality and spatiality (1996), can be seen as a space of resistance to forms of spatial and cultural fixity, one that can engender the radical openness to the other that allows the inter-cultural encounter to enrich and expand both cultures in an intensified experience of the near and far. The performance was more than merely a unifying force of shared culture; it became a force for disrupting cultural hegemony and for engendering an alternative consciousness. The Congolese white worsted or the Javanese grobak are metonymical objects that stand for some greater global whole. This seems to reaffirm the notion that the far from the local being globalism’s ‘other’ (Smith 2001), the local, as Beck puts it, can be discovered as the ‘internalized global’ (Beck 2002, p. 17). The mediated co-presence of the global afforded by the grobaks contributed to the process of ‘inner globalization’ (ibid., p. 17). A third space of cultural engagement – a hybrid space in Bhabha’s terms – offers ‘a challenge to the limits of the self in the act of reaching out to what is liminal in the historic experience, and in the cultural representation, of other peoples, times, languages and texts’ (Bhabha 2008, p. xiii). As a relatively unfamiliar object in the standard global flows of images and signs, the grobak emerged from the liminal in the Indonesian-Australian historical encounter. In this case, the challenge to the self was enhanced by the connection with the global other and the fact of being able to speak through the grobak to create narratives of another time and place and intensify ‘the productive capacities of this Third Space’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 56). Like the white worsted as a travelling object, the grobak became Bhabha’s ‘shibboleth of the third space’ (Bhabha 2008, p. xiii), the unfamiliar ‘sign’ of a different, global space. As Paul Routledge’s argued in his study of the critical engagement, a thirdspace is:

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thus a place of invention and transformational encounters, a dynamic in-between space that is imbued with the traces, relays, ambivalences, ambiguities and contradictions, with the feelings and practices of both sites, to fashion something different, unexpected. (Routledge 1996, p. 406)

Amin and Thrift’s conceptualization of place enriches this understanding when they argue that places ‘are best thought of not so much as enduring sites, but as moments of encounter, not so much as “presents,” fixed in space and time, but as variable events; twists and fluxes of interrelation’ (2002, p. 30; emphasis in the original).

Works Cited Aching, Gerard (2010) ‘Carnival Time versus Modern Social Life: A False Distinction.’ Social Identities 16.4: 415-425. Amin, Ash, and Nigel Thrift (2002) Cities: Reimagining the Urban. Cambridge: Polity. Appadurai, Arjun (1986) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Augé, Marc (1995) Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Bailey, John (2012) ‘Best Seat in the House.’ The Sunday Age, 30 September. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bhabha, Home K. (2008) ‘Preface. In the Cave of Making. Thoughts on Third Space.’ In Karin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner, eds., Communicating in the Third Space. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, ix-xiv. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984) Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Beck, Ulrich (2002) ‘Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies.’ Theory Culture and Society 19: 17-41. Clifford, James (1992) ‘Traveling Cultures.’ In Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 96-116. Elliott, Anthony, and John Urry (2010) Mobile Lives. Oxon: Routledge. Featherstone, Mike (2007) Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage. Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Grobak Padi e-flyer (2012) http://issuu.com/multiculturalarts/docs/eflyer_groba k_27_09_12?mode=window&pageN umber=1.

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Hornblow, Michael (2013) TransGrobak. http://www.michaelhornblow.com/ new-index/#/transgrobak/. Lash, Scott, and John Urry (2002) Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage. Lury, Celia (1997) ‘The Objects of Travel.’ In Chris Rojek and John Urry, eds., Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory. London: Routledge, 75-95. Massey, Doreen (1991) ‘A Global Sense of Place.’ Marxism Today (June): 24-29. Massey, Doreen (1993) ‘Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.’ In Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson and Lisa Tickner, eds., Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change. London: Routledge, 59-69. Multicultural Arts Victoria (2012) ‘Melbourne Festival: Grobak Padi (Australia/ Indonesia).’ http://www.multiculturalarts.com.au/events2012/padi.shtml. Our House (2012) ‘Grobak Padi.’ Our House Collective, 1 October. http://ourhousecollective.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/grobak-padi.html. Routledge, Paul (1996) ‘The Third Space as Critical Engagement.’ Antipode 28.4: 399-419. Sassen, Saskia (2007) A Sociology of Globalization. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Schulze-Engler, Frank (2008) ‘Transcultural Negotiations: Third Spaces in Modern Times.’ In Karen Ikas and Gerhard Wagner, eds., Communicating in the Third Space. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 149-168. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry (2003) ‘Mobile Transformations of “Public” and “Private” Life,’ Theory, Culture and Society 20.3: 107-125. Smith, Michael Peter (2001) Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell. Soja, Edward W. (1996) Thirdspace: Journey to Los Angeles and other Real-andImagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell. Soja, Edward W. (2008) ‘Thirdspace: Towards a New Consciousness of Space and Spatiality.’ In Karin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner, eds., Communicating in the Third Space. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 49-61. Szerszynski, Bronislaw, and John Urry (2006) ‘Visuality, Mobility and the Cosmopolitan: Inhabiting the World from Afar.’ British Journal of Sociology 57.1: 115-131. Thrift, Nigel. (1997) ‘Cities Without Modernity, Cities With Magic,’ Scottish Geographical Magazine. 113, 3: 138-140. Tuan, Yi-Fu (1977) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Urry, John (2000) Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge. Wijaya, Sastra L. (2012) ‘Gerobak Padi Yogyakarta Berkeliling Melbourne’ [Yogyakarta gerobak padi roves around Melbourne]. Kompas, 1 October. http://oase.kompas. com/read/2012/10/01/16254246/Gerobak.Padi.Yogyakarta.Keliling.Melbourne.

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About the Author Chris Hudson is Associate Professor of Asian Media and Culture in the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She has published widely on globalization and culture in Asia and is the author of Beyond the Singapore Girl: Discourses of Gender and Nation in Singapore (Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) Press, 2013), and co-author with Denise Varney, Peter Eckersall and Barbara Hatley of Theatre and Performance in the Asia Pacific: Regional Modernities in the Global Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). This volume is an outcome of an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant. Email: [email protected]

10 An Islamist Flash Mob in the Streets of Shah Alam Unstable Genres for Precarious Times Bart Barendregt

Abstract This essay uses the instance of an Islamist flash mob to explain how, in Muslim Southeast Asia, a long-standing Islamist visual and auditory repertory is currently being reshaped in and through its interaction with both a national public sphere and international trends, and how a new-found repertory of spectacular street performance provides Malay Islamists with the means to articulate local political concerns with global pop aesthetics. In doing so, this chapter moves away from the ways street spectacle and a remediation of such performance through social media have mostly been studied for progressive and ‘artivist’ causes only, showing little concern for conservative, poor, reactionary or, in this case, Islamist appropriation of the very same imagery, technology and formats. The chapter aims to explain what is so appealing about the global format of the flash mob, and by whom, and to what ends it is being mobilized locally in Southeast Asia. The flash mob, in its combination of mob politics and sheer commercialism, its transgressive and attention-seeking noise versus global fashions, is shown to be a transitory and highly unstable genre that flawlessly captures the spirit of a Malaysia in precarious times. Keywords: Islam, Malaysia, mob politics, social media, Muslim Modernities

The Square, the Mob … and ‘Love for the Prophet’ Late afternoon, 6 October 2012. Some of my long-time Islamist acquaintances had just picked me up at Lawan Pedang Street in suburban Shah Alam.

Hudson, Chris, and Bart Barendregt (eds): Globalization and Modernity in Asia. Performative Moments. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462981126_ch10

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Unrest had been in the air for weeks, with general elections upcoming, and many anticipating the opposition – Islamists among their ranks1 – having a real chance of overthrowing the ruling National Coalition for the first time. But little of this commotion is evident on this sultry afternoon, with young Malay couples and their children flocking to Shah Alam’s centrally located Freedom Square, playing with toy guns, balloons and soap bubbles. That evening, Shah Alam would be the stage for, what some Islamist friends had enthusiastically referred to as, the ‘world’s first ever Islamist flash mob,’ with plans to ‘occupy’ the square and make their voices heard. The flash mob was carefully orchestrated by Munsyid Malaysia, a professional organization established only a year before with the intention of collectively promoting Islamist performing arts to a larger national audience.2 And yet, despite being around Munsyid’s main protagonists for a number of weeks, the event had otherwise escaped my attention. The flash mob, by now a genuine global format, effortlessly mixing mob politics with sheer commercialism, is, of course, largely defined by a blend of secrecy and sudden spontaneity. I had been fortunate enough to hear about the intended event just two days before, while attending a session at the studios of hot new Muslim rock act, Al Farabi Band. The band had left a short announcement for some of their followers on their Facebook pages: Flash Mob: Let’s perform selawat with us at Dataran Kemerdekaan. […] It will surprise you. Come and join us there. […] All rockers and metalheads invited. Please bring along ur gajet. […] [W]e Rock ur Soul.

Around 9 pm, just after the evening prayer, and with the neighbouring park now filled with people eating al fresco under LED-lit trees, ‘the mob’ definitively got into motion. Many of its participants lived in and around Shah Alam, and otherwise knew each other from previous Munsyid Malaysia gettogethers (at which they usually eat, pray and especially sing together). Others, 1 I take Islamism here to be a modern-era form of activism that sees Islam as providing answers to questions in all domains of life – not merely politics or spirituality, but also economy and, for that matter, lifestyle issues. 2 That evening, all of the main actors in the Shah Alam event were proud performers of the nasheed genre and, in one way or another, were involved in the Islamic music industry. Nasheed, for those not familiar with it, is widely credited to be the most popular, global and slickly commercial of Islamist genres. It is a popular musical style that, in the period 1995-2005, was extremely popular among the newly emergent Southeast Asia Muslim middle classes and that today is still fervently produced and consumed by Muslim activists but, alas, now with far less mainstream media attention. Most of what was performed on the evening of the 6 October 2012 could easily pass as a nasheed performance, with the sermons and speakers serving as the interludes and tausiyah (words of wisdom) that Malaysian nasheed performances have been long known for.

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also through Munsyid Malaysia, had come from as far away as Kelantan, Terengganu or even Sabah on the Island of Borneo to join the flash mob. As things got underway, a few young Islamist performers, led by singer Hazamin of the well-known act Inteam, entertained bystanders with the praise poem ‘Assolatuwassalam’ in which they expressed their love for the Prophet3: Solatullah salamullah ‘Ala thoha rasulillah Solatullah salamullah ‘Ala yasin habibillah Solatullah salamullah ‘Ala yasin habibillah (Blessings and peace upon the Prophet Muhammad. He is God’s messenger. Blessings and peace upon Prophet Muhammad. He is God’s beloved.)

Soon after, veteran Islamist act Hijjaz, whilst wandering through the now gathering crowd, performed a nasheed: a Muslim hymn. And then, unexpectedly, out of the very same crowd a spokesman emerged, again praising the Prophet, yet also inserting a message to those ‘ignorant observers of Islam,’ particularly Western cartoonists, who repeatedly failed to recognize how Muhammad continues to inspire his worldwide following. Al Farabi Band was up next, loudly praising the very same Prophet, with a rock ballad version of an ancient selawat (praise poem). The happening Figure 10.1 Young Islamist performers singing a praise to the Prophet at Freedom Square

3 The song was originally performed by Malaysian nasheed act Raihan, on their widely acclaimed first hit album Puji-Pujian (Blessings), which was released in 1996 and which instantly made both Raihan and nasheed as a genre fashionable all throughout Muslim Southeast Asia (Barendregt 2012).

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eventually culminated in ‘YouTube preacher’ Ustaz Nazmi Abd Karim driving through a mass of what now must have amounted to a few hundred spectators (see Figure 10.2).4 From the backseat of a huge motorbike, the Ustaz addressed the mob with takzirah (admonitions) – in practice, a mixture of motivational speech and Muslim stand-up comedy – whilst calling upon his Muslim brethren and sisters to keep supporting the larger Islamist cause. His plea further politicized the event. Out of the crowd appear five students, whose banners and pamphlets soon make clear that they are from Syria. They ask the crowd to financially contribute to their cause and help fight civic atrocities in what has become known as ‘the Syrian war.’ Their sudden entrance, momentarily leaves the impression that the flash mob has been hijacked, but also provides the performance with an instantaneously international feel and sudden urgency. As abruptly as it started, the flash mob is over within the hour, leaving both bystanders and performers enthusiastic beyond words; the square had been occupied, and together they had become the mob. But what actually had happened here and what was or was not successfully mobilized? 5 Figure 10.2 Ustaz Nazmi Abd Karim driving through spectators

4 Ustaz Nazmi Karim is himself an inhabitant of Shah Alam. Known for his use of colloquial language and his social media presence, Nazmi had his religious training at Egypt al Azhar’s University and in Syria, which may explain the presence of the Syrian students during the flash mob. 5 Following Talal Asad’s (1986) advice about guarding against essentializing Islam, every scrutiny of the mob’s intentions has to start from the observation that Malaysian Islamism has many faces, and its agendas are manifold (see also Liow 2009).

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While some of the performers had joined the mob to claim public visibility, blaming mainstream media for neglecting Islamic performing arts, others were clearly driven by a more down-to-earth, often politically motivated agenda, protesting the civil casualties in the Syrian war or the current state of Malaysian politics, albeit less vociferously. The flash mob, soon re-branded online as Xpresi Cinta Rasul (Xpressing love for the Prophet), hence provided a platform to collectively voice various forms of discontent that seemingly merged into a shared Islamist agenda. This agenda was soon given a second lease of life, when videos of the performance were edited and posted on social media and into the Malaysian blogosphere, arousing new audiences. In bringing together the square, the mob, and, in this case, the ummah’s renowned love for the Prophet, this chapter uses the Islamist flash mob to illustrate the affective power of what Spyer and Steedly (2013) so appropriately call ‘images that move’: they travel fast, but also move (us) beyond words, indulging audiences in this case to affectionally recognize what is going on and submit themselves to becoming the larger mob. Before returning to this argument, I briefly want to look at the wider context in which this particular flash mob took place, situating the event in a wider background of modernist Muslim aspirations and Malaysia’s place in the (Muslim) world. This speaks to the questions what is so spectacular or ‘flashy’ about the mob and who is ‘the mob’ in flash mob? Finally, it will address why the 2012 Islamist flash mob and its agenda(s) – both explicit and hidden – are worthy of our scholarly attention.

Muslim Malay Modernities Social theorists have come to define the global predicament not so much as a condition, but more widely as the often-messy, repeatedly unidirectional interconnection of ideas, capital and people; interconnections that furthermore change constellations quickly and are therefore in a constant state of flux. To invoke the global at the turn of the second millennium is, as Anna Tsing (2000, p. 331) asserts, to call attention to the speed and density of such interconnections among peoples and places. Rather than perceiving the global as that hefty indefinite space out there that is frequently felt to work antagonistically against the local, the two – local and global – are consistently co-produced, with the global inevitably fantasized in and from particular localities. The Islamist flash mob proves to be just another illustration of such machineries. In small town Shah Alam, ‘the mob’ is not only reaching out to what it feels to be the global Islamic ummah – incorporating the messages and visual imagery of faraway Muslim places such as Palestine

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and Syria, of th Muslim Brotherhood and Tahrir Square – but those very same images are articulated and connected to the current neglect of the Islamist case in Malaysian politics. By posting the mob online, local affairs are then put on a par with and inserted into a wider global Islamist discourse. Furthermore, the Shah Alam flash mob highlights Islam not only as an alternative trajectory to globalization, which comes with its own templates, memes and ways to go ‘viral’ that, once proven successful in one corner, are quickly adopted elsewhere in the Muslim world. But in its co-optation of a modish format such as the flash mob and its outright cry for more public visibility, Malaysian Islamists also seem to use the flash mob to postulate a claim to be modern on one’s own terms, a claim that in several aspects may not always be concurrent with hegemonic ideas held so dear by the Malaysian state, the entertainment industries or other power holders. As elsewhere, such claim-making processes (Dirlik 2010) tend to be complex and beg for a brief assessment of Muslim Malay modernity in its latest guises.6 Modernity as an intellectual idea indisputably has its origins in the West, and capitalism and Western liberal values have done much to export its original contours elsewhere. Yet, counter-modernities have always been part and parcel of this modernity, or as Mee and Kahn (2012, p. 6) argue, modernity was plural all along. It may not be productive therefore to consider others’ claims to be likewise modern as merely indigenized, belated, second-rank or even contaminated. As the global project of modernity is and always has been necessarily unfinished and as it struggles to become, such articulations of the modern are and remain haunted by other exclusionary modernities, be they religious, traditionalist or gendered in scope (see Kahn 2003; Harding 2008; Weintraub and Barendregt 2017). In much of Muslim Southeast Asia,7 such ongoing claims to modernity – with socialism pretty much silenced and left out for the last 50 years (see also Chua, this volume) – have been a battle of ‘isms,’ with capitalism, liberalism, but also different strands of Islamism offering Southeast Asians distinctive paths to a modern globalized world. Malaysia offers a good illustration of such claim-making processes. Since its independence in 1957, one single party, 6 In a similar vein, Dirlik (2010, p. 29) suggests that the globalization of modernity ‘needs to be comprehended not just in the trivial sense of an originary modernity reaching out and touching all, even those who are left out of its benefits, […] but more importantly as a proliferation of claims on modernity.’ 7 Elsewhere, I use the term ‘Muslim Southeast Asia’ in reference to ‘a not sharply delimited field of study that is primarily bound by religious affiliation. It connects Muslims living in the majority Muslim countries of Indonesia, Brunei, and Malaysia with smaller factions of populations living in Singapore, Southern Thailand, and the Southern Philippines’ (Barendregt 2012).

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the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), has ruled a multiethnic country essentially constituted by three majority groups: Tamils, Chinese and Malays. Whilst firmly holding on to a Malay supremacist agenda, UMNO has thus far been very successful in promoting an Asian-style neo-liberalism as a shortcut to growth and development, thereby offering benefits primarily to the Malay segment of society. However, the unintended consequence of such benefits is the advent of a new, wealthy Muslim Malay middle class, which, in its quest for self-definition and setting itself apart from Western peers, increasingly aspires to a sharia-compliant consumerist lifestyle (see also Fischer 2008; Rudnyckyj 2013; Barendregt and Hudson 2016). In need of the Malay majority vote, UMNO’s prior secular order has increasingly co-opted these growing Islamic sentiments in order to counter the proselytizing activities of Islamist groups and the Islamist Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), but also to use it to its own advantage. Peletz has argued how, owing to trends in neo-liberal governmentality and state-sponsored Islamization, the UMNO-led Malaysian state has gradually become more corporate, intrusive, and punitive, steadily merging neo-liberal globalization with the forms and norms of Islam and Islamization held to be most compatible with it (2015, p. 144).8 Such governmentality offers the state an additional step towards enhancing surveillance, discipline and control and, importantly, it pushes the public to engage in forms of self-governance hitherto unknown. The Islamist body, in particular, seems to be subject to this novel practice of self-surveillance, as evidenced by the preoccupation with modest, orderly behaviour, veiling and the fear of the female voice being raised in public (Barendregt 2017). But also in other ways a long-standing fear of an unruly Islamist body (cf. Hirshkind 2006) is discernible and now open to wider public scrutiny. It is this felt need to discipline and be disciplined that leads Malay Muslims to further interrogate corporeal and spatial practices once at the heart of the Islamist social imaginary (cf. Göle 2002, 2013). Such recasting of the Islamic social imagery and its transgression of erstwhile Islamist standards is partly reinforced by other, more global trends in the Muslim world, especially by what theorists (Bayat 1996; Boubekeur and Roy 2012; see also Heryanto 2014) have recently dubbed the ‘post-Islamist 8 Peletz observes how the past two decades have seen a change in proper observance of their religion by Malays. Such an observance now moves away from Islamist groups and their previous stress on piety and good behaviour, to what Peletz dubs a more ‘punitive turn’ and a forbidding of evil: ‘Malays are not only increasingly on the lookout for behaviour falling outside the range of state-defined normativity but are also more likely than in times past to bring real or imagined ethical and other transgressions to the attention of mosque officials, the police, or authorities’ (Peletz 2015, p. 155).

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turn’: the move beyond an ideology that merely employs Islam as a political tool to confront Western economic and political domination, towards new spaces and new means of expression (Boubekeur and Roy 2012, pp. 4-5).9 Both the post-Islamist and Malay punitive turn seem to rely on what Peletz (2016) has called the ‘commodification and rebranding’ of Islam, as a ‘pro-corporate/ capitalist development, friendly to common-law sensibilities, and otherwise modern, progressive, and this worldly.’ In its wake, Malay Muslim activists have been experimenting with new forms of activism and new organizational structures in order to realize a halal chic of sorts,10 which propagates its values through hitherto unconventional modes, mixing proselytizing (dakwah) and quiz show, remembrance and recitation (zikr) with Western therapy, sharia compliance and (culinary) tourism, or, in our case, long-standing Islamist concerns with short-lived Internet fads, such as the flash mob. With this broader context in mind, let us now return to the first issue this chapter wishes to address, the question: ‘What is so appealing to Muslim Malay activists about the flash mob format?’

What Is Flashy about the Flash Mob? The flash mob is yet another globally dispersed form that has been cleverly appropriated and experimented with by Malay Muslim activists, to see what it potentially can contribute to their cause. In the process, it is being adapted to local taste and needs. Taking into account such wider global circuitry may help explain why, on this occasion, it was exactly the flash mob that was opted for by my Islamist acquaintances, and how, in that process, it was creatively transformed by borrowing its further vocabulary from other places in and beyond the Muslim world. 9 However, and in spite of what some of the post Islamist theorists argue, these manifestations are no less political and, in Malaysia at least, also often co-opted by both the ruling UMNO party and its nemesis, the Islamist Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) (see Mueller 2014). Also as a temporal order, the ‘post’ in post-Islamism is highly problematic. Political and cultural activisms have co-existed for decades and may be as old as the Malaysian nation itself; but, Boubekeur and Roy (2012, p. 6) are keen to stress ‘that the boundaries between Islamism and post Islamism are fluid and interconnected, bound by deep historical continuities and not by sharp ruptures.’ 10 From halal, Arabic for ‘permissible,’ and chic, meaning stylish, smart and suave. Objects and practices of consumption that stress proper and pious behaviour, yet at the same time conspicuously mark its user as fashionable and hip. Often juxtaposed with its more secular and (conceptually) ‘Western’ equivalents. Street and public performance in outdoor spaces play a dominant role in the branding and dissemination of this halal chic as some performances described in this chapter may illustrate.

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Let us start with closer scrutiny of the flash mob as a phenomenon and identify what, actually, is so flashy about it? In today’s understanding, the word ‘flashy’ refers to an act that is ‘vulgar’ and ‘tasteless,’ ‘devoid of meaning’ and ‘trashy,’ all attributes that critics have attached to the worldwide flash mob craze and similar Internet-inspired hypes that also went viral, from the ‘Harlem Shake’ to last year’s ‘Mannequin Challenge.’ And yet, flashy also means ‘impulsive,’ ‘transitory’ or ‘lasting for a flash only’ (OED n.d.), traits that many of us recognize when we say flash mob. The first reference to flash mobs is a well-covered event back in 2003, when hundreds of people descended upon a Macy’s store in Manhattan and asked ‘for a giant “love rug” for their communal suburban warehouse. Two weeks later, another “flash mob” met at Grand Central Station […] and erupted into synchronized applause’ (Star Tribune, 8 July 2003, quoted in the OED (n.d.)). Whereas Lenderman (2009) notices that participants in flash mobs generally state that their actions are apolitical, lacking any overt agenda, and often are without social criticism, others, such as Rheingold (2003), have been quick to recognize the flash mob’s political potential. The Oxford English Dictionary11 also recognizes that actions performed by a flash mob are often deemed bizarre or unusual and seem exclusively to cater for attention and are meant to entertain. However, the dictionary adds, that ‘the term is now also commonly used of such groups whose actions are intended to have a political or social impact.’ Today, flash mobs are an integral part of popular culture, they regularly appear in TV shows, movies and music clips, and have triggered, amongst both amateurs and professionals, a worldwide follow-up (Molnár 2014). As a phenomenon, the flash mob has also made its appearance in Malaysian public life, celebrating causes as diverse as the opening of a new mega mall, the Visiting Malaysia Year or commemorating annual Independence Day. Malaysians have turned to Glee flash mobs, Justin Bieber flash mobs, McDonald’s Breakfast Day flash mobs, and let us not forget, a plethora of mobs that are seemingly ‘spontaneously’ organized by cell phone or other commercial providers, and which willingly seem to capitalize on the now heroic bourgeoisie idea of mobile uprisings (see also Rafael 2003). The Selongkor10 blog lists ‘the 15 most influential Malaysian flash mobs’ so far, with the ‘Malaysia Airlines Missing You’ flash mob ranking number one.12 11 The 4th edition of the Kamus Dewan (2010) has yet to recognize the word ‘flash mob’ as part of the Malaysian vocabulary. My Islamist acquaintances prefer to use the term in its English rendering. 12 In a very spectacular way, Malaysia Airlines greeted passengers arriving at Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) on Saturday, 14 January 2012, with a medley of songs and about

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Yet, there is very little coverage by either mainstream media or academics of less ‘fashionable’ forces similarly using the format as a strategy (see Houston et al. 2013). A considerable literature addresses artivism, community arts, street performance; yet, very little of this academic writing has tried to cover its use for more conservative and less fashionable or, in this case, Islamist causes. This is partly due to the far from obvious association between, on the one hand, Islamism and, on the other, flash mobs as a global, often entertaining and yet already somewhat outdated media craze. Although the ‘Love for the Prophet’ mob was viewed as exceptional, a ‘Flash Mob for Syria’ was staged in July 2012 near Niagara Falls – and much viewed on YouTube.13 This mob clearly predates the Shah Alam one by a few months, in which it went viral and seems to have been a potential source of inspiration for the Malaysian organizers. But there is more to the flash mob than it simply being borrowed and appropriated, including the mob’s taking over Freedom Square that evening in October 2012. Dataran Merdeka or ‘Freedom Square’ is centrally located in the city of Shah Alam, which has been the capital of Selangor since the handover of Kuala Lumpur to the Federal State in 1978. Situated nearby the newly built KLIA International Airport and about 20 kilometres west of Kuala Lumpur, the city today mostly hosts housing areas and shopping centres as far as one can see. The city, built on the land of former rubber and oil palm estates, epitomizes urban expansion into the Klang Valley, with Shah Alam being Malaysia’s first planned city after independence and predestined to accommodate the country’s emergent Muslim Malay middle class. There is much in Shah Alam that breathes this distinct Muslim Malay atmosphere, with its seamless blend of Islamic and government space that appears in line with Peletz’ argument for a new style of corporate Islam. Street names are shown in both Roman and Jawi script 14 and the city’s most prominent building, the Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz State Mosque, offers a combination of Malay, Muslim and modernist style architecture. This second-largest mosque in the Southeast Asian region overlooks what is called a ‘Quranic Garden of Paradise,’ and it is here, in between the mosque, the garden and the five-star, ‘halal-friendly’ Grand Bleu Wave Hotel, that a hundred singers and dancers to ‘welcome the New Year with a bang.’ See http://selongkar10. blogspot.nl/2014/01/15-video-persembahan-flash-mob-paling.html. This was obviously before the flights MH17 and MH370 went missing. 13 This mob was organized with a clear-cut political initiative in mind, and staged in a Muslim minority society, where, as a consequence – and in a double sense – it may create more ‘noise.’ 14 Jawi is a modified Arabic script for writing the Malay language.

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one finds the location of the flash mob, Freedom Square. Originally built in 2000, coinciding with and to commemorate the nation’s 43rd Independence Day celebrations, the square today is mostly used as a performance and sports venue, offering space to team trailing, marathons and food festivals, but also national parades and flag-flying ceremonies. Bearing in mind the conspicuously Islamic character of much of Shah Alam’s city centre, it may strike one as somewhat odd to claim a more thorough visibility of the Islamist case here. Remember, we are talking about divergent claims to modern Muslim Malay identity, and claiming a commonly shared ‘right to the city’ (Harvey 2008) seems to serve at least one of those claims. However, on this particular evening, mob politics were focusing on quite another (yet related) sentiment: the feeling that, with Islamic music and performing arts no longer being flavour of the month, the Malay middle classes have lost interest in their ‘good value music,’ as have the industry or other former patrons, including politicians. In sum, the flash ‘mobster’ felt as if people had suddenly ceased listening. Such sentiments seem to have heightened in the months preceding the general elections of early 2013. Although many of my Malay Islamist acquaintances habitually shy away from and seldom mingle with political affairs, the upcoming election had promised to become an exciting one, now that the People’s Alliance – a loose coalition of, among others, the Islamist Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) – had become a serious contender to the National Front spearheaded by UMNO. But both PAS and UMNO, whilst routinely playing the ‘Islam card,’ seemed to have little consideration for a broader cultural dimension to such an Islamic agenda. The big question, then, was whether there would be music and singing at the Putrajaya Palace, home to the Federal Administration, if the Islamists were indeed to win the elections; or whether such a new Islamist order would disapprove of Islamist arts, painting, film, theatre and especially their music? 15 In hindsight, the flash mob’s ultimate drive was more just a right to the city, it pertained to a right to be heard, and to literally make some ‘Islamist noise’ of its own in order to claim a space in public (as well as a space in public discourse – see below).16 15 Just days before the flash mob, I was invited to join some of the organizers in attending a panel organized by the PAS youth wing, and while the invitation was enthusiastically taken up, quite a few of my acquaintances later expressed their disappointment, complaining that they were still not able to tell what a possible Islamist revolution may sound like once PAS was to take Putrajaya. 16 With the potentially counter-hegemonic effects of such Islamist ‘noise’ in mind and its sheer promise to provide a cultural constituent to what otherwise is to remain an exclusively political Islamist project, it also becomes understandable why, since the mid-2000s, Islamist

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Outdoor music and urban street spectacle, loud, flamboyant and much in your face, is nothing new to the Malay Islamist context. Yet, the format chosen in late 2012 seemed, at first glance, somewhat odd, inspired as it was by contemporary capitalist fashions and internationally circulating media aesthetics. It seems to perfectly highlight the paradox of local communities caught in the globalization processes of late capitalism. It transgresses and makes noise, but in its clear ambition to be modern and to be heard, it needs to speak the language and usage of precisely the late capitalist formats it so often condemns. But the flash mob, while lending its very name to the event, was but one among a wide range of images that was, conspicuously or not, reassembled for this night’s purpose. Other images, such as the square and the appeal to mob politics, obviously resonated with recent happenings in much of the Muslim world that soon went viral elsewhere. Mona Abaza (2014) gives an illustration of the strength of such travelling images during the revolutionary wave that struck many Arab countries in the period 2010-2012, as she describes how the ‘stage’ of Tahrir was ‘the exemplary moment that triggered extended and replicated, not only in all the squares of Egypt but soon beyond that.’17 Abaza wonderfully illustrates how the occupation of public spaces as an emerging global configuration of activism witnessed a novel turn after 2011, when the square, as an experimental playground for ‘dramaturgical violent public confrontations, public performances and occupations,’ also found its way to protest camps elsewhere, from Occupy Wall Street to Maidan Square in Ukraine, complete with the rhetoric of ‘We the People.’ Although never publicly acknowledged, it may well be that these images first inspired the organizers of the ‘Love for the Prophet’ flash mob and had them single out Shah Alam’s Freedom Square as particularly apt for that night’s performance.18

performers have increasingly tried to organize themselves in a number of musical associations. These include the Islamist music industry-driven Persatuan Industri Nasyid (PIN, 2006), the launch of first website, then event organizer Nasyeed.com (since at least 2003), addressing a niche market of festive occasions with an Islamist tinge and, most notably, the Majlis Usahawan Nasyid Malaysia (2011), better known by its acronym Munsyid. 17 Others, including Castells (2012), have noted how the very events we now refer to as the Arab Spring, were, in turn, inspired and even shaped by the originally Serbian youth movement Otpor, whose non-violent street protests functioned as a template for many movements yet to come. 18 It is clear that the organizers of the Shah Alam flash mob – who traditionally have never tried to hide their antipathy towards corrupt Middle Eastern dictatorship – openly sympathized with the Muslim Brotherhood cause, and all were well aware of the recent events in the Middle East. In other instances I found them quickly inspired by the unrest in the Middle East, particularly the visual culture that came with it. Of course, the notion of the ‘Freedom Square,’ with its

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What the flash mob, the rhetoric of mob politics and the image of the square, all seem to share is the ease with which they can be appropriated and repurposed, they move from one media context to the next and are like containers that can simply filled; yet, nowhere and at no time are they totally devoid of meaning and their wide circulation emanates with immediate sentiment and recognition. Spyer and Steedly (2013, p. 8) have commented upon such images taking place in wider worlds, moving beyond borders, but also ‘moving us,’ often beyond words. Fast-travelling images are facilitated today not only by mainstream old and new media, but also increasingly by small, networked media technologies. The rapid circulation of visual images via media, Spyer and Steedly say, contributes to a feeling of ‘global intimacy,’ on the one hand, and to a pervasive sense of instability on the other. Images travel from one context to another, apparently stable, but changing identities and incorporating meanings from one local context to the next. Such images seldom stop travelling, nor do they travel alone and, on their way, may be invested with other meanings, absorbing and being absorbed by other technologies and practices. I would like to add here that, naturally, not all images travel equally effectively, nor do they travel along the same routes, and whereas some routes seem better travelled (in this case, those between places in the Muslim world) due to a shared sensitivity, some images are also more redundant due to the longer local history. Let us not forget for a moment that, as a performance, ‘Love for the Prophet’ also builds upon a prevailing repertory of urban Muslim spectacle19 as well as a growing trend of massive mass-mediated Islamic shows, including the Indonesian dhikr akbar events (Hasan 2012), the road shows of the singing Hadhrami preacher Habib Syech, now tremendously popular in both Indonesia and Malaysia (Howell 2012), or other attention-grabbing performances, such as the mass praise poetry recitals ‘KL/Singapore bershalawat,’ in which the Islamist body similarly refuses to stay put for any longer.20 In making ‘noise,’ ‘Love for particular patriotic ring, lends itself to political causes. A few months later, Kuala Lumpur’s very own Freedom Square was home to the much better mediated Bersih 3.0 rally. 19 Barendregt and Hudson (2016) demonstrate how a tradition of Malay Muslim entertainment and mass-mediated Islamist in- and outdoor spectacles reaches back to at least the International Quran recital competitions that started in 1961 under the patronage of then Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman and later were also televised. More recently, such televised spectacles also include globally dispersed and appropriated TV formats such as religious talent shows. 20 With its shaking bodies, breathing techniques and ecstatic longing, such an ‘unruly’ Muslim spectacle has long been looked upon with suspicion, but its coming into the open not only brings cathartic relief, but also seems to appeal to more universal, middle-class aesthetics, providing this spectacle with a New Age-like allure.

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the Prophet’ likewise incorporates elements from rock-and-road shows plus other ‘noisy’ formats like the karnival (a local rendering of carnival referring to a festive mix of food, performance and discussions) or political convention, most notably the rallies of the Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS). The latter, lately, have similarly turned into a feast of electric guitars and motorbikes, hoping to recruit a young, hip audience for its Islamist cause (Müller 2015).21 What are we looking at? Postmodern bricolage, simulacrum or cultural appropriation, participants simply hold this to be performance with the best of worlds, much in line with what post-Islamist theorists would argue to be a moving beyond the erstwhile East/West divide. In breaking with the previous postcolonial sentiment of 1970s Southeast Asian Islamist movements, Southeast Asian Muslims increasingly feel part a truly global community with other means to other itself. In sum, more than just a flash mob, ‘Love for the Prophet’ echoes the Deleuzian (Deleuze and Guattari 1988) ‘assemblage’ in which otherwise heterogeneous bodies are combined in ‘consistency,’ becoming an emergent system – in this case, a new Islamist assemblage of sorts. An assemblage that may well be highly unstable, and that reiterates some elements while easily omitting others on the next first occasion, but which continues to serve as an experimental playground where a novel Islamist social imaginary is slowly being carved out. In the months after the Shah Alam flash mob, and obviously working from the same assemblage of mobile, amplified street performance, some of its main participants, most notably the event organization Nasyeed.com, known for its studios, and especially its light and sound system,22 continued such experiments. Al Farabi Band advertised (see Figure 10.3) a mobile stage truck ‘40ft (Fully Equip) [sic],’ offering to rent it out to ‘those who care about GAZA and Palestine’ and to use it for ceremonial speeches, concerts and campaigns with an Islamist cause. A next assemblage was tested at Shah Alam’s Mara University of Technology in December 2012, culminating in a massive 2014 road show event named 21 The uptake of road show elements and the use of the word karnival may be inspired by 1990s techno beat festivals in Europe, US or Goa, but the rock-and-road show has a much longer genealogy, dating back to the road shows of the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead in the 1960s. However, closer to home and offering more of an Islamist parallel, Indonesian dangdut singer Rhoma Irama is celebrated due to his Soneta road shows combining dakwa with electric guitars, strobes and a huge travelling sound system (see also Weintraub 2010). 22 The event organization Nasyeed.com specializes in Islamic ‘edutainment,’ producing music and other clips, but also renting video cameras, a PA system and printing possibilities. This organization, where a number of nasheed artists have found a career, was founded sometime in 2003 and, so far, it has been involved in large, conspicuously Islamic events such as the annual televised nasheed awards, hijab fashion shows and numerous charity shows for Syria or Gaza.

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Figure 10.3 Al Farabi Band’s advertisement for a mobile stage truck

‘Pray 4 Gaza,’ complete with ‘Gaza Bazar,’ speeches, an exhibition and Islamist performances. What all such performances share, in addition to their instant recognition enabled by globally available, yet locally appropriated and Islamized elements, is their out-of-place-ness – their emphasis on the loud, the noisy and the spectacular that exceeds and transgresses the everyday that most of my Islamist acquaintances seem to inhabit. It is to the workings of such rough music and its presumed audiences that I would like to turn next.

Who Is the Mob in Flash Mob? As a strategy, the flash mob arguably may be as old as some of the instances of ‘rough music’ cited by E.P. Thompson in his now classic Customs in Common (1991). In this study, Thompson describes what he sees as a European-wide folk custom – or, better, ‘symbolic vocabulary’ of dramatic performance – a performance that is characterized by both ritualized expressions of hostility and a rural community that herewith regulates itself. Its format and

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expression may have changed over time and from one context to the next, but rough music in nineteenth-century Europe usually included processions, community jokes, theatrical riots, rhymes and especially noise making. In its workings, rough music was both conservative, as it served to reaffirm existing ties and community values, and subversive, in the sense that it concurrently disapproved of and challenged those in power. There is much that appeals to Thompson in such rough music: ‘It is a property of a society in which justice is not wholly delegated or bureaucratized, but it is enacted by and within the community’ (1991, p. 530). Nonetheless, he concludes, there is little future for what, in essence, was a working-class ritual, especially with the changing face of nineteenth-century England, the rise of market capitalism and consequent loss of the moral economy of the plebs. Much of today’s mob politics is reminiscent of rough music’s tactics. While worlds and eras apart, ‘Love for the Prophet’ similarly opts for making noise, claims public space and pokes fun at those in power, politicians and the media establishment, it mostly does so by reinstalling the values of Islamism among its participants, fellow Malay Muslims. It is this mix of transgression and simultaneous reaffirmation that continues to be at the heart of so many popular cultural expressions (Hall 1981, p. 239),23 and a mixture that also Muslim heavy metal act Al Farabi Band, one of the main protagonists of the flash mob, obviously seems to make use of. The heavy metal band, in everyday life a bunch of highly skilled aeronautic and computer engineers, derives its name from Islamic scholar Abu Nasr Al Farabi – a ninth-century intellectual, philosopher and pioneer of Islamic science and music – thus seemingly bringing together Islam’s golden era in a faraway past with the futurist and hip lifestyle the band seems to stand for. The band’s martial image of black clothing with turbans, Palestinian scarves and ‘jihad music (music for the heroes)’ as a slogan, combines especially well with the noisy heavy metal rock they prefer for their message of dakwah and syariah compliance. Much of this imagery, their music and looks may, at first glance, seem at odds with that of the other actors and flash mob participants; yet, the real difference may just be that they are more outspoken. Both Al Farabi Band’s personal backgrounds and song repertory have more in common with some of the other Islamist veteran acts present that night than one would expect at first hearing, as both are 23 Or as Hall (1981, p. 239) so famously argued: ‘Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged, it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where the hegemony arises, and where it is secured.’

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Figure 10.4 Islamic Rock act Al Farabi Band being filmed during the flash mob while performing to the backdrop of the Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz State Mosque

evidently rooted in one of the nation’s earliest most successful and most controversial Islamist movements, Al Arqam. 24 Al Farabi’s best-known song to date, ‘Simfoni Evolusi,’ is a close rendering of the former Al Arqam anthem ‘Islam yang telah berkembang’ (Islam has been blossoming), as its lyrics narrate: 24 The singer, Nasaie, is actually a cousin of the late Ustaz Asri Ibrahim, the lead singer of the Al Arqam house ensemble Nadamurni and forerunner of Hijjaz and Rabanni. From the late 1960s until 1994, as I detail elsewhere (Barendregt 2010), Arqam members were organized into rural residential communes that promoted economic independence from the state by branding their own ‘Islamic’ products and setting up a network of entrepreneurial communes throughout Southeast Asia. These communes promoted a utopian Islamic lifestyle, made possible by central facilities such as schools, health centres, a radio broadcaster and a recording studio, leading many to agree that the movement has been a pioneer of the halal food industry in Malaysia and beyond.

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Hayya ‘alas Solah Hayya ‘alal Falah (The Spreading of Islam has been nurtured by the sweat and tears of mujahid. Its garden has been protected By the hands of mujaddid and mujtahid. Our guiding light is the Al Quran and the Sunnah of Rassulah.)

In the mid-1980s, the members of both Rabbani and Hijjaz, old-time acts prominently performing during the Shah Alam flash mob, were already mixing strobes and Sufism, smoke and selawat praise poetry as they were part of the Arqam house ensemble that accompanied its leader, Sheikh al Arqam, on his many trips abroad. More so, Nasyeed.com, the organization organizing the flash mob and other Islamist performances, not only literally permeates ‘noise’ with its mighty sound system, the organization is also aptly named after the popular genre of Islamist hymns that once served Al Arqam as an interface with the outside world. As a genre, nasheed was instrumental in articulating ideas of what pertains to the modern Muslim Malay; that is, until the Malaysian authorities officially disbanded the movement in 1994, forcing its members, some of whom were detained, into the musical underground. The overt link with doing dakwah (‘missionary activities’ or proselytizing) explains why nasheed is often considered by its protagonists not just to be a musical genre (or entertainment as such) but, primarily, a spiritual practice. Nasheed means to practice what you preach or sing (with many groups inserting tausiyah, or ‘words of religious advice’ in the intervals between songs during their performances), thus providing an often young Malay audience with ideas about how to realize a utopian Muslim society in the here and now (Barendregt 2012). In doing so, nasheed music’s main protagonists somehow, and not knowingly, seem to embrace the Thompsonian ideal of rough music, sanctioning and steering a like-minded Malay Muslim community in its proselytizing, whilst challenging the authorities not always keen to listen to such a message. Nevertheless, differences clearly remain, as the carefully choreographed instances of working-class outrage that Thompson portrayed so well did not yet benefit from the affordances that modern-day social media can provide.25 Thompson’s nineteenth-century peasants had no mobile media other than pamphlets, had no access to Facebook to mobilize 25 Although the term ‘flash mob’ was apparently already in use in 1832 to describe a ‘group of thieves, confidence tricksters, or other petty criminals, especially ones who assume respectable or fashionable dress or behaviour’ (OED n.d.).

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their crowd, or access to YouTube to record, edit and post their rough music and provide it with an afterlife and therefore new audiences. So far, we have been dealing with ‘Love for the Prophet’ as typically a performance event, thus following the Oxford English Dictionary and other quick definitions of a ‘flash mob’ as a ‘large group of people organized by means of the Internet, or mobile phones or other wireless devices, who assemble in public to perform a prearranged action together and then quickly disperse’ (OED n.d.). As may be obvious, a successful flash mob by definition is more than this and wishes to move beyond a one-off event. As much as the flash mob is in the domain of the digital (see the invitations to join the action on Facebook), it also has a second life pertaining to that very same digital. To illustrate this, it helps to briefly return to and unpack the quintessence of the flash mob, to see who the ‘mob’ in flash mob actually refers to in this case. As I will argue, the Shah Alam case is subject to often-paradoxical processes: seemingly spontaneous yet carefully planned, a one-time event yet also a text with its after lives, and yes, unruly but also rational and modern, and hence mob no more. In its traditional English usage, the ‘mob basically refers to the masses, the common people or any large group whatsoever, yet more derogatively the mob often times has come to stand in for an unruly, disorderly or even riotous crowd’ (cf. Siegel 2001), in fact, much reminiscent of Thompson’s peasants going awry. However disorderly flash mobs in practice may turn out to be, the truth is that they are always well designed way in advance. Participants of the Shah Alam flash mob were practicing the whole even for at least four full hours before it even started, cautiously listening to the instructions by the moderators of Nasyeed.com plus assistants and repetitively studying a chart explaining the order of play that day. Whereas ‘flash,’ as earlier mentioned, normally signifies a sudden act of spontaneity, the actual flash mob performance is not only carefully choreographed, it is typically meticulously registered. And here one needs to distinguish between simple amateur footage of the performance, as its bystanders tend to record it, and more professional coverage and especially the ensuing editing process taken care of by professionals. A team of three professional cameramen plus sound engineers, hired with the company Video Pro Media (which specializes in covering Islamic weddings but also nasheed-related performance), was instructed to register any part of the performance, from its early stages to the different acts that the flash mob eventually consisted of, complete with possible audience responses. Needless to say, the eventual recordings confront us with the kind of ‘staged authenticity’ common to flash mob aesthetics. In spite of all the

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expertise and professional equipment available, the registered performance preferably is rendered through an unstable, mobile and fast-moving perspective, much reminiscent of the cell phone camera. The mob and its spontaneous ‘becoming,’ is further accentuated by the camera, showing us as gradually more and more members of the audience join and use their own digital devices to capture the same event. With the camera moving in and out of the crowd, as if organically part of it in an almost hyper mobile way, the whole event not only breathes an air of media-saturated-ness, but also pronounces that the real event here is actually the mob. In its claim to Malay Muslim Modernity, the flash mob might be noisy and at times transgressive; it may have been mocking those in power as it also openly displayed true anger and deep frustrations with the current state of affairs. But this anger and hostility are temporary and expression of it is highly ritualized. For example, permits to stage the flash mob were acquired beforehand and things were carefully cleaned up afterwards as the unruly Islamist body was put to rest again.26 Above all, the mob, once the performance was over, quickly dissolved, but in its remediation as a media text soon found a second lease of life, becoming a public that exists by virtue of being addressed. Without much editing, ‘Love for the Prophet’ was posted that same day on various YouTube channels, including a fifteen-minute summary of the event on a channel moderated by a blogger named Zoohir Abdullah. The more carefully edited registration of Video Pro Media followed a few days later covering separate segments of the flash mob performance, containing the spoken advice by Ustaz Nazmi, a clip of the rock song by Al Farabi on the band’s own channel etc. Whereas a few hundred had attended the original event, video renderings now reached a few thousands more – with the amateur footage interestingly reaching a much larger audience than the professionally edited clips – and providing the flash mob with a second lease that continues unabated as the clips are still shared and commented upon.27 26 Interestingly, the careful editing of what, in practice, at times felt to be a messy event, seems somewhat in contrast with the ‘riot porn’ that Rasza (2013) has observed elsewhere, in which video is explicitly used to depict the most physical confrontations with the authorities. In spite of a noisy act, and a performance that highlights the sometimes unruly Islamist body, the flash mob here is a far cry from rough music’s riotous crowd; rather, we see a mass united in reason, performing controlled anger in what furthermore is a sanitized spectacle. The mob is then edited, sanitized and mainstreamed in its use of technology. 27 The edited clips by Video Pro Media can be found on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=AMIrwRorfIU, whereas the better viewed amateur footage can, amongst others, be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngPgoGPDu0.

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Not only does the mob become the mob in its sheer use of technology, additional use of technology adds to a proliferation and transformation of the mob once posted online, becoming, in a way, what Danah Boyd (2014) has referred to as the ‘networked public.’ In a spatial sense, such a public exists, as they gather through social media. As a social construct, it allows people to see themselves and to become aware of a shared life world. Warner (2002), similarly, has argued that the public self-organizes around texts, albeit in late capitalism increasingly around visual, audio or digital texts. Whereas the mob instantly recalls nineteenth-century peasant revolt (not to say that true mobs no longer have an existence in the here and now), Warner suggests that the idea of the public has become part of the common repertoire of modern culture and reaching ‘strangers’ is its primary orientation. A public sets its boundaries and its organization by its own discourse rather than by external frameworks only if it openly addresses people who are identified primarily through their participation in the discourse and who therefore cannot be known in advance. […] [It] unites strangers through participation alone, as a social imaginary. (Warner 2002, p. 56)

Publics differ from nations, races, professions, or any other groups that, though not requiring co-presence, saturate identity (ibid., p. 53). A public, Warner therefore concludes, requires at least minimal participation; but, rather than a permanent state of being, the reality of a public depends on its members’ activities, not on its ‘members’ categorical classification. Hence, such a public only prolongs its very existence in following up, re-posting and re-appropriating the original text. Not surprisingly, media scholars have often lauded the appeal of mob politics due to its rhizome-like dissemination, in spite of the fact that, more often than not, many of these mobs are, in practice, carefully masterminded by the few.28 Yet, the reference to the flash mob’s capacity of fungus-like 28 Castells’ (2012) description of the Arab Spring, Anonymous’ nerd activism or the Occupy movement is poetically rendered in his Networks of Outrage and Hope, in which he argues the new social movements of our Internet era move freely from the public space of the Internet to an occupying of symbolic offline spaces. Fuchs (2012) has interrogated this, according to him, somewhat simplistic analysis by criticizing the assumption of rhizomatic ‘leaderless revolts’ that appear to be spontaneous and which are, largely, depicted as technology driven. Postill (2011), in a somewhat different context, has similarly warned scholars for too easily resorting to a strict dichotomy of a ‘community’ and ‘network.’ Rather than seeing technology as something alien or external to a community that moves between relatively autonomous online and offline zones to have an impact, its use may be better understood if one tries to situate such new and mobile

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replication and viral contamination certainly seem to do justice to the ease with which its separate elements are continuously adapted and reassembled. From the recurrent imagery of occupied squares to the often-repeated slogans of ‘We Are All …,’ we have all seen and heard it before. In the months following October 2012, Islamist flash mobs have come and gone. In November 2012 a ‘Pray 4 Gaza’ flash mob was organized by students of the International Islamic University in Kuala Lumpur. One month later, Malaysian student activists in the Middle East organized a spectacular ‘Flash Mob for Palestine.’ In 2014 and 2015, other flash mobs for similar causes were organized by Islamist activists in and from Malaysia, proving that, by and large, the flash mob has now become not only a much sought after global intimacy, but may very well function as inherent to the Islamist modern imaginary. In response to the question, Who is the mob in a flash mob?, various answers are possible. The mob is those present that night, but also the public, often composed of strangers sensitive to the message of ‘Love for the Prophet’ and watching it the days after its registration was carefully edited, and those watching it years from now as it is reposted, liked and thoroughly shared. One may even include those who, inspired by initially watching ‘Love for the Prophet’ online, have come up with their own reiterations of the Islamist flash mob, looking for audience of its own. If we follow Warner, who argues that publics exist by virtue of their imagining, then we may well include the global Islamic community at large, as it is such a public that the flash mob on the night of the 6 October mostly seemed to have had in mind. As the global was fantasized from the local, we all became Gaza and we were all, albeit, temporarily, Palestinians and Malaysians who stood side by side with Syrian students and called upon their fellow men to defend the very first media text that turned strangers into brethren and to love and praise the Prophet.

Last Words Was the flash mob of the 6 October 2012 a success? It is hard to say whether it was or it wasn’t. How can success be measured is in this regard? Yes, there was a crowd of a few hundred people – fans, families and friends. And quite a number of remediations of the mob were posted online – some more professional than others – and they were viewed by about 5,000 people, in time maybe more. What matters is that media-saturated events and artistic media use in a wider temporal and spatial context, in which single events may be remediated repeatedly and in the hands of different actors and with constantly shift meanings.

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interventions such as the October 2012 flash mob can no longer be studied in isolation, as they seem to grow organically into something new and with an unpredictable life of their own. To be honest with the reader, in the few days and weeks after the flash mob had been posted online, I was mostly left in a state of confusion. What was it that this spontaneous yet well-orchestrated post-Islamist potpourri had wanted to achieve? Its causes were many: Malay politics, Syria, Western Islamophobia. Also, the choice to subsequently brand the edited flash mob and post it online under the rather generic title of ‘Love for the Prophet,’ first had me puzzled and seemed to confirm my impression that if this was an Islamist road show, pretty much anything goes. However, I hope that this chapter has helped make clear why I feel some images travel more easily, are prioritized over others and how they may help tap into a wider global circuitry. It also explains why such globally intimate images appeal to larger audiences, often consisting of strangers and connected by a single text only, as that is what the Islamic ummah basically is. In hindsight, one could argue that, in all of its playfulness, ‘Love for the Prophet’ proved to be a seamless playground for perfecting what is slowly becoming a new Islamist social imagery, more experimental, more fashionable, and more fun but equally serious in its claim to be heard. But why single out the flash mob, and why now? If one thing stands out, it is that the flash mob is but one among a set of heavily used images that global media have helped circulate, others being the karnival and the rock-and-road show. All images that represent the unruliness and messiness of the modern, but which are also container-like, and allow for further accommodation of all sorts of sights and sounds. In experimenting with the noisy and seemingly unruly, this new Islamist assemblage is like the karnival or rock show, transgressive and intentionally out of place, but in the end returning to a normal state of things. This is reminiscent of the ritualized nineteenth-century peasant revolts and, factually, is the stuff that much popular cultural expression is made of, in its seeming transgression and subsequent reaffirmation of things. Fashion theorists (see, for example, Chaney 1996 or Hansen 2004) suggests that times of social change produce great fashion in order to distract and provide its consumers with the means to cope with and address too much social upheaval, but also to provide the public with novel identities and a new social imaginary. Similarly, one could argue that precarious times make for unstable genres, the fashionable format of the flash mob offering a good case in point here. As one such assemblage of unruly performance, the flash mob tends to be highly unstable, in the sense that certain parts are reiterated time and again whereas others are easily left out, depending on one’s needs, what the public has in mind and also carefully incorporating new global trends and emergent local worries.

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for funding this research and Professor Datuk Dr. Shamsul Amri Baharuddin and his colleagues at KITA, National University of Malaysia, for so generously accommodating my stay in Malaysia while collecting data for this chapter. I additionally would like to thank Mohd Al Adib Samuri and the people of Nasyeed.com for their generous input.

Works Cited Abaza, Mona (2014) ‘Post January Revolution Cairo: Urban Wars and the Reshaping of Public Space.’ Theory, Culture & Society 31.7/8: 163-183. Asad, Talal (1986) ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.’ Occasional Papers 14. Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University. Barendregt, Bart (2012) ‘Sonic Discourses on Muslim Malay Modernity: The Arqam Sound.’ Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Life 6.3: 315-340. Barendregt, Bart (2017) ‘Princess Siti and the Particularities of Post-Islamist Pop.’ In Andrew Weintraub and Bart Barendregt, eds., Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 246-271. Barendregt, Bart, and Chris Hudson (2016) ‘Islam´s Got Talent: Television, Performance and the Islamic Public Sphere in Malaysia.’ In T. Lewis and F. Martin, eds., Lifestyle Media in Asia: Consumption, Aspiration and Identity. Abingdon: Routledge, 176-190. Bayat, Asef (1996) ‘The Coming of a Post-Islamist Society.’ Critique: Journal for Critical Studies of the Middle East 5.9: 43-52. Boyd, Danah (2014) It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven: Yale University Press. Boubekeur, Amel, and Olivier Roy (2012) Whatever Happened to the Islamists? Salafis, Heavy Metal Muslims and the Lure of Consumerist Islam. New York: Columbia University Press. Castells, Manuel (2012) Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chaney, David (1996) Lifestyles. London: Routledge. Dirlik, Arif (2010) ‘Asian Modernities in the Perspective of Global Modernity.’ In Yiu-wai Chu and Eva Kit-Wah Man, eds., Contemporary Asian Modernities: Transnationality, Interculturality, and Hybridity. New York: Peter Lang, 27-54. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum.

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Fischer, Johan (2008) Proper Islamic Consumption: Shopping among the Malays in Modern Malaysia. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Fuchs, Christian (2012) ‘Some Reflections on Manuel Castells’ Book “Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age.”’ Triple C: Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 10.2. http://www.triple-c.at/index. php/tripleC/article/view/459. Hall, Stuart (1981) ‘Notes on Deconstructing “the Popular.”’ In Ralph Samuel, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 227-240. Hansen, Karen Tranberg (2004) ‘The World in Dress: Anthropological Perspectives on Clothing, Fashion, and Culture.’ Annual Review of Anthropology 33.1: 369-392. Harding, Sandra (2008) Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. Harvey, David (2008) ‘The Right to the City.’ New Left Review 53: 23-40. Hasan, Noorhaidi (2012) ‘Piety, Politics, and Post-Islamism: Dhikr Akbar in Indonesia.’ Al-Jami’ah: Journal of Islamic Studies 50.2: 369-390. Heryanto, Ariel (2014) Identity and Pleasure: The Politics of Indonesian Screen Culture. Singapore: NUS Press in association with Kyoto University Press. Hirschkind, Charles (2006) The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Houston, J. Brian, et al. (2013) ‘Urban Youth’s Perspectives on Flash Mobs.’ Journal of Applied Communication Research 41.3: 236-252. Howell, Julia Day (2012) ‘Sufism and Neo-Sufism in Indonesia Today.’ RIMA: Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs 46.2: 1-24. Kahn, Joel (2003) ‘Islam, Modernity, and the Popular in Malaysia.’ In Virginia Hooker and Noraini Othman, eds., Malaysia: Islam, Society and Politics. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 147-168. Kamus Dewan (2010) Kamus Dewan, 4th ed. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Lenderman, Max (2009) Experience the Message. New York: Carroll & Graf. Liow, J.C. (2009) Piety and Politics: Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia. New York: Oxford University Press. Mee, Wendy, and Joel S. Kahn, eds. (2012) Questioning Modernity in Indonesia and Malaysia. Singapore: NUS Press. Molnár, Virág (2014) ‘Reframing Public Space through Digital Mobilization Flash Mobs and Contemporary Urban Youth Culture.’ Space and Culture 17.1: 43-58. Müller, Dominik M. (2015) ‘Islamic Politics and Popular Culture in Malaysia: Negotiating Normative Change between Shariah Law and Electric Guitars.’ Indonesia and the Malay World 43.127: 318-344. OED (n.d.) Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peletz, Michael G. (2015) ‘A Tale of Two Courts: Judicial Transformation and the Rise of a Corporate Islamic Governmentality in Malaysia.’ American Ethnologist 42.1: 144-160.

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Peletz, Michael G. (2016) ‘Syariah, Inc.: Continuities, Transformations, and Cultural Politics in Malaysia’s Islamic Judiciary.’ In Robert W. Hefner, ed., Shari’a Law and Modern Muslim Ethics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 229-259. Postill, John (2011) Localizing the Internet: An Anthropological Account. New York: Berghahn Books. Rafael, Vicente L. (2003) ‘The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines.’ Philippine Political Science Journal 24.47: 3-36. Razsa, Maple John (2013) ‘Beyond “Riot Porn”: Protest Video and the Production of Unruly Subjects.’ Ethnos (April 8): 1-29. Rheingold, Howard (2003) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Perseus. Rudnyckyj, Daromir (2013) ‘Wall Street or Halal Street?: Malaysia and the Globalization of Islamic Finance.’ Journal of Asian Studies 72.4: 831-848. Siegel, James T. (2001) ‘Suharto, Witches.’ Indonesia 71: 27-78. Spyer, Patricia, and Mary Margaret Steedly (2013) Images That Move. Santa Fe: SAR Press. Thompson, E.P. (1991) Customs in Common. New York: New Press. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (2000) ‘The Global Situation.’ Cultural Anthropology 15.3: 327-360. Warner, Michael (2002) ‘Publics and Counterpublics.’ Public Culture 14.1: 49-90. Weintraub, Andrew N. (2010) Dangdut Stories: A Social and Musical History of Indonesia’s Most Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weintraub, Andrew N., and Bart Barendregt, eds. (2017) Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 246-271.

About the Author Bart Barendregt is Associate Professor at the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology. Bart has an interest in popular and digital culture, and has published on Southeast Asian performance, new and mobile media, and (Islamic) pop music. Bart is currently working on a book dealing with Islamist boy band music and the mixing of religion, youth culture and politics among Malaysian and Indonesian student activists. He is editor of Sonic Modernities in the Malay World (Brill, 2014), and co-editor of Green Consumption: The Global Rise of Eco-Chic (Bloomsbury, 2013), the volume Recollecting Resonance (Brill, 2013) and the volume Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities (University of Hawai’i Press, 2017). Email: [email protected]

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Pure Love? Sanitized, Gendered and Multiple Modernities in Chinese Cinemas Jeroen de Kloet Abstract This chapter explores through the prism of three highly popular romantic movies Love Is Not Blind (China, 2011), You Are the Apple of My Eye (Taiwan, 2011), and Love in a Puff (Hong Kong, 2010), performances or mediations of what is termed sanitized modernities, modernities that are cleansed from all dirt, pollution and impurity that constitutes the everyday. The movies share the desire to polish the real to a level that it shines, that its surface becomes smooth and touchable, the city transparent, and our movements within it sophisticated and swift. The films articulate different modernities. In Love Is Not Blind, the velocity of the modern, propelling ever more conspicuous consumption, is confronted. This compressed modernity that Chinese youth is currently facing produces both a desire for as well as anxiety over a modern lifestyle. In Taiwan, it is a nostalgia for high school days that is most pertinent, and as such the movie gestures towards the past: youth is being idealized. We are confronted here with what we can term a kawaii modernity, saturated with cuteness, soft-focus shots, and a profoundly romantic structure of feeling. This can be linked to the current political situation of Taiwan as a country that is struggling to retain its position and identity vis-à-vis a China that is gaining power so quickly on the global stage. This predicament is amplified in Hong Kong. Here, we witness a postcolonial anxiety, one that in real life had the Umbrella Movement as its somewhat later political articulation. In the movie we see characters negotiating what we can term a pragmatic modernity, in which young people navigate through the city and quest for their demands by taking over back alleys, by avoiding surveillance and by gaining more space in the private realm, although they ultimately surrender. Keywords: Chinese cinemas, modernities, purity, romance

Hudson, Chris, and Bart Barendregt (eds): Globalization and Modernity in Asia. Performative Moments. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462981126_ch11

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Is there hope? Rubbish dump! Is there hope? Rubbish dump! – He Yong, ‘Rubbish Dump’ (1992)

When 25-year-old Yuan Yuan picked me up with his Volkswagen Beetle in 2011 to go for a drink in Beijing, I realized how much had changed in just two decades. The Beetle has now, for some, replaced the bike, bus or the yellow ‘bread taxi,’ the name of the latter referring to its bread-like shape. Yuan Yuan was a writer at that time, one who tried in his work to capture the zeitgeist of life in Beijing and contemporary youth cultures in China. With his trendy style, and smart, sexy looks, he sometimes featured in advertising campaigns as well. When I met him that year at the Strawberry music festival he mingled with rock stars he had befriended, wearing one of his ultra-fashionable outfits. Now, in 2016, he writes and works for the mainstream media; he still publishes books, and remains as fashionable as ever. He socializes in trendy bars and cafés, continues to be a lucid and keen observer of everyday life in Beijing and tries to support his friends with, for example, their start-ups. Take his friend Minou, a woman in her late thirties, who just launched a dining-with-strangers start-up, using an app to connect people for friendship or dating, who come together in a home for an extensive (and expensive) dinner. I joined one of those dinners in the Autumn of 2015. The table was impeccably arranged with layered plates for the different courses and with fancy wine glasses. The style of the room, located in an apartment in the hip Eastern district of Beijing, was simple, with everything in white and a wooden floor and largely wooden furniture. One girl with platinum blond hair and colourful tattoos on her arms reminded me of Marilyn Monroe. In the course of the evening, we talked about the latest fashion trends, about media gossip, about new hot spots in Beijing, about politics and about the difficulty to launch an app in a society where new media fads change overnight. Both Yuan Yuan’s as well as Minou’s life struck, and still strike, me as profoundly modern. They baptized my life in China with a touch or gloss of the ultra-cool and modern. Gone were the dusty old hutongs, the ‘original’ neighbourhoods of Beijing marked by their maze of small alleys, gone were the shabby clothes. We could even forget the air pollution for a while. What mattered now were clean, upmarket apartments and Comme des Garçon outfits. It is a side of Beijing, I must confess, that I like a lot. When I was watching the 2011 movie Love Is Not Blind by Teng Huatao, a romantic blockbuster in China, I felt a strong resonance with the times spent with Yuan Yuan and Minou. The Beijing as presented – or, to be more precise,

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performed – in the movie is impeccably clean; gone is the air pollution, the dust on the roads, the loud and smoky restaurants, instead, there are coffee bars painted a clean white and expensive tea houses and restaurants. This creates in particular in the case of Beijing a striking disjuncture with one’s ‘real’ experiences in the city, in which dirt and air pollution feature prominently. In this chapter, I will explore through the prism of three highly popular romantic movies: Love Is Not Blind (China, 2011), You Are the Apple of My Eye (Taiwan, 2011), and Love in a Puff (Hong Kong, 2010), performances of what I like to term sanitized modernities: cleansed from all dirt, pollution and impurity that constitutes the everyday (Douglas 1966; De Kloet 2007). The point here is not to consider whether or not these movies ‘reflect’ reality – of course, they do not; at most they refract a certain reading of a certain reality. This is why I prefer to use the notion of performance, as the plot, the cinematography, the sound, among other elements, together constitute an assemblage that both displays and constructs a certain articulation of modernity. The movies are selected, not only because of the immense popularity among audiences in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, but because their thematic overlap allows me to probe their performances of modernity. They share the desire to polish the real to a point where it shines so that its surface becomes smooth and touchable and the city becomes transparent, and our movements within it sophisticated and swift. But are they truly cleansed of all dirt? According to Mary Douglas, societies are structured around specific notions of dirt and cleanliness. ‘Dirt offends against order’ (Douglas 1966, p. 2). It is purity and cleanliness that signifies and sustains the moral order of society, encapsulated and epitomized, I would suggest, in the aspiration to be modern. Whereas Douglas focuses on the perceived danger in impurity, after a close reading of the three films, I am interested in the dangers of purity, and prompted to look beyond purity for moments, places, and times of impurity and contamination, that indicate that modernity is perhaps not quite so modern, nor desirable. Kwame A. Appiah encapsulates the ambivalence of purity, and its potential productive opposite: ‘When people speak for an ideal of cultural purity, […] I find myself drawn to contamination as the name for a counterideal’ (2006). Popular films such as these are key sites in which to explore the ambiguities inherent in notions of purity, danger, and contamination and their implications for modernity. Before I examine the movies, I want to further explicate my understanding of modernity. In addition to the implications of cultural, moral, and physical purity with modernity, I propose to read modernity more as an aspiration than as a state at which a society arrives safely. Bruno Latour (1993) proclaims

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that we have never been modern, but it may be more accurate to think that modernity will never be an achieved state of being. It appears more like a ghost that trails perpetually forward; at times we can even breathe it, at other moments we almost lose its sight. Reading modernity as aspirational, and thus processual, allows for opening it up to different articulations. We move in different directions, at different speeds – contingent on time and space. But the ‘we’ in Latour remains disturbingly unmarked. What we witness is the emergence of multiple articulations of modernity. What all these modernities do share is not only that they are aspirational, but also an imagined relationality with Western enlightenment, however refracted through the multiple translations over time and space (Lo 2009).1 The resulting struggle over modernity requires performative work, ‘to fashion the forms of our modernity, we need to have the courage at times to reject the modernities established by others’ (Chatterjee 1997, p. 20, see also Dirlik 2007; Eisenstadt 2000). It does so in particular for those who are located outside of the comfort zone of modernity, that is the ‘non-West’ (Chakrabarty 2000). But what are the limits of this multiplicity? The three movies discussed in this chapter come from different locations but are all ‘Chinese.’ What are the possibilities and limitations of the modernities as performed in these movies, where do they differ, where do they overlap? And to extrapolate this question from the textual towards the societal, I would like to ask: How diverse are Chinese sanitized modernities (cf. Schmidt 2017)? Of particular importance here is the discourse around the rise of China, through which the regional and global idea of ‘China’ and ‘Chinese,’ and dovetailing to that also the idea of ‘Chinese modernity,’ increasingly gravitates towards the mainland. This triggers feelings of fear and alienation in both Taiwan and Hong Kong. Indicative are the umbrella protests in the fall of 2014 in Hong Kong and the rise to power of Tsai Ing-wen from the pro-independence democratic coalition in Taiwan. Will this result in different modern aspirations from the margins as well? 1 This point is contested. Aiwah Ong, for example, writes: ‘I consider modernist projects as knowledge-power processes that arise out of tensions between local and regional forces, and not merely in reaction to the West. I reject the simplistic binary opposition of the West and the non-West in accounting for emerging multiple modernities. Alternative visions of modernity may exist within a single country or a single region of the world; their configurations are to a large extent conditioned by geopolitics and the dynamism of global capitalism’ (1997, pp. 172-172). In my view, the West – not as a geopolitical entity but as an idea – remains always connected to the aspiration to be modern (see also Chakrabarty 2000). The different articulations of modernity in different cultural contexts can and do depart from that Western model, and these multiple modernities can in turn become hegemonic themselves, for example, in the case of Chinese modernity (see Lo 2009).

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Aside from the association of modernity with purity and the eradication of dirt, modernity always intersects with gender and sexuality (Felski 1995). In the words of Lisa Rofel (1999, p. 19), ‘gender serves as one of the central modalities through which modernity is imagined and desired. Gender differentiation – the knowledges, relations, meanings, and identities of masculinity and femininity – operates at the heart of modernity’s power.’ A dinner party, for example, is a format that is also meant to facilitate meetings with strangers who can potentially become lovers. What happened during the dinner party that I attended is not only a performance of modernity (or, more accurately, a performance of the aspiration to be modern), with its impeccable white interior and table design, but also a performance of the modern desiring self (Rofel 2007), performances that are often inscribed onto the gendered body through fashion, tattoos, hair colour, and the like. Another example comes from homosexuality that, with its hip affluent urban lifestyles through which it is represented, often indexes modernity, as we will see in the analysis of the movies as well. These performances facilitate a gendered economy of desire; the modern self is also a dating self, at times crossing the lines between heterosexuality and homosexuality, being interwoven in a complex web of affect, desire, and (be)longing. In this chapter, I take the highly popular cinematic expressions of the three movies under study as performances of modernity. The images of modernity in these movies are not only entangled with notions of purity and dirt, but modernity is also represented as a normative aspiration, rather than an achievable state. However it is interpreted in its multiple manifestations, it is also unavoidably implicated with gender. I thus distinguish three dimensions of modernity: sanitized modernity, multiple modernity, and gendered modernity. In my analysis, I will show how different negotiations of purity and gender help constitute different (multiple) versions of modernity. By analysing three movies from different Chinese locations I probe the possibilities and limitations of this multiplicity.2 Consideration of what is sanitized, or even completely erased in an urban setting, requires a focus on four dimensions of social life: family, work, the nation state, and money. It is 2 The movies under study are highly popular, yet outside of their locales, they remain rather unknown. Chinese movies that do make it globally, and that are time and again analysed by film scholars, are either the art house cinema of, for example, Jia Zhangke and Tsai Ming-liang, or the more spectacular martial arts cinema of, for example, Zhang Yimou. Implicitly, this chapter is therefore also a plea to take the popular Chinese cinemas seriously as an object of study. While one should be weary to take box office figures as a justification to select an object of analysis, the popularity of these movies do make them part of a shared collective imagination that I have interpret here as performances of modernity.

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within these dimensions that articulations of impurity are frequently found, and where questions arise about the intersections of these dimensions with the imperatives of modernity: When and what kind of dirt is allowed, and why are certain tropes cleansed or left out completely? And how are purity and dirt entangled with gender and sexuality? And how do these help the performance of (that is, constitute and negotiate) multiple modernities?

Conspicuous Consumption: Love Is Not Blind 3 Love Is Not Blind is a romantic comedy from 2011 directed by Teng Huatao, a 1995 graduate of the Beijing Film Academy. He is best known for his television dramas that depict the lives and loves of young urbanites in China. The movie is based on an online novel written by Bao Jingjing, in combination with interviews with young people across China. After a little over one week after its release, Love Is Not Blind – which cost only 9,000,000 yuan (US$1.4 million) to make – had earned over $200 million yuan (approximately US$31.5 million) at the box office (Chen 2011). The film was released on 8 November in anticipation of 11 November, ‘Singles’ Day’ in China. 4 The movie depicts the 33 ‘days’ (11 November, 2011, that is, 11/11/11, or 11+11+11) of the life of lead protagonist Wang Xiaoxian, a 27-year-old woman, who just broke up with her boyfriend after watching him shopping intimately together with her best friend. She survives the break-up with the full support of her co-worker Huang Yiyang, a very gay-ish male character. They work as wedding planners, preparing other couples weddings. One review proclaims that the movie ‘strives to comfort and warm the hearts of all those individuals who celebrate Singles Day’ (Chen 2011). The movie’s performance of a sanitized modernity becomes clear from the very start. The opening scene presents different ways to split up for a couple, but also serves to set the scene: modern Beijing with its shiny tall buildings, fancy bars, artistic districts and luxuriously modernistic apartments (Broudehoux 2004). This is the new and modern Beijing, the Beijing of conspicuous consumption, of designer labels and dinners in the restaurants of star painter Fang Lijun. All interiors seem to mirror the cover of lifestyle magazines. 3 A different and shorter version of this analysis of Love Is Not Blind appears in Youth Cultures in China (Polity, 2017), co-authored with Anthony Fung. 4 ‘Singles’ Day,’ or guanggongjie (光棍节), literally ‘bare sticks holiday,’ is a celebration of being single that takes place on 11 November, that is, 11/11 (4 bare sticks). Blind date parties are organized to take place on this day, but it has especially become a commercial festival during which online shopping sales peak.

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Beijing is impeccably clean, the sky is always blue, and the grass is green, with characters living in beautifully decorated shiny apartments. The movie refuses to render the flip side of the city visible, such as the migrant workers that make all these fancy shopping malls possible, the polluted air from the factories and cars, the dust from the coal in the air. This absence, in conjunction with the material wealth of all characters and their creative jobs, gestures towards a prosperous future of China and can thus be read as a performance of a Chinese modernity. One that, in both the plot and its aesthetics, resonates with the discourse of the rise of China, in which China becomes a creative force, rather than the factory of the world (Keane 2013). Cheerfully betraying the orthodoxy that Chinese care so much about their family, and that Confucian family values are deeply engrained in the everyday life of Chinese culture, this movie presents a quite different reality, one that is deeply drenched in an articulation of, or desire for, modernity that centres on youth and the city, one in which the family, but also the nation state – one that in mainland has a very powerful presence in everyday life – is conspicuously absent. Instead, it is work and money that are rendered visible. In this prosperous setting, love remains a thorny affair. After witnessing different ways in which couples can split up we are confronted with Wang Xiaoxian, who is slowly recovering a break-up. It is in a luxurious and modern shopping mall that Wang Xiaoxian sees her boyfriend, Lu Ran, with whom she has been for seven years, intimately holding hands with Feng Jiaqi, her close girlfriend since junior high. Lu Ran and Feng Jiaqi select a perfume for her. Her break up thus has a fragrance of which, as her voice-over recalls in the movie, ‘the top note is potpourri, the middle note is grass, the low note is sandalwood.’ It is simultaneously an act of consumption, and the end of a relationship. Wang Xiaoxian is now single and thrust into a state of despair and loss, a state in which the support of her male colleague, Huang Yiyang, becomes indispensable. Both Huang’s clothes and his movements connote modernity and gayness, and even when he acts later on in the movie as her boyfriend, it is clear he really is not, and never will be her lover. Her interaction with the witty, ironic, and always supportive Huang Yiyang drives the plot forward. As one reviewer proclaims, ‘even though Yiyang’s sexual orientation is never explicitly mentioned in the film, the film is essentially about the importance of having a non-threatening male in your life. That alone makes Love Is Not Blind a refreshing change from the usual romantic comedy’ (Chen 2011). The movie can thus also be read as an ode to friendship that may be a longer-lasting force in life than romantic love. The gay character is yet another articulation of modernity. Often depicted in stylish clothes and with a penchant for clubbing,

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gayness nowadays in the big cities in China is associated with openness and a hip and trendy lifestyle. In China, the term that was used for a close female friend – guimi – is now used for gay men as the best friend of women. When the two lead characters are asked to arrange the wedding of a super-rich couple, one typical of the new rich of China, Ms. Li and Mr. Wei, they meet in a place that serves high tea. Li Ke immediately shows her wedding ring and asks in a high-pitched voice: ‘Miss Wang, isn’t my engagement ring beautiful?’ To which Wang replies, ‘Very beautiful. It must be really expensive.’ ‘It’s from Tiffany,’ Li Ke responds. In its clear exaggeration of the significance of brand names, the movie brings a focus to the conspicuous consumption that is now so widespread in Beijing, one that is complicit also with the cleansing of the city, in which shiny and clean shopping streets take the place of dusty hutong alleys. It turns out that the wedding organizers Wang Xiaoxian and Huang Yiyang cannot comply with all the wishes of the couple and thus quit the assignment. But Wang Xiaoxian continues to see Mr. Wei, and in a park she confronts him with questions about his choice of partner. The critique of consumption is articulated most directly in this scene she confronts Wei with: ‘Many great guys date girls who always talk about Louis Vuitton and Prada. If you talk about the essence of love, she’ll most likely tell you that the limit you set on her credit card is the essence of your love for her. Why? Why is there such a match?’ After which Wei replies: ‘Two words: save trouble. We want to find wives who can stick with us even when love fades away. Can you accept it? Li Ke can, for her, love is a luxury, but LV is a necessity. For girls like you, LV is a luxury, but love is a necessity. The LV group won’t suddenly go bankrupt, but love can end in a minute. If I want to build a relationship, I have to make sure I have endless resources to supply it. From that perspective I’m a very dependable man.’ This eloquent reasoning draws a curious analogy between brands and love, one that in the brand-conscious context of East Asia is not so farfetched. Both brands and real estate are important assets for a man. In a scene showing a speed dating session organized by Wang Xiaoxian and Huang Yiyang, as part of the additional services of the wedding company they work for, we see how the very first demand articulated is that ‘I want my future husband to have his own apartment.’ The desire for luxury and financial wealth, and it’s coupling with love, has stirred up quite some debate over the past years in China (Luo and Sun 2014; Sun 2014). But the critique on consumerism that Love Is Not Blind offers remains paradoxical, as the movie itself celebrates consumption in its portrayal of a clean and fashionable Beijing. Everything we see, every scene breathes consumption, making it hard to take the critique of conspicuous consumption too seriously.

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The dream wedding may not be a dream after all. The end of the movie suggests that love may never be everlasting, but the one thing that remains is friendship. The friendship between Wang Xiaoxian and Huang Yiyang remains, it is what keeps her going after the break up. It takes a gay man to rescue her. In the final scene, we see how Wang Xiaoxian gazes outside of the window of her elegant office, located next to ‘The Village,’ Beijing’s most glamorous shopping district. She is looking at a neon light that never works. At this point, Huang Yiyang calls her up, asks her to look to the neon light again. Suddenly the word ‘Faith’ appears while Huang Yiyang proclaims on the phone: ‘No matter what happens. I will be around.’ It is a final affirmation of the importance of friendships in our lives, more so than romantic relationships. Thus, the modernity as performed in Love Is Not Blind is indeed a sanitized one, in plot and aesthetics it gestures towards a prosperous present and future of China, in particular in its ambivalent celebration of conspicuous consumption. Both the family and the nation state are cleared away in the movie. In this world, also a gay friend connotes modernity. But this Chinese modernity is not only shiny and rosy, it is in the domain of gender, love, and sexuality where the movie complicates a univocal celebration. In the end, love is questioned, friendship is valued higher and considered to be purer and less contaminated.

High School Nostalgia: You Are the Apple of My Eye You Are the Apple of My Eye – a coming-of-age movie based on the novel written by the director Giddens Ko – was released in 2011. Ko’s semi-autobiographical The Girl We Chased Together in Those Years was already a bestseller among Chinese online readers, and the movie became an instant box office hit. It secured the second place on Taiwan’s chart of all-time box office hits (Lee 2011). You Are the Apple of My Eye starts in 2005, when lead protagonist Ko-teng dresses up to attend the wedding of Shen Chia-yi. The scene then quickly brings the viewers back to 1994 and the high school years of Ko-teng. Then and there, his life revolves around hanging out with school buddies. While all his classmates are infatuated with Shen Chia-yi – an accomplished and clever classmate – Ko-teng is not. But when the teacher asks Shen to keep an eye on the prank-loving Ko-teng, he falls for her, too, even if he never dares to declare his love for her. Their not-quite-a-romance ends when an altercation between them erupts sometime after they have separated and gone to different high schools. Several years later, Ko-teng, now a writer, and his high school mates watch Shen, still as beautiful as they remember, walking down the aisle with another man.

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When compared to Love Is Not Blind, we are confronted now with quite a different performance of modernity. The city functions much less prominently in the movie, instead, portraying the school and its immediate surroundings as well as many indoor scenes. The scenes present the environment as clean, soft, and pure, an apparent attempt to depict youth as innocence and pure. The movie gestures to the past, rather than the present or the future, and portrays purity in quite a different light to Love Is Not Blind. The movie is saturated with a nostalgia for youth and is filled with hope, freedom and resistance to rules. What is left out of this nostalgic narrative are ‘real’ political and economic issues, such as class differences and labour insecurity, and as such it is a nostalgia that is motivated by an assumed split between youth and adulthood. But nostalgia is more than just longing for the good old days. A nostalgic subject is, according to Helen Hok-sze Leung (2001 p. 430), someone who ‘sits on the fence of time,’ thus implying an increased awareness towards the passing of time. In the case of Taiwan, this fence is becoming increasingly unstable and precarious, in particular given the global rise of China. The modernity longed for is one located more in the past than the present, a past in which Taiwan could more easily claim to be more modern as well as more prosperous than mainland China. The self-confidence towards the future is missing in this movie, which may well explain its appeal to audiences in Taiwan. This reaffirms a general nostalgic structure of feeling that permeates Taiwanese culture today, for example, in the cinema of Tsai Ming-liang, that gestures, for example, towards previous eras when cinemas were still important cultural places, now increasingly in decay (in Goodbye Dragon Inn, see Chan 2007). The movie is about the assumed innocence of youth and its entanglement with love and sexuality – the latter being imagined through countless visual and verbal jokes involving erect penises, but also through a gay encounter taking place under the shower (Ho 2011). It makes ample use of youth stereotypes, including a fat, smart, nerdy and sexy character. At its core is the unspoken love between Ko-teng and Shen Chia-yi, a love that remains unfulfilled. This makes the movie all the more appealing; it is not a bitter story, but rather one of unfulfilled desire, and it claims itself that desire is more pleasurable than its consummation.5 You Are the Apple of My Eye presents the high school years as filled with excitement, innocence, 5 Ironically, Giddens, the director and (script)writer of Apple of My Eye, was caught having an extramarital affair, and the main actor who became an idol after the success of the film was arrested in Beijing in connection with drugs, after which Beijing immediately banned him – in an attempt to indeed sanitize the city.

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and doubt. Modernity is located in the past and mapped onto the alleged innocence of youth. We are confronted with the disciplinary mechanisms that educate young people to become hard-working citizens who will marry and raise a family. These expectations are, however, juxtaposed against scenes in which a more rowdy, rebellious atmosphere is created. One recurring theme is the frequently returning erections among the boys in the class. In one scene at the beginning of the movie, we see the boys trading cards while walking to the classroom, while the girls clean up the campus. This quite stereotypical gendered scene becomes sexually charged in the classroom, when Chen Chia-yi is introduced in the movie, and the voice-over of Ko-Teng explains that all boys except him have a crush on her. Then Liao Ling-Hung enters the room. He continually scratches his groin, earning him the nickname ‘Groin.’ A favourite classroom activity for fellow students is shooting an elastic string at his groin, making him scream out loud. This mischievous play with masculinity is further enhanced by the character Boner, so named because he always has a ‘boner.’ The slow motion of the flying elastic string, making a quite unlikely zig-zag through the class, is typical for the humorous undertone of the movie. The scene is emblematic of the mischievous, boyish atmosphere that is a recurring affective trope of the movie. It also challenges the purity of the narrative and of youth and, as such, the sexual naughtiness here undermines the purity of modernity. This continues in the subsequent scene, where we witness the rising of the national flag, a moment during which Boner gets a boner. Here, the performance of the nation state, rendered invisible in Love Is Not Blind, is not only challenged by sexuality, but charged by it. Meanwhile, the schoolmaster screams at the students to ensure that everybody stand in line. The regimes of the school and the nation state are undermined by the mischievous and unruly sexuality of the schoolboys. The tension between expectations imposed by society – the fragile nation state of Taiwan, the school and the family, and the contestations of such expectations the students – drives the narrative of the movie. Meanwhile, girls carry the burden of good moral behaviour, and boys behave badly, a gendered representation that resonates uncomfortably with global heteronormative roles that tend to reconfirm rather than challenge the moral order. For example, in another scene, we see an argument between Shen Chia-yi and Ko-teng, the latter proclaiming that ‘You can be so stuck up just because you have good grades,’ after which she responds, ‘I don’t look down on people with bad grades, I look down on you because you pick on people with good grades while you don’t even try to work hard.’ This exchange implies that no matter how smart you are, what truly

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counts is working hard. At this moment, the scene switches to Ko-teng’s family home, where Ko-teng, like his father, walks naked through the house. Like the nation state, the family appears as an important presence in this movie, not ‘cleansed away’ as it is in the other two movies. What is instead absent, or sanitized, are work and money. This absence is notable, not just during high school days but also in the later parts of the movie that are set in working life. Ko-teng’s mother asks him to get dressed, but he refuses, as he claims to be as strong as Bruce Lee. Subsequently, his mother asks him to swallow his food before he speaks, and in other moments to study hard and so on. The disciplinary statements of the mother towards the son are, however, undermined by him walking around naked in the house. And the mother wonders how it comes that the tissues are finished so quickly, a question that produces the image of Ko-Teng masturbating frequently. It is the bodily and the sexual that undermines the alleged purity of the family, and in its slipstream injects modernity with impurity and contamination. After they have completed middle school the whole group is sitting on a concrete wall, on the outskirts of the city. Like rooftops, these are often the cinematic places used to evoke a sense of freedom, of being beyond the surveillance and control of society and the city (Chow and De Kloet 2013). Some want to study abroad, another wants to become a famous basketball player. When asked about her aspirations, Shen Chia-yi responds that ‘I don’t expect much of my future really,’ after which Ko-teng gazes at her in bewilderment. ‘He wants to be a kick-ass person,’ he replies, ‘I want the world to be a little bit better because of me.’ After which his voice-over continues to tell the audience: ‘and you are the only person that is going to make my world better.’ But when, towards the end of the movie, we are catapulted back towards the present wedding of Shen Chia-yi, much has happened. Most of the dreams articulated on that wall did not become reality and the love between Ko-teng and Shen Chia-yi remained unfulfilled. As such, the movie refuses to turn into a clear-cut happy story, despite its romantic and nostalgic mis-en-scène. The big earthquake of 21 September 1999 does bring them back together, as the first person Ko-teng wants to call after years of silence is Shen Chai-yi, to ensure she is safe. At the wedding, the boys ask if they may kiss the bride, after which the groom agrees under the condition that they should first kiss him in the way they would like to kiss the bride. They respond with astonishment: How dare he impose such a demand? But then, all of a sudden, we see Ko-teng running up to the groom, and giving him an intense and long French kiss. This slippage into gay sexuality and the requirement that they consummate it with the

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kiss he always longed for but never had, gestures towards the subversive potential of the body and of sexuality while recalling earlier times when they all were fooling around in class. The purity of modernity is in You Are the Apple of My Eye projected towards the past, rendered in soft focus shots and drenched in nostalgia and cuteness. It is a modernity located outside work and money. It shows how modernity in Taiwan is something that is imagined to be under threat, given the current rise of China, whose version of modernity Taiwanese do not want themselves to align to. But this claim on a modernity that intersects, with both the nation state and the family, is shot through with ambivalence, in particular in the unruly and sexually charged scenes, as well as in the closure with a queer kiss. That the love remains unconsummated, and thereby clean and pure, makes this movie different from the more common feel-good love stories. Indeed, it may well be read that also for Taiwan, modernity remains something to aspire, rather than to maintain or acquire.

Pragmatic Love: Love in a Puff Pang Ho-cheung’s Hong Kong film Love in a Puff was released in 2010. The plot revolves around the love story of Cherie and Jimmy, two smokers who meet at an outdoor smoking area subsequent to the banning of all indoor smoking areas in Hong Kong in 2007. While the movie had a very poor opening weekend, subsequent buzz around it on the Internet turned it into a successful release that took HK$5 million at the box office in three weeks. The movie involves people with different professions, from office executive to hotel bellboys, and it takes place in the back alleys of Hong Kong. Two of these people are Cherie, a beauty products salesgirl, and advertisement man Jimmy. Cherie gets to know about his recent break-up through his chatty co-workers. Something clicks between the two at their first meeting and despite various obstacles a romance begins (Ma 2010). Compared to the other two movies, that perform a sanitized version of the city and the youthful past in school respectively, Love in a Puff is much more concerned with the underside of the city of Hong Kong with its dirty alleys. Like Love Is Not Blind, it refuses to erase the importance of work, but is much less focused on conspicuous consumption. Instead, it shows the characters driving around the city in search of cheap cigarettes. We see a group of workers, taking a smoke in their coffee breaks, cracking crude jokes, using foul language, making fun of each other, and telling ghost stories. We see how Cherie Yu increasingly distances herself from

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her current boyfriend, while she gets more involved with Jimmy Cheung. Their encounters constantly revolve around smoking; their desire to smoke runs counter to the city’s policies to promote a healthy lifestyle. As such, these are gestures against the sanitization of modern life, just as their meeting places, alleys, roads at the night, parking garages, are all part of the backstage of the city, the part of Hong Kong the authorities do not want us to see. Of the three films discussed here, Love in a Puff departs most strongly from the trend of urban sanitization they all deal with. This can be explained by the current zeitgeist of Hong Kong, which is infused with an anxiety about the mainland and a concern over its own political future. Politics is translated in the plot into a quite banal event: the 2007 ban on smoking in public. The characters in Love in a Puff are young workers, rather than youngsters; their relation towards love seems less romantic, more pragmatic and cautious, when compared to the other two movies. While the language is funny and witty, the conversations are never really that serious, and the love that slowly develops is expressed in movements and silences, rather than articulated. The pressures of life in Hong Kong do not allow much time for romance, anyway. The movie steers away from drama and settles into a more mundane study of everyday life in the metropolis of Hong Kong, a place that is increasingly governed by regulations that affect daily life, such as the smoking ban.6 This political context also appears in a scene set in a karaoke bar. There, the two main characters and their friends start to sing karaoke. The lyrics of the song run: ‘Happy times fly by, like the clouds in the sky. […] I am surprised to see the concern in your eyes. I can dodge the storm with a smile.’ Then, Cherie drags Jimmy onto stage and continues to sing with him: ‘saying goodbye to a smile, you still seem to care.’ On the wall we see posters from the Cultural Revolution, impregnating the lyrics with references to the current state of Hong Kong, where happy times are indeed flying by and the future is deeply uncertain. In a scene early in the movie, we see a group of smokers standing together and then suddenly the two are on their own. The scene shows the convivial atmosphere that runs throughout the movie as a whole. There is hardly 6 Other examples are the stringent regulation of public space with areas devoted to walking, running, biking and driving, the crowd control in MTR stations and heavy security control in gated communities. In tandem with these, a much stronger fear has emerged around the increased control of Beijing over Hong Kong. The spirit of the umbrella movement still lingers on. For example, on 6 November 2016, a clash between protesters and the police took place; the protesters had gathered after Beijing had announced it wanted to bar two pro-independence lawmakers from taking office.

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any serious talk, both in the mis-en-scène as well as in its plot; the movie evokes a quite different structure of feeling compared to the other two movies. There is no nostalgia; nor are there romantic musings about love and desire. Instead, there is the reality of hard work in a demanding city with an uncertain future, coupled with the complications of love. In one scene, Cherie’s phone rings, and the bell-tone turns out to be a voice, saying ‘It’s your dad; It’s your aunt; It’s your brother; It’s your younger brother.’ Its turns out that her boss is calling her. Here the family, otherwise cleansed away from the narrative, returns like a spectre repackaged as a bell-tone, referring to the boss. Soon after the karaoke visit, Cherie splits up with her boyfriend and asks Jimmy to help her with moving out, after which they immediately drive to a love motel. Due to her asthma, they cannot ‘really’ sleep together, which alludes to the general thrust of the movie, in which so much remains unarticulated, in which gestures are more important than words, and where love is a highly risky and unstable state of being, taking place in a deeply controlled society that becomes more rather than less suffocating. In the final scene of the movie Cherrie and Jimmy drive through the city at night. Since the government has decided to significantly raise taxes on cigarettes, they are now chasing cheap packets. The atmosphere is tense, and when the car breaks down and they get stuck on an empty highway, Cherie explains she wants things to be more straightforward: ‘I don’t understand your conspiracy theories about everybody, I really don’t. I’m tired, get it? I’m simple and straightforward.’ As a response, he shows her the text message he had sent her earlier after the karaoke visit, that reads ‘n 55!W !’ Only then does she realize that when read upside down it reads ‘I miss you,’ that he has been more articulate than imagined. At that moment, both decide to quit smoking. In its setting in the hidden corners of the city, the movie presents the everyday struggles of young urban workers in a city that is in constant flux and, as such, it works against the grain of a sanitized modernity, to surrender in the very end to the no-smoking policies of the government. The modernity performed in Love in a Puff is less pure, less innocent and less sanitized when compared to the other two movies. This can be explained also by the current state of Hong Kong, in which anxiety and uncertainty over its future reigns. The confidence in the future we saw in Love Is Not Blind, the longing for the pure and innocent past in You Are the Apple of My Eye, are being replaced by a more troubled and anxious narrative that is firmly set in the present. This anxiety is pacified over the course of the movie, both the city of Hong Kong as well as love are approached in a

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more pragmatic, down to earth way, pragmatism serves here as a survival strategy to navigate these uncertain times. Ironically, it is in this dirtier context that love can actually come to fruition.

Conclusion Modernity is performed as something clean and sanitized, but different modes of purity proliferate. In Love Is Not Blind both the family and the nation state are cleansed from the narrative that is set in an impeccably clean Beijing. What is foregrounded instead are work and money. In You Are the Apple of My Eye the purity is projected onto the past, expressing a nostalgic fear of losing out in the current geopolitical context in which China rapidly gains power. Here, both family and the nation state are present, whereas neither work nor money plays an important role. In Love in a Puff, the purity is confronted in a more direct manner in dirty back alleys, foul language, and the insistence on continuing smoking against the political odds. Here, the city remains dirty, the nation state is present, as is work, and money is something scarce, rather than in abundance as is the case in Love Is Not Blind. This testifies to the importance of impurity, of dirt, and contamination as a potential challenge to the disciplinary working of sanitized modernities. The final capitulation towards the non-smoking policies can be read as a pragmatic choice to survive in uncertain times. It is also only in this movie that love actually survives. While having a gay friend might be an index of modernity, the impossibility of love (Love Is Not Blind), coupled to the celebration of friendship, of love remaining unconsummated (You Are the Apple of My Eye), or love being delayed (Love in a Puff), attests to the struggle modernity – as an aspirational structure of feeling – always involves. The differences indeed tell us something about the diverse localities as well. In Love Is Not Blind, the velocity of the modern, propelling ever more conspicuous consumption, is confronted. This compressed modernity that Chinese youth is currently facing produces both a desire for as well as anxiety over a modern lifestyle. The shiny cityscape of Beijing may well be its most poignant articulation: housing prices of Beijing have skyrocketed over the past years, making housing unaffordable for the young generation. The fancy apartments the characters live in, the designer furnishings, the lavish lifestyle – they confront audiences who lack all these things and repackage life as modern fantasy. What we witness here is not so much Xi Jinping’s ‘Chinese Dream’ of a prosperous China, but rather its sheer impossibility, prompting audiences to think, ‘Oh well, keep on dreaming.’ In Taiwan, it is a nostalgia

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for high school days that is most pertinent, and as such the movie gestures towards the past: youth is being idealized. We are confronted here with what we can term a kawaii modernity,7 saturated with cuteness, soft-focus shots, and a profoundly romantic structure of feeling. This can be linked to the current political situation of Taiwan as a country that is struggling to retain its position and identity vis-à-vis a China that is gaining power quickly on the global stage. In Hong Kong this predicament is amplified. Here, we witness a postcolonial anxiety, one that in real life had the Umbrella Movement as its somewhat later political articulation. In the movie we see characters negotiating what we can term a pragmatic modernity, in which young people navigate through the city and seek to satisfy their demands by taking over the back alleys, by avoiding surveillance and by gaining more space in the private realm, although they ultimately surrender. Let me conclude this chapter with the song that back in 1992 brought me to China. It is a classic rock song by punk rocker He Yong, titled ‘Rubbish Dump.’ After seeing him on TV I knew I wanted to know more of China. He screams out loud Is there hope? Rubbish dump! Is there hope? Rubbish dump! The anger in his voice suggests there is no hope left, the unlikely connection he forges between hope and a rubbish dump, or, to stick to the terms used in this chapter, between hope and dirt, is an uncanny one. But my analysis reveals something else, something more hopeful, indeed: there is hope in dirt, in impurity. It is the love we may find in the dirty back alleys of a city, the comfort of a close yet not heteronormative friendship that may undermine the sanitized cult of the couple, the memories of sexually charged high school days when the raising of the national flag causes a boner. Now, more than 20 years later, my answer to He Yong would be: Yes, there is hope, maybe precisely in the rubbish dump.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Leonie Schmidt and Maryn Wilkinson for the joint watching and discussion of the movies, Yiu Fai Chow for his critical reading, Vincent So for help with editing and Bart Barendregt and Chris Hudson for their support, patience and comments. This project has been supported by a consolidator grant from the European Research Council (ERC-2013-CoG 616882-ChinaCreative). 7 Kawaii refers to cuteness in the context of Japanese culture. It returns in many cultural expressions, ranging from Hello Kitty to Lolita fashion and from Pokémon Go to Doraemon.

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Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony (2006) ‘The Case for Contamination.’ New York Times, 1 January. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/magazine/the-case-forcontamination.html?_r=0. Broudehoux, Anne-Marie (2004) The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing New York: Routledge. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Though and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chan, Kenneth (2007) ‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn: Tsai Ming-liang’s Political Aesthetics of Nostalgia, Place, and Lingering.’ Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1.2: 89-103. Chatterjee, Partha (1997) Our Modernity. Rotterdam: Sephis. Chen, Liuyi (2011) ‘Asia Pacif ic Arts: Love Is Not Blind Is a Box Off ice Hit in China.’ Asia Pacific Arts, 22 November. http://asiapacificarts.usc.edu/article@ apa?love_is_not_blind_is_a_box_office_hit_in_china_1 7724.aspx. Chow, Yiu Fai, and Jeroen de Kloet (2013) ‘Flânerie and Acrophilia in the Postmetropolis: Rooftops in Hong Kong Cinema.’ Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7.2: 139-155. De Kloet, Jeroen (2007) ‘Cosmopatriot Contaminations.’ In Jeroen de Kloet and Edwin Jurriëns, eds., Cosmopatriots: On Distant Belongings and Close Encounters. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 133-154. Dirlik, Arif (2007) Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Douglas, Mary (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Eisenstadt, S.N. (2000) ‘Multiple Modernities.’ Daedalus 129.1: 1-29. Felski, Rita (1995) The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ho, Yi (2011) ‘Movie Review: You Are the Apple of My Eye 那些年，我們ㄧ起追 的女孩.’ Taipei Times, 19 August. http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/ archives/2011/08/19/2003511096. Keane, Michael (2013) Creative Industries in China: Art, Design and Media. Cambridge: Polity. Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lee, Maggie (2011) ‘You Are the Apple of My Eye Film Review,’ The Hollywood Reporter, 7 September, 2015. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/ you-are-apple-my-eye- 238703. Leung, Helen Hok-Sze (2001) ‘Queerscapes in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema.’ Positions 9.2: 423-448. Lo, Kwai-Cheung (2009) ‘The Web Marriage Game, the Gendered Self, and Chinese Modernity,’ Cultural Studies 23.3: 381-403.

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Luo, Wei, and Zhen Sun (2014) ‘Are You the One? China’s TV Dating Shows and the Sheng Nü’s Predicament.’ Feminist Media Studies 15.2, 239-256. Ma, Kevin (2010) ‘Love in a Puff (志明與春嬌) (2010).’ LoveHKFilm.com. http://www. lovehkfilm.com/reviews_2/love_in_a_puff.html. Ong, Aiwah (1997) ‘Chinese Modernities: Narratives of Nation and of Capitalism.’ In Aiwah Ong and Donald M. Nonini, eds., Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism. New York: London, 171-202. Rofel, Lisa (1999) Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rofel, Lisa (2007) Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Schmidt, Leonie (2017) Islamic Modernities in Southeast Asia: Exploring Indonesian Popular and Visual Culture. London: Rowan and Littlefield. Sun, Wanning (2014) ‘If You Are the One: Dating Shows, Reality TV, and the Politics of the Personal in Urban China.’ Australian Review of Public Affairs (October). http://www.australianreview.net/digest/2014/10/sun.html.

About the Author Jeroen de Kloet is Professor of Globalisation Studies and Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS) at the University of Amsterdam. His work focuses on cultural globalization, in particular in the context of East Asia. He is part of a HERA project on single women in Shanghai and Delhi, together with Heidelberg University (Germany) and the Open University (UK). He is also the principal investigator of a project funded by the European Grant Council (ERC) titled ‘From Made in China to Created in China: A Comparative Study of Creative Practice and Production in Contemporary China.’ In 2010 he published China with a Cut: Globalisation, Urban Youth and Popular Music (Amsterdam University Press). He wrote, together with Yiu Fai Chow, Sonic Multiplicities: Hong Kong Pop and the Global Circulation of Sound and Image (Intellect, 2013) and edited, together with Lena Scheen, Spectacle and the City: Chinese Urbanities in Art and Popular Culture (Amsterdam University Press, 2013). With Anthony Fung he published Youth Cultures in China (Polity, 2017). See also www.jeroendekloet.nl. Email: [email protected]

12 Yogya on Stage Barbara Hatley Abstract Since its first performance in 2008, German theatre company Rimini Protokoll’s 100% theatre project has travelled the world, mobilizing a hundred residents of diverse cities, each representing 1 per cent of the population, to play themselves and express their views on stage. In 2015 the show came to the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta, staged by Rimini in collaboration with local theatre company Teater Garasi. Reviewed in the context of recent social developments, 100% Yogya is seen to have created a vibrant picture of a city undergoing modernizing changes, absorbing global influences, while bringing together participants of diverse backgrounds to express their views, revealing and necessarily accepting differences. A global dramatic model applied locally produced impressive theatre. What its impact and ongoing signif icance may be, however, as key social divisions revealed by the production continue to shape Yogyakarta life, challenging the designation ‘city of tolerance,’ remain unanswered questions. Keywords: local, global, diversity, community, performance

In 2015 the globally circulating 100% city reality theatre project (100% Berlin, 100% Athens, 100% Tokyo etc.) came to Indonesia. Performed first in Berlin in 2008, Vienna and Athens in 2010, then in Melbourne, London, Oslo, Zurich, Copenhagen, San Diego, Brussels, Cracow, Tokyo, Kwangju, Paris, Darwin and beyond, the project mobilizes a hundred city residents, each representing one per cent of the local population in terms of census categories such as sex, age and occupation, to play themselves and express their views on stage. Berlinbased theatre company Rimini Protokoll works with local social institutions and community groups to bring together casts of non-actors through a ‘chain reaction’ method, each participant selecting a friend or acquaintance, then

Hudson, Chris, and Bart Barendregt (eds): Globalization and Modernity in Asia. Performative Moments. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462981126_ch12

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training them in patterns of movement and visual representation to express their opinions on stage. This ‘staging of metropolitan demographics in a form of “reality theatre”’ (Koczy 2015) is intended to both provide a profile of the city and serve as a ‘community event.’ People from different social, ethnic, economic, and geographic groupings who would not normally have contact with one another are encouraged to interact, express their views, given space to reveal their differences, displaying the diversity of peoples and opinions co-existing within a single urban site. All join in sequences of music and dance celebrating their city. On 30 October and 1 November 2015 in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta, Yogya for short, 100% Yogya was staged as a collaborative production between Rimini Protokoll and local theatre company Teater Garasi. Why Indonesia and why Yogya?1 Why not Jakarta, the capital, or another regional city in Indonesia? The Indonesia connection came about when Rimini Protokoll was invited to participate in a ‘German season’ of arts events and other activities in Indonesia funded by the German government. And Yogya was chosen because Garasi is located there, was the simple response of the Rimini Protokoll team to questions about location. As arguably the leading contemporary theatre group in Indonesia, with extensive international experience, Garasi was well-known to Rimini. Although their own abstract, strongly movement-based productions differed markedly from Rimini’s realist, documentary theatre, the Garasi group was very interested in learning this new style and enthusiastically accepted the invitation to collaborate with them. So the deal was done. Along with these national and international connections, various local factors also make Yogya an attractive site for such a production. An ancient court city and ongoing sultanate, Yogya is also closely involved in national political life and the modern economy; its many, pre-eminent educational institutions attract huge numbers of students from across the archipelago. It has strong Islamic credentials – the first modernist Islamic organization in Indonesia was founded there – and is also a major centre of Catholic religion and education. It has a vibrant arts scene and booming domestic and foreign tourism. Such diversity of population, religious affiliation, economic activity and cultural expression seem likely to ensure an interesting and 1 The off icial name of the city is Yogyakarta, often shortened to Yogya. It is frequently also written as Jogjakarta or Jogja, and usually pronounced in accordance with this spelling. Yogyakarta is also the capital of the Special Region of Yogyakarta (Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta), consisting of four administrative districts or regencies plus the city, with the same status as a province, governed on a hereditary basis by the Sultan of Yogyakarta.

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vibrant show. Moreover, Yogya’s reputation for pluralism and harmonious incorporation of difference – the city itself has been designated a ‘city of tolerance’ and in 2012 the sultan received an award for pluralism – would seem very much in keeping with the aims of the 100% project. Yet how would this modern imagining of the city as a collection of autonomous individual citizens, ‘a group just beginning to experience itself, a choir that has never practiced’ (Rimini Protokoll n.d.a), fit with long-standing, local understandings of group and community? With the concept of ‘neighbourship,’ for example, linking residents of urban lowerclass neighbourhoods (kampungs) embodied in traditional, village-style mutual assistance with ritual events and domestic tasks, collaborative labour and collective decision-making?2 Or with the revered status of the Yogya royal court as a centre of the preservation of Javanese cultural traditions? How effectively would the census, first introduced to Indonesia as part of the global spread of European modernity under Dutch colonialism, defining ‘the way the colonial state imagined its dominion’ (Anderson 2006 p. 164), maintained by the Indonesian nation state for its own purposes of classification and control, work as the basis of display and celebration of a contemporary, individual-based, urban identity? To what extent would Yogya citizens recognize themselves in this globally inflected picture? Developments in recent years problematizing Yogya’s tolerant image presented another potential challenge in staging the show. There had been attacks by Islamic mass organizations on Christian churches and on meetings of the minority Ahmadiyah Islamic sect, bannings of commemorative events focusing on the 1965 anti-communist killings and imprisonments, disruptions to gatherings of the gay, lesbian and transsexual community. The sultan of Yogya, seen as a heroic defender of the people amidst the social upheaval at the end of the Suharto regime, and widely supported in a later campaign to maintain his position as hereditary governor within Yogya as a special administrative district, has assumed a more ambiguous, problematic status in recent years. The introduction in 2012 of a law granting ownership of all non-private land to the palace created much friction with existing residents, as royal families have attempted to develop such land for hotels, mining, and a new airport. How was a theatrical performance to portray the face of Yogya in these circumstances? Would local people be willing to speak out openly on controversial issues? Would they be willing to share personal experiences and problems publicly, given the very restricted nature of such 2 Studies of these social practices in Yogya kampung include Guinness (1986, 2009), Sullivan (1980, 1987) and Sullivan (1994).

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expression in kampung life?3 Would the customary norm of maintaining the appearance of social harmony inhibit them from expressing opposing views to those of other performance participants? Could such an event potentially exacerbate tensions, exposing participants to hostile reaction, rather than celebrating accommodation of difference? In the following pages I give a detailed description and analysis of the staging of the production 100% Yogya, as I observed it over ten days in October 2015 – preparation and casting, the rehearsal process, the format of the performance, the reactions of audience members and media reports, comments on their experiences from some of the participants. Then I draw together evidence from the show to respond specifically to the questions posed above. How well did this globally formulated model for performing urban identity work in the local context for Yogyakarta? In the process of performance, what picture of the city, of social relations and opinions, what indications of recent changes, did it present? Thinking further, into the future, what was its likely social impact?

Preparing the Show Naomi Srikandhi, a long-time member of Teater Garasi, performer, contributing writer and also director of several productions, took on the role of associate director of 100% Yogya, working with the Rimini Protokoll team as directors. Naomi had a special interest in documentary theatre. She explained it as theatre of the real located in a different domain from the abstract, layered symbolic reference typical of Garasi plays. While the Garasi group travelled to Australia in September 2015 to perform their production, The Streets, at the OzAsia festival in Adelaide, Naomi remained in Yogya to work on the mammoth job of casting the production. She oversaw the selection of the hundred participants in the show, and, assisted by the Kunci Cultural Studies Institute and other Garasi members, interviewed each participant to ensure that they fitted the criteria of the statistical profile of Yogyakarta. The basic categories were: sex, religion, family composition and residential location. A further layer of complexity was provided by the additional filters of ethnicity, linguistic and cultural diversity, education, employment and income level. 3 Analysing the operation of groupings or ‘cells’ of female neighbours in the urban neighbourhood she studied, Norma Sullivan observes that the benches outside cell members’ homes where women chat between tasks constitute the only site where private experiences, ‘worries, joys and aspirations’ can be broached: ‘They are generally taboo elsewhere’ (Sullivan 1987, p. 95).

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The first participant, as in all Rimini Protokol 100% productions, was a statistician who provided statistical information about Yogya; he then selected a friend, who selected his young son, who selected an older brother, and the chain continued. It was easy at first, Naomi reported, as anyone chosen fitted into the profile, but for the final participants finding individuals whose characteristics matched the remaining gaps was exceedingly difficult. Where people didn’t have a wide circle of contacts Garasi members would make suggestions; twice a new chain of contacts had to be started. Naomi speaks of the need to bring out ‘hidden categories’ which don’t show up in the statistics, such as the lesbian, gay and transgender people not acknowledged in the figures of 50 per cent male, 50 per cent female. The inclusion of a small, articulate group from the LGBT community presumably reflected Naomi’s own concerns and connections as a declared feminist and gender activist. In the selection interviews, each of which lasted about an hour, participants were asked about their daily activities and hobbies and favourite places in Yogya, and about the things they liked and didn’t like about the city. Then they were invited to suggest questions they would like to put to the other participants. These fed into the process of formulating questions to be addressed to the participants on stage in the performance. The strategy of asking interviewees to frame their own questions helped position them as active contributors to the performance, not simply as respondents to questions put to them (Daulay 2015, p. 26).

Rehearsals Rehearsals comprised the whole cast, along with the Rimini Protokoll directors, Naomi and other Garasi members assisting with translation, organization and stage management, musicians and technicians. Outside these times, Naomi and other Garasi members consulted with individual participants about their contributions and provided advice on expression and dramatic delivery. In the first session I attended, Naomi addressed various questions to the participants to which they responded with a show of hands; later a selected list prepared by the technicians was projected onto the back of the stage and participants gathered on the right or left to indicate their agreement or disagreement with the statements. Stefan Kaegi and Helgard Haug from Rimini Protokoll gave directions in English, which Naomi and fellow Garasi member Rizky Sasono translated into Indonesian for the cast.

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During and after rehearsals there were intense discussions among the directors and assistant director, often including Yudi Tajudin, creative director of Teater Garasi, technical staff and other Garasi members, concerning the questions put to the participants. Should a question about ISIS be included or not? Did juxtaposing questions about communism and religion imply that they are linked as opposing forces, seemingly echoing Indonesian government propaganda? The order and mode of expression of questions was another hot topic, with the directors and assistants huddling together, typing away, making changes. Naomi informed participants about changes to the questions in her notes at the beginning and end of each day’s rehearsals, as well as advising about stage movements and verbal statements. The actors should express their views frankly, not changing their responses to questions even if other cast members voiced different opinions. What they had to say was important; they should share it confidently with the audience. I had the chance to talk to some of the cast in the rehearsal breaks, when they were able to chat together and help themselves to drinks, snacks and later, an evening meal. All spoke positively about their involvement in the production. Family groups (father, mother and one or two children) taking part were very happy to be able to share the experience together. Young people enjoyed meeting up with existing friends and making new ones. Several older women said that being up on stage dancing made them feel young again. A tall, thin woman in her 70s wearing a jilbab (Islamic headdress) reported that she had been imprisoned as a communist in the wave of reprisals against the Communist Party in 1965-1966, and had lived the rest of her life under the shadow of that connection. She felt afraid of the hostile feelings of others; even here there were some who didn’t like her, and she had never been able to join in community events and activities. So the experience of being part of this show was something new and special. Being included in the group and contributing to the overall profile of Yogya, was surely important also to other individuals in marginalized situations – a transgender busker and ex-sex worker from Median, North Sumatra, who came to Yogya after hearing that bisexuals were better accepted in this city than elsewhere; a heavily tattooed American woman married to a local man who reveals during the show that she has been homeless and contemplated suicide; a young blind man; a lively, intelligent young female social worker, Anggiarsari, suffering from dwarfism, who noted a decline in sociability in Yogya ; while mothers had previously forbidden their children to mock her, now they encouraged them to do so. Other participants said they appreciated being able to interact with and learn more about people outside their normal social circles. The proprietor of a popular travellers’ cafe, originally from

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Belgium but long resident in Yogya, endorsed this view, but also reported that she was shocked by some of the opinions expressed, noting that even Christians supported the view that Muslim women should be veiled.

On with the Show Interest in the coming performance had been building in Yogya in the weeks before the show, with good media coverage and a growing buzz around the city. About a week before the show all 2,500 tickets to the two performances were sold out. So a video projection screen was set up in the foyer; as audience members thronged eagerly into the theatre another, smaller crowd gathered to watch the action from afar. As the hundred participants massed at the back of the stage, a single spotlighted figure steps forward to address the audience. He is a tall, slim young man who introduces himself as an official of the provincial statistical office, whose job it is to visit people’s homes and collect information about their lives. Statistics are often regarded as just aggregations of boring facts, but they can reveal very interesting information. He and the other 99 people on stage representing the Yogya population would like to invite the audience to see the faces behind the numbers. He refers to his own profile in the performance booklet, then introduces his friend, an international relations lecturer and fanatic follower of Liverpool football team who introduces his young son, and the snowballing process is underway. We meet many housewives, one waving an eggbeater she refers to as her weapon, and kids who bring their favourite toys or book. A boy who brings along a Lego construction and says he want to be an engineer gets a clap, as does another who wants to become President of Indonesia. There is a silversmith, a solicitor, a tobacco farmer, street vendors, drivers. Some participants sing, explaining music is their hobby; some make a joke about the friend or relative they introduce (my young brother, who takes forever in the shower). Others get laughs by referring to ‘birds,’ a humorous euphemism for penis; a middle-aged man reports that he looks after birds and invites audience members to see him later if they’d like him to take care of theirs. A woman gets a big clap mixed with laughter when she explains that the wooden penis she is holding is not for her own pleasure but to use in her work as a sexual health educator. Amidst the relatively ‘normal-sounding’ stories some are more challenging and thought-provoking. A young man/woman who, although born a girl now lives as a ‘transman,’ waves a rainbow-coloured flag, emblematic of the LGBT community. The young blind man introduces himself, then observes ‘in a

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limited body we don’t need to be limited,’ to extended applause from the audience. A man who describes himself as a nuclear chemistry worker suddenly puts on the white cap of a haji (a returned pilgrim from Mecca) and talks of his work in the local mosque. He brings in a woman in an Islamic headdress, who in turn introduces a young man from her neighbourhood. This man introduces himself as Fuad, a fighter and trainer in martial arts, who has been in the ring hundreds of times but has never lost a match. He is also head of Ka’aba Youth, a radical Islamic movement which has more than 10,000 members in Yogya. The group consistently attacks immorality and activities that defame religion. ‘But in spite of that we love this country.’ he asserts. The final participant, number 100, dressed in a skin-tight white suit, reports that he is a devotee of Elvis who plays rock and roll music at weekends. Combing his slicked-back, Elvis-style hair, he announces: ‘With me 100% Yogya is complete!’ Explaining that he is also a journalist, he recounts an incident where he wrote an article critical of the Yogya mayor’s policy on bicycles. The next day the mayor and his staff arrived at the newspaper office to protest. The incident illustrates the ongoing dilemma of journalists. They need to be critical but don’t know how far they can go. It’s a gamble, he suggests, and the actors begin to move around in a circle as a giant roulette wheel with their images imposed upon it is projected overhead. ‘We are Yogya,’ it is announced. ‘We are a statistical cross-section of many population categories.’ A following segment then highlights and problematizes several of these categories.

Social Categories and Their Implications A statement that they represent Yogya in comprising 50 per cent registered males and 50 per cent females sees the participants divide into male and female groups. Then Cenny, the transgender busker from North Sumatra, steps forward to say that she was seventeen when she realized she had been born with the wrong body. Differently gendered people are treated like a disease. ‘Raise your hand if you feel restricted by the gender divide,’ she asks, and hands go up from both male and female groups. The issue of age prompts celebration, as the oldest person present, a lively 90-year-old woman, takes a step forward for each decade in her life, then sings a song about finding a sweetheart, a sergeant major in the air force, a flying hero. On place of residence, participants cheer as the names of their areas of the city are called out, again in celebratory mode. But when a young woman states she no longer feels safe moving around these districts at night,

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about a third of the cast indicate they feel the same way. Ethnic origin is displayed through dance, as participants representing the percentage of the Yogya population from their region dance to a typical song from that area. The mood is festive, while the contrast between one lone Papuan, another man from Eastern Indonesia, a few people from other regions and no less than 92 Javanese is striking and thought-provoking. A portrait of the city over a 24-hour period is presented, as in 100% shows in other cities. Cast members mime a great range of activities – cooking, typing, reading, busking, phone texting, riding a motor bike, repeatedly performing Islamic prayers. Yogya is seen on the move very early in the morning, with residents shown praying and bathing from 4 am and on the road to work or school before 7. But the performance also shows many young people still dancing and partying at 2 am.

The Questioning Begins For the first series of questions one cast member steps forward and asks who has experienced a particular phenomenon or agrees with a certain statement. Others gather under the words ‘I’ and ‘not I’ (Saya/bukan saya) projected against the back wall. Queries about residence in the city – ‘Who was born and raised in Yogya?’ ‘Who still lives in the house where they grew up?’ – are followed by the more controversial ‘Who thinks that the neighbourhood association intrudes too much in their private life?’ Many, perhaps 40 of the 100 participants, agree. Then come some issues of religion: ‘Who prays routinely?’ sees people divide into approximately equal groups. About one-third of participants are in favour of implementation of syariah Islamic law; a somewhat smaller group would like to see the issue of religion removed from citizens’ identity cards. Most people indicate they prefer shopping in traditional markets rather than big shopping malls. The old woman accused of communist involvement in 1965 comes forward and tells of her experiences, how her imprisonment without trial for three years changed her life. When she asks who thinks the Indonesian president should make an official apology to the victims of 1965, there is murmuring and some clapping from the audience, suggesting agreement and perhaps commendation of her bravery in speaking out. But only a minority of other cast members indicate their support. More people identify with the following question ‘Who feels threatened by communism?’ On other political issues, about two-thirds of participants think the current government should be investigated for corruption. Only a few indicate

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agreement with the takeover of citizens’ land in the Kulonprogo area to build a new airport, a controversial and divisive issue pitting long-term residents against royal families claiming traditional ownership of the land and wishing to develop it. Regarding religion, morality and individual behaviour, the question is posed: ‘Who thinks Muslim women should be obliged to wear the jilbab Islamic headdress in public?’ About two-thirds indicate agreement. When the question ‘Who has tried illegal drugs?’ elicits only three positive responses, a woman participant states that she doesn’t believe this result, the numbers are surely larger, and suggests that the lights be switched off. In the ensuing blackness the participants switch on little torches to indicate positive responses. The question about drug use is repeated and around 20 lights flash. Questions about sexuality which participants would not dare to answer openly see many lights go on – over 20 indicate they have cheated on a partner, around 25 agree that sex before marriage is acceptable. Only about five admit to having had a romantic moment with someone of the same gender, and seven or eight that they or their partner has had an abortion. But the question ‘Who has a crush on one of the other 99 in the cast?’ is greeted by an outburst of flashing lights, perhaps 35-40, and gasps and laughter from the crowd. While the picture created here is startling, perhaps shocking, yet also amusing to audience members, the response to the next question is more sobering. When asked ‘Who dislikes one of the other 99 participants?’ many participants flash their torches. In a following segment, adults are banished from the stage and the children come forward. One states ‘l will look after my parents when they are old’ and his companions gather round him in support. But the boy who says ‘I want to be like my parents’ stands alone; no one joins him.

Competition, Celebration, Critique When one teenage boy says he’s very competitive and challenges others to a race, a finishing line is set up and all participants take part. A push-up competition follows and then a series of dance displays. Older women and children perform poco-poco, a traditional dance from Sulawesi popularized for fun and exercise among women’s groups. The question ‘Who can goyang dangdut?’4 sees most of the cast swaying to the beat of dangdut, a hugely popular musical form blending 4 Goyang dangdut refers to the vigorous hip-swaying movements (goyang meaning literally ‘sway’) performed by dangdut singers, and by many audience members in response to the infectious beat of the music.

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Malay and Middle Eastern elements with Western pop and rock; teenagers and young adults are the starring exponents of Korean wave ‘Gangnam style.’ The festive mood flows on in celebratory questions about Yogya: ‘Who came to Yogya looking for freedom?’ ‘Who thinks that Yogya deserves to be special?’ Many people raise their hands, and the audience applauds. But then the glowing image is queried with questions such as: ‘Who thinks that Yogya is not a city of tolerance anymore?’ and later ‘Who thinks there are racists among those on stage?’ A segment of interaction with the audience follows. Asked if they know anyone in the crowd, almost all participants raise their hands. The lights go up on the viewers, and an actor asks them ‘Who feels represented by us?’ A sea of hands goes up and he exclaims happily, ‘Oh, lots, 90%!’ Then audience members are given the opportunity to question the actors. When a woman student asks who has problems with newcomers (pendatang) to Yogya, the fundamentalist Islamic leader Fuad raises his hand high and two others also indicate agreement. A later question about who has problems with LGBT people in Yogya sees Fuad respond first, followed by several others.

Tough Questions, Revealing Answers After moving around in response to reconfigurations of categories, participants gather back on stage to face a series of questions posed in a new format involving alternative answers projected on to the back of the stage. The answers are colour coded so that actors hold up cards of the appropriate colour to indicate their responses. The topics are weighty and controversial, for example: ‘How do you express political outrage – in social media, demonstrations, coffee shops; by boycotting elections, shouting at the TV?’ ‘What is the media most biased about – religious violence, sexual violence, government policies, corporations versus the people? What should the sultan do – respect old rules, refuse the special funds, hand over power to his daughter, the governorship of Yogya should be decided through election, live forever’? Answers to the first question seem to be fairly evenly divided. The media is seen as most biased in relation to government policies, then religious and sexual violence. On the hot topic of opinions of the sultan, only four people show support for his proposal to change the rule of male succession to allow his oldest daughter to replace him, in the absence of sons. Opposition to this idea seems implied in many responses that he should respect the old rules. Meanwhile many people express agreement that the governor of Yogya should be chosen by election

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What should the government stop first, alcohol consumption, traffic jams, corruption, fundamentalist groups, forrest burning? Corruption is the top priority for most people; six are most concerned about fundamentalist groups, and three with alcohol. Two questions focus on people arriving in Yogya and Indonesia more generally from elsewhere. ‘What should we do about those coming to Yogya from Eastern Indonesia – accept their customs, send them back, demand that they adapt, ask them to learn Javanese, concentrate them in one place?’ Most people respond that that these people should be made to adapt, some think they should be asked to learn Javanese. Only six support accepting their customs; Fuad raises his card high to assert they should be sent back.

Shared Personal Experiences The final segment of the show focuses on personal circumstances and experiences. On economic matters, a tiny number indicate they make money through investment; a much larger group asserts ‘we work for a living’ and many acknowledge ‘we are in debt: more than a little.’ A few say they are afraid of the future, among them the American woman, Taarna, Cenny the busker and tiny Anggiasari. A much bigger group, including Taarna and Cenny again, the transgendered man and the Papuan, Fuad the Islamic leader and a number of women in jilbab headdresses, identify themselves as having broken the law. A few reveal they have been in gaol, including the elderly woman imprisoned as a communist and the young male drug addict. Most participants signal they are in favour of the death penalty; smaller numbers indicate that they would kill to defend their family and their city. Around 20 participants state they are looking for a partner, including Cenny, Anggiasari, the Papuan student, the young blind man. A sizeable group indicate they are afraid of marrying outside their religion. The sex educator brings her young daughter on stage under a sign reading ‘We have HIV/AIDS.’ Many audience members applaud, in sympathy and admiration of her bravery in speaking out. Seven people reveal they have considered taking their own lives. Finally the cast comes on stage in groups according to expectations of lifespan – I won’t be here in ten years, 20 years, 50 years, and so on – until a point where everyone, even the youngest and most optimistic, will be gone. But rather than reflecting sombre concern at this thought, their faces light up with eager anticipation. Thumping music sounds and members of the group The Jogja Hip Hop Foundation appear to perform their rap anthem

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‘Jogja Ora di Dol!’ (Yogya is not for sale!). The song, composed in response to a popular protest movement against capitalist development in the city, mobilizing artists and environmental activists, waged vigorously on social media,5 is familiar to many cast members. They wave energetically, move right and left and imitate the gestures of the singers who angrily point out offending new developments ‘malls in bright lights’ ‘tall billboards bridging the streets,’ ‘rice fields turned to housing.’ Swaying with the rhythm, the actors sing along with the words: Hey, return my city, hey, that’s not yours Not only yours who own capital

They project a sense of shared entitlement, confident assertion of rights and pride in their own city. The final lines of the song sum up the whole message and mood of the performance: Our home for everyone Yogya is not for sale This is my city, this is your city Our home for all of us

Lights go on, cast members bow and audience members applaud loud and long, rising to give a standing ovation. Many move to the front of the theatre to take photos and congratulate the participants. The show is over.

Reactions, Reviews, Reflections Public response to the production was enthusiastic. Audience members interviewed leaving the theatre described it as ‘brilliant and touching’ and ‘a political education for citizens that made complex issues easy to 5 The arrest of a mural artist in October 2013 for rewriting ‘Jogya ora didol’ on a wall after his original words had been erased brought the slogan and the sentiments it expressed to widespread attention. Issues such as the drying up of Yogya’s water table due to the erection of high-rise hotels and defacement of the city’s streetscape by huge advertising billboards were the subject of much comment in public statements and postings on Twitter and Facebook. The hip hop group The Jogja Hip Hop Foundation, whose hit song ‘Jogja Istimewa’ (Yogya is special) had earlier featured prominently in the campaign to maintain Yogya’s special administrative status, in April 2014 released ‘Jogja Ora Didol,’ which likewise quickly became very popular. See Dwi Widayanti (2013) and https://jogjaoradidol.tumblr.com/.

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understand’ and revealed things about Yogya that the viewer had not known, as can be seen in the video recording of 100% Yogya (Rimini Protokoll n.d.b). Media coverage of 100% Yogya was extensive and positive. Press reviews described the show as a success, with such accolades as: ‘a fascinating piece of documentary theatre’ (Wahyuni 2015); ‘an innovative development of the Rimini Protokoll concept by Garasi Theatre’ (Kompasiana 2015); ‘surprising, also funny, and moving’ (Kedaulatan Rakyat 2015). The fact that the cast had no acting background and were simply playing themselves, is seen to have produced a portrait of Yogya just as it is, as close to reality as possible (Suara Merdeka 2015), while the addition of artistic elements made the presentation of quantitative data more dynamic and engaging for the audience (Junianto 2015). Reviewers comment positively on the straightforward, unabashed way participants expressed criticism of their city, including suggesting the municipal government is full of corruption and needs replacing (Kompasiana 2015). Stefan Kaegi of Rimini Protokoll is quoted explaining that the project aims to ‘show the audience that very different opinions could be brought together and that people could ask questions that may be considered taboo or offensive. It is OK to agree or disagree. This is a democratic process.’ Helgard Haug reportedly found the most interesting aspect of the Yogya performance the religious questions raised and addressed, something not experienced in other 100% productions (Wahyuni 2015). 100% Yogya is said to have not only staged present-day life in Yogya but also provided ‘a mirror to question the true reality of Yogya and Indonesia’ (Kompasiana 2015). The strengths of the production identified in these comments are clearly illustrated in the description of the performance and its preparation provided above. Real-life stories and factual information can be seen combined with ‘artistic elements’ to great effect in the lively, humorous ways cast members introduced themselves and one another, and in their confidence and articulate expression in voicing their questions. Individual coaching from Garasi members as experienced Yogya-based actors contributed crucially in this regard. In other productions the Rimini Protokoll team, working directly with local actors unknown to them by name, had to convey instructions to individuals within general notes to the cast – ‘number 30 please look at your friend when you introduce her’; ‘number 55 speak louder and more clearly.’ Here a personal approach avoided public mention of flaws, while nurturing individual skills, and giving participants a sense of their importance to the project. The process of formulation of questions, with issues raised in discussion with the participants reviewed by the Rimini Protokoll and Garasi teams, then tailored for thematic coherence, social implication and dramatic effect, likewise pictured social reality in an

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engaging, artistically satisfying way. Here, too, the input of Garasi members, with their acute understanding of local social and political conditions, was vital. Meanwhile sequences of music, movement and dance were skilfully integrated into the show, providing entertainment while also illustrating themes. Thus participants from different regions performed representative dances, age diversity was signalled by the 90-year-old woman singing, and music and dance sequences differentiated between the traditional cultural practices of older people, dangdut as a blended form, popular with all age groups, and the globally wired skills and tastes of the young. The inclusion of questions about personal experience, along with those on socio-political topics, allowed room for cast members of varying ages and backgrounds to feel represented and to have a voice. Might those revealing they have contemplated suicide or broken the law, or are currently searching for a partner, feel a sense of commonality with people sharing this experience, even those from very different backgrounds to their own? Participants with particular talents to demonstrate or gripes to raise got the chance to do so. Individuals in marginalized positions in everyday life such as the blind man, the girl suffering dwarfism, the transgender busker, the mother and child with HIV/AIDs, were very much part of the whole, receiving sympathetic attention both from the audience and in reports of the show. Such emphasis on personal expression and experience fits the picture of Yogya as a modern urban conglomeration of diverse individuals, rather than a series of traditionally structured communities bound by a collective sense of identity. Indications are given during the show of a shift away from traditional patterns of interaction and conceptions of community. For many participants, customary social expectations and responsibilities, as represented by the local neighbourhood organization, are seen to intrude into individual affairs. Established behavioural models have seemingly lost their hold on the younger generation: only one of the children in the show says he wants to grow up like his parents. That cast members openly voice contrasting opinions on controversial issues to those of their companions likewise suggests a modern-minded acceptance of the admissibility of difference. And their views show little inhibition by traditional rules of respect. The frank critique of government corruption is notable, as is the strong support for the governor of Yogya to be elected rather than the sultan holding the position permanently, and opposition to changing the succession rules to allow the sultan’s daughter to succeed him. Some of the sentiments expressed contrast sharply, however, with the pluralist acceptance of difference central to the ideal model of a modern city, and with Yogya’s own reputation for tolerance. The enforced conformism

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conveyed in the demand that those who come to the city from Eastern Indonesia should be made to adapt to local ways is echoed in the agreement by the majority of participants that Muslim women should be obliged to wear the jilbab headcovering. Meanwhile many participants describe the ongoing modernization and urbanization of Yogya in negative terms, singling out the chaotic traffic, too many hotels, and giant shopping malls replacing traditional markets. Nearly two-thirds of the comments about Yogya in the performance booklet describe declining conditions, arguing that the city is too crowded, no longer calm and peaceful (in Javanese ayem lan tentrem, the ideal state of public affairs and daily life), too expensive, unsafe, especially at night, and crowded with undisciplined drivers and messy traffic. Yogya, residents feel, is becoming more and more like Jakarta. Yet they love their city for all its faults. Singing and dancing together along with the Jogya Hip Hop Foundation, they assert a shared sense of pride and ownership and determined resistance to disruptive change from outside. The joyous, celebratory ending of the performance confirms its portrayal of Yogya as a diverse, dynamic city, and its citizens as people of interesting and varied preoccupations and talents, with some shared opinions and some clashing stances, somehow contained within the whole.

Concluding Observations The global model of the 100% city show applied to Yogya had clearly worked well, resonating meaningfully with local social conditions. Participants had felt involved, audience members represented. The performance pictured a city undergoing complex transitions; local neighbourhoods and practices adjusting to a modern urban imaginary encompassing diversity and difference, absorbing global cultural flows, even as forces such as resurgent Islam and regional cultural/political divisions worked to contain diversity and impose conformity.6 Guided by members of the Garasi theatre group and their Rimini Protokoll mentors, cast members enjoyed expressing their ideas, feelings and opinions within this context. Despite being startled at their first encounter with others who held very different ideas to their 6 Patrick Guinness gives a factual account of the processes suggested theatrically here, describing the way young people’s involvement with global popular music styles and consumer goods was incorporated into the life of the Yogya kampung of Ledok during the early 2000s, and how, by 2004, adherence to orthodox religious practice had strengthened markedly, with traditional lifecycle ritual celebrations replaced, for example, by Islamic prayers (Guinness 2009, pp. 141-150, 158-169).

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own, they all adjusted to interacting with each other. Supporters of syariah law had shared the stage with gays and transsexuals, and advocates of a presidential apology to victims of anti-communist repression stood alongside those fearful of resurgent communism. Audiences enjoyed the show and identified with it, while learning new facts and gaining fresh insights into their city. In a noteworthy theatrical moment, 100% Yogya had fulfilled its dual mission of providing a profile of the city and mobilizing residents in an important community event. Global and local had come together, the global model illuminating the local, providing a framework for its celebration. Yet the production indeed represented just one moment in the ongoing life of the city. Some of the participants expressed interest in follow-up activities, wanting to continue the momentum of the show and maintain contact with new acquaintances. But their mentors and trainers, members of Teater Garasi and Rimini Protokoll, had moved on to other globally connected projects. While Rimini took the 100% city performance to other cities and countries, Garasi restaged their production Yang Fana itu Waktu, Kita Abadi (Time is transient, we are eternal), depicting members of an Indonesian family absorbed in dreams of Hollywood stardom and universalist Islamist fantasies, then worked with a Japanese director on an international performance project re-interpreting the Mahabharata epic. Meanwhile in Yogya, several major social clashes challenged the picture of containment of difference that the 100% Yogya production had projected, at the same time confirming the sites of social division the performance had exposed. Homosexuality and gay rights was one site of conflict. In February 2016 a planned pro-gay rights rally at the Tugu monument in Central Yogya was blocked by police and confronted by a rival demonstration by the Islamic People’s Front, Forum Umat Islam (FUI) (Faizal 2016; Wicaksono 2016). Head of the FUI and leader of the action, Muhammad Fuad, was a participant in the 100% Yogya performance mentioned several times in the description of the show. Fuad is quoted in press reports condemning homosexuality as a disease which if legalized would spread and infect other citizens (Wicaksono 2016). In May, police and members of an anti-communist mass organization forced the cancellation of a planned showing of a documentary film about Buru Island, where people accused of communist involvement were imprisoned when the right-wing Suharto government took power in 1965-1966 (Hidayah and Santo 2016). In mid-July came an ugly outpouring of racist feeling against Papuan students in Yogya, when police and mass organizations blockaded the students’ dormitory to prevent a planned peaceful

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march in support of the organization United Liberation Movement for West Papua being incorporated into a wider grouping of Melanesian countries. Members of the mass organizations brandished weapons and yelled racist insults at the students. A flood of comments followed in the press and social media that labelled Papuan students as socially disruptive drunkards, with many suggesting that they should simply go home (Kusumadewi 2016), as the actor Fuad had done in the 100% show. A review article reporting the recent anti-Papuan attacks and listing other incidents of social friction since 2010 argues that such events threaten Yogya’s status as a ‘city of tolerance.’ It highlights the actions of the FUI, led by Muhammad Fuad, and includes a photo of Fuad as he appeared on stage in 100% Yogya. The caption explains how the performance represented Yogya’s diversity, including differing ideologies, and reports that Fuad was ‘picked as the representative of the city’s hard-line groups’ (Muryanto 2016). Thus the one reference to the 100% Yogya production in recent public discourse cites its representation of intolerant views, in the person of Muhammad Fuad. Of the other 99 participants, their contributions to the show and what has happened to them nothing is said. What the experiences and images of 100% Yogya may have meant for participants and viewers in the longer term, whether they have inspired further involvement in performance activities, fostered inclusive attitudes and local engagement, or faded into disillusionment as incidents of intolerance in the city rise in number we cannot know. And yet… In mid-2017 reports came in of police in Yogya blocking attacks by Islamic radicals on a demonstration in support of pluralism, while urging citizens to report any dissemination of hatred (Muryanto 2017; Maharani 2017). Muhammad Fuad’s Facebook account suddenly became inactive. Might one imagine here resonance of the spirit of 100% Yogya? Fostering attitudes of tolerance among the general public which have encouraged such developments? Might there be further acts in the show still to come?

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict (2006) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. London: Verso. Daulay, Fiki (2015) ‘Diantara Warga dan Panggung Kota’ [In between the citizens and the city stage]. In 100% Yogya (performance booklet), 24-30.

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Dwi Widayanti (2013) ‘Jogja Ora Didol, Jogja Not for Sale.’ Kompasiana, 13 October. http://www.kompasiana.com/dwiwida/jogja-ora-didol-jogja-not-for-sale​ _552e1bb16ea8342a3b8b45bf. Faizal, Elly Burhaini (2016) ‘LGBT Supporters in Yogyakarta Prohibited from Staging Rally.’ The Jakarta Post, 25 February. http://www.thejakartapost.com/ news/2016/02/25/lgbt-supporters-in-yogyakarta-prohibited-from-staging-rally.html. Guinness, Patrick (1986) Harmony and Hierarchy in a Javanese Kampung. Singapore: Oxford University Press. Guinness, Patrick (2009) Kampung, Islam and State in Urban Java. Singapore: Asian Studies Association of Australia in association with NUS Press. Hidayah, Kurniatul, and Santo, Ari (2016) ‘Kronologi Pembubaran Paksa Pemutaran Film “Pulau Buru Tanah Air Beta” di Yogyakarta.’ Kompas, 4 May http:// regional.kompas.com/read/2016/05/04/05153321/Kronologi.Pembubaran.Paksa. Pemutaran.Film.Pulau.Buru.Tanah.Air.Beta.di.Yogyakarta. Junianto, Ari (2015) ‘100 Orang Jogja Wakili Jogja di 100% Yogyakarta.’ Harian Yogya, 9  November. http://www.harianjog ja.com/baca/2015/11/09/ pentas-teater-100-orang-jogja-wakili-jogja-di-100-yogyakarta-659355. Kedalautan Rakyat (2015) ‘Yogya, Kota Paling Pagi Beraktivitas.’ Kedalautan Rakyat, 1 November. Koczy, Daniel (2015) ‘Faces behind the Numbers: Rimini Protokoll and Daniel Koczy Discuss 100% City.’ Contemporary Theatre Review 25.2. https://www. contemporarytheatrereview.org/2015/rimini-protokoll-100-percent-city/. Kompasiana (2015) ‘100% Yog yakar ta dan Suara Lantang Warga Yogya di Jerman Fest.’ Kompasiana, 2 November. http://www.kompasiana.com/ wardhanahendra/100-yogyakarta-dan-suara-lantang-warga-yogya-di-jermanfest-2015_5636a9ac139373f50ad3a623. Kusumadewi, Anggi (2016) ‘Kisah Mahasiswa Papua di Yogya Dua Hari Terkurung di Asrama.’ CNN Indonesia, 17 July. http://www.cnnindonesia.com/ nasional/20160717064356-20-145189/kisah-mahasiswa-papua-di-yogya-duahari-terkurung-di-asrama. Maharani, Shinta (2017) ‘Six Arrested after Trying to Disband Rally for Ahok in Yogyakarta.’ Tempo.Co, 11 May. https://en.tempo.co/read/news/2017/05/11/055874360/ Six-Arrested-after-Trying-to-Disband-Rally-for-Ahok-in-Yogyakarta. Muryanto. Bambang (2016) ‘Intolerance Stains Yogyakarta’s Melting Pot Image.’ The Jakarta Post, 15 August. http://www.thejakartapost.com/longform/2016/08/19/ intolerance-stains-yogyas-melting-pot-image.html. Muryanto. Bambang (2017) ‘Six Troublemakers Arrested during Yogya Pro-Ahok Rally.’ The Jakarta Post, 11 May. http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/05/11/ six-troublemakers-arrested-during-yogya-pro-ahok-rally.html.

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Rimini Protokoll (n.d.a) ‘100% Berlin.’ http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/ en/project/100-prozent-berlin. Rimini Protokoll (n.d.b) ‘100% Yogyakarta | Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel.’ https://vimeo. com/163701574. Suara Merdeka (2015) ‘Pertunjukan 100 Persen Sukses.’ Suara Merdeka, 2 November. http://berita.suaramerdeka.com/pertunjukan-100-persen-yogyakarta-sukses/. Sullivan, John (1980) ‘Back Alley Neighbourhood: Kampung as Urban Community in Yogyakarta.’ Working Paper no 18. Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University. Sullivan, John (1987) Local Government and Community in Java: An Urban Case Study. Singapore: Oxford University Press. Sullivan, Norma (1994) Managers and Masters: A Study of Gender Relations in Urban Java. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin. Wahyuni, Sri (2015) ‘100% Yogyakarta: Portrait of a City on the Stage.’ The Jakarta Post, 4 November. http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2015/11/04/100-yogyakarta-portrait-a-city-stage.html#sthash.FNsPrUyg.dpuf. Wicaksono, Bambang (2016) ‘Massa FUI Hadang Demo Pendukung LGBT di Tugu Yogya.’ Tempo, 23 February. https://m.tempo.co/read/news/2016/02/23/058747549/ massa-fui-hadang-demo-pendukung-lgbt-di-tugu-yogya.

About the Author Barbara Hatley, after a long career teaching Indonesian studies at Monash University, then at the University of Tasmania, is now Professor Emeritus in Asian Studies at the University of Tasmania. Her major research interests are in Indonesian performing arts, modern literature and gender studies. Barbara’s publications include Javanese Performances on an Indonesian Stage: Contesting Culture, Embracing Change (NUS Press, 2008), Theatre and Performance in the Asia Pacific: Regional Modernities in the Global Era, co-authored with Denise Varney, Peter Eckersall and Chris Hudson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and an edited volume on performance in postSuharto Indonesia: Performing Contemporary Indonesia: Celebrating Locality, Constructing Community (Brill, 2015). Email: [email protected]

Index 100% Berlin 24, 215 100% Yogya 24, 215 11 June 2002 installation 71-73, 81-82, 85-87 1965 anti-Communist reprisals 217 9/11 20, 72, 85-86 Aaj Tak 117 Abdullah, Zoohir 118 Activism 90, 170, 176, 180, 189 Adulthood 204 Advertising 36, 83, 109 Aesthetics 14, 16, 19, 22-23, 59, 72-73, 75, 79, 81, 86, 111, 163, 169, 180-181, 187, 201, 203 Afghanistan 77 Aksara, Wayan 41-42 Al Arqam 185-186 Al Farabi, Abu Nasr 184 Al Farabi Band 170-171, 182-185, 188 Alienation 64, 68, 198 All About My Car, Honey 110 Anand, Ambika 114 Angklung 137 Anonymous 52, 189 Anthropology 13 Antonio Blanco Museum 41, 44 Appadurai, Arjun 14, 22, 131, 140, 142-146, 150, 156 Appiah, Kwame A. 197 Apps 19, 37, 43, 51-52 Aquino III, Benigno 139, 141, 144 Arab Spring 181, 189 Arahmaiani 20, 71-72, 81-85 Art house cinema 199 Art installation 159 Artaud, Antonin 36 Architecture 41, 46, 135, 178 Artivism 178 Asia-n 11-12, 15-18, 23, 27, 36, 52, 55, 73, 89, 91, 101, 105, 129-130, 135, 140, 146, 152, 154, 168-169, 175, 202, 218, 234 Globalized Asia 18 ‘New Asia’ 18 Asia Research Institute 89, 91, 105 Asian Values 18 Aspirational Advisors 110 Aspirationalism 21, 108-109, 114, 120 Assemblage 17, 57, 182, 191, 197 Assolatuwassalam 171 Astrology 117 Astro Uncle 117-118, 123 Athens 215 Australia-Indonesia Institute 150 Authenticity 22, 32, 36, 48, 187 Authoritarianism 101

Bakhtin, Mikhail 164 Ballet Philippines 144 Bali 19, 35-41, 43-53 Bao Jingjing 200 BaliSpirit Festival 37 Banda Kawayan 130, 137, 141, 144 Band Baajaa Bride (BBB) 110, 114, 123 Bandung 75, 81 Bank Indonesia Yogyakarta 75 Barisan Nasional (National Front) 179 Barisan Socialis (Socialist Front) 95-96, 102 Bateson, Gregory 36 Baudelaire, Charles 78 Bayanihan Philippines National Folk Dance Company 32, 133, 145 Beijing 23, 93, 131, 196-197, 200-204, 208, 210 Beijing Film Academy 200 Beijing Olympics 131 Belo, Jane 36 Belonging 13, 20-21, 89-90, 156 Beck, Ulrich 11, 116 Benjamin, Walter 20, 73-75, 78, 81-82, 85-87 Berlin 24, 72, 215 Bersih Movement 181 Bhabha, Homi 152, 162-163, 165 Bigg Boss 113 Books 21, 64, 93, 97-98, 196 Bookshops 98 Bourdieu, Pierre 108, 115 Branding 61, 176, 185 Brunei 174 Brussels International Exposition 133 Buddhism 36 Butler, Judith 13 Calligraphy 71-73 Calma, Ed 131-132, 135, 141, 146 Canada 72, 81-82 Capitalism 15, 19, 59-60, 63, 65, 67-68, 95, 164, 174, 180, 184, 189, 198 Capitalist deterritorialization 19, 57-58 Carnival 164-165, 182 Caste 108, 114-115, 122 Carlson, Marvin 13 Celebrity chefs 107-108 Censorship 21, 89, 92, 98-99, 102-103 Ceremony 38-43 Chandra, Vikram 111 Chawla, Puneet 118 Chelfitsch 19, 63, 65 Childhood 20, 75 China 23, 131, 133, 142-143, 195-198, 200-204, 207, 210-211, 213 Chinese ancestry 131

236  Chinese Communist Party 95 Chinese language 97 China’s Single’s Day 200 Cinema 23, 199, 204 Citizenship 107-108, 111, 123 Class 109-110, 112-113, 118-120, 122-123, 141, 175, 178, 181, 184, 186, 204-205, 207 Clifford, James 156 Clothing 184 Coca Cola 83-84 Cold War 95, 99 Colonialism 15, 31, 217 Commercialism 23, 31, 169-170, 189 Commodification 164, 176 Communism 20-21, 89-90, 92-99, 101-102, 217, 220, 223, 226, 231 (neo-)Confucianism 101 Conrad, Joseph 162-163 Consumerism 19, 65, 109, 115, 120, 202 Consumer-citizenship 111 Consumption 111-112, 126-127, 130, 141, 143, 146, 176, 195, 200-203, 207, 210, 226 Contamination 32, 190, 197, 206 Contemporary art 71-73 Contemporary dance 135, 159 Copenhagen 215 Corporeal 150, 156, 175 Corruption 48, 226, 228-229 Cosmopolitanism 17, 110, 156 Cosmopolitan turn 17 Cultural capital 16, 111-112, 123 Cultural intensity 18, 24 Cultural Revolution 208 Curators 72, 111, 133 Cuteness 195, 207, 211 Daddy’s Day In 110 Dance 132-133, 135, 144-145, 154, 158-161, 216, 223-224, 229 Dangdut 182, 224, 229 Darwin 215 Decolonization 95, 97, 102-103, 105 Deleuze, Gilles 182 Democracy 102 Design 61, 114, 118, 129-130, 133, 135, 139-140, 144, 146, 199 Detention 83, 90, 95-97 Dhyan Pragya (Meditation Knowledge) 121 Dhikr akbar 181 Discourse 13, 15, 30, 35, 85, 113, 120, 123, 163, 174, 179, 189, 201, 232 Discrimination 84 Diaspora 20, 135, 145 (Self) Discipline 14, 122, 164, 175 Dirt 195, 197, 199-200, 207, 210-211 Dissidents 95 Documentary film 91-94, 96, 231 Doraemon 211 Douglas, Mary 197

GLOBALIZATION AND MODERNIT Y IN ASIA

Drugs 204, 224 Durano, Joseph 144 DVD 91 Dystopia-n 19, 64-65, 85 Eat, Pray, Love 35-36, 47-51, 53 Economy 15, 19, 24, 50, 60 Bubble economy 60 Convenience economy 57-58 Edutainment 182 Eisenstadt, Schmuel 15, 17, 198 Elections 18, 170, 179, 225 Elite 21, 110, 116, 120, 139, 142, 145 Embodied expertise 108 England 184 English language usage 187 Entrepreneurs 35-36, 46, 50 Entertainment 113, 116, 123, 174, 181, 186, 229 Ethnicity 34, 142-143 Ethnographic objects 22, 135, 137 Ethnoscape 140-143 European Enlightenment, also Western Enlightenment 15, 23, 48-49, 53, 198 Exhibition 12, 72, 89-90, 92-93, 98-99 Exile 20 Exoticism 19, 35-37, 40, 48, 51-53, 138 Expats 35, 40, 48 Facebook 170, 186-187, 227, 232 Family 23, 44, 52, 60, 64, 101, 114, 116, 118, 123, 142, 199, 201, 203, 205-207, 209-210, 218, 220, 226, 231 Fang Lijun 200 Fashion 21, 36, 108, 110, 112, 114-115, 169, 180, 182, 191, 196, 198-199, 211 Fashion TV 110 Federation Square and Arts Centre Melbourne 150, 154 Festival 22, 37, 90, 92, 103, 149-150, 154, 157, 159-161, 163-164, 196, 200, 218 Filipino Chinese 131 Filipinoness 131 Film 90, 92, 98, 103, 200 Financescapes 140, 143 Flag-flying ceremony 179 Flash mob 18, 23, 169-174, 176-184, 187-188, 190-191 Flash mob for Palestine 190 Flash mob for Syria 172 Malaysia Airlines Missing You Flash Mob 177 Folk Arts Theatre 145 Food 22, 42, 51, 58, 61-62, 64-65, 111, 132, 138, 149-150, 152-154, 157-161, 179, 182, 185, 206 Fortune teller 116 France 141 Freedom 21, 84, 89 Freedom Film Festival Johor 90, 92, 103 Forum Umat Islam (FUI, Islamic People’s Front) 231 Fundamentalism 32, 102, 225-226

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Future 20, 22, 39, 60, 74, 104, 130, 133, 145, 184, 201, 203-204, 206, 208-209, 218, 226 Gadget Guru 108, 111-112, 123 Gandhi, Amrita 123, 111-113, 123 Gaonkar, Dilip. P. 15 Gaza 77, 182-183 Gender 23, 38, 62, 85, 108, 115, 174, 195, 199-200, 203, 205, 219, 222, 224 Giddens, Anthony 153, 161 Gilbert, Elizabeth 36, 48-49 Globalization 11, 14-17, 21, 29-33, 37, 57, 60, 63-65, 165, 174-175, 180 Internal globalization 21, 165 Grobak (mobile Indonesian food carts) 22, 150-151, 153-159, 162-165 Grobak Padi, also Gerobak Padi 149, 156-157, 159, 161-162 Goffman, Erving 13 Goodbye Dragon Inn 204 Governance 98, 175 Governmentality 122, 175 Grindr 19, 35, 37, 51-53 Guigona, Bart 144 Guimi 202 Gunawan, Agung 154, 159-160, 164 Habib Syech 181 Halal 176, 178, 185 Halal chic 176 Handicrafts 139-140 Harlem Shake 177 Haug, Helgard 219, 228 Hazamin 171 Heart of Darkness 162 Heavy Petting 110 Hegemony 184 Hello Kitty 211 Heritage 72, 99 Heterosexuality 199 He Yong 196, 211 Higher education 98 Hijjaz 171, 185-186 Hindi language use 113, 115-119, 124 Hinduism 38 History 20-21, 30, 59, 73-75, 78, 82-83, 85-87, 90, 92-93, 95, 97-99, 101-104, 111, 129, 132, 141, 154, 162, 164, 181 Critical history 74, 86-87 Counter histories 92-93, 96-97 Ur-history 75, 86-87 HIV Aids 226, 229 Homophobia 24 Homosexuality 199, 231 Hong Kong 23, 195, 197-198, 207-209, 211 Hong Lim Park 99 Hornblow, Michael 157-160 Human potential movement 36 Humour 72, 111

Identity 32, 38-39, 41, 52, 120, 154, 162-163, 189, 195, 217-218, 223, 229 Cosmopolitan Identity 123 Local identity 108 National identity 179 Ideoscape 140, 145 Imagination 14, 29, 35-36, 38, 98, 129-131, 157, 165, 199 Imagined community 131 Imagined past 22, 133 Imagined worlds 124 Imaginary 21, 30, 32, 130-133, 138, 190, 230 Filipino imaginary 29, 32, 131, 133 Global imaginary 12, 29, 32 Islamist social imaginary 175 National imaginary 119 Social imaginary 13-14, 182, 189, 191 Impurity 23, 195, 197, 200, 206, 210-211 India 18, 21, 48-49, 73, 101, 107-120, 122-125, 135, 142 Individualism 67, 120 Indonesia 20, 24, 36-37, 39, 48, 55, 71-72, 75, 77-79, 81, 85-86, 149-150, 154, 157-161, 163, 174, 181, 215-217, 221, 223, 226, 230, 234 Industrial revolution 78 Infotainment 111, 121 Institut Seni Indonesia (Indonesian Institute of the Arts) 75 Internal Security Act (ISA) 89, 103 Internet 19, 35-37, 39-40, 46-48, 53, 176-177, 187, 189, 207 Interventions 14, 18-19, 191 Irama, Rhoma 182 Iraq 77 ISIS 220 Islam 50, 71-73, 77, 79-81, 101, 169-172, 174-176, 178-179, 186-187, 230-231 Islamic art 72 Islamism 18, 170, 172, 174, 176, 178, 184 Islamophobia 191 Jakarta 71, 75, 216, 230 James, Paul 12, 19 Jamming 75 Japan 19, 37, 57-68, 73, 81, 131-132, 143 Java 24, 149, 154, 157, 159, 161 Javanese cultural tradition 217 Jawi script 178 Jia Zhangke 199 Jogja Biennale 75 Jogja Hip Hop Foundation 226-227 Jogja National Museum 75 Jogja Ora di Dol! 227 Johor Bahru 90-91 Just for women 122 Ka’aba Youth 222 Kaegi, Stefan 219, 228 Karim, Ustaz Nazmi Abd 172

238  Karnival 182, 191 Khoo, Eric 90 Kitsch 22 KL/Singapore bershalawat 181 Klee, Paul 74 Ko, Giddens 203-204 Konbini store 19, 20, 57-63, 65-69 Korean wave 16, 225 Kulintang 135, 136 Kunci Cultural Studies Institute 218 Kuwait 77 Latour, Bruno 197-198, 223, 229 Law 13, 217 Lee Hsien Loong 92, 97, 101-102 Lee Kuan Yew 96-98, 100, 103-104 Lee Kuan Yew: the musical 103 Lefebvre, Henri 163 LGBT 219, 221, 225 Liberalism 105 Lieu de mémoire 82-85 Lifestyle 21, 61, 107-108, 110, 113-116, 120-123, 170, 175, 185, 195, 202, 208, 210 Life advice 120 Lifestyle cable channels 110, 116 Lifestyle experts 21, 107, 115-116, 124 Lifestyle pedagogies 12 Lifestyle television 21 Lim Hock Siew 96 Live India 118 Live Vaastu 123, 118-119 Lolita fashion 7 Los Angeles 20, 72, 82 Love in a Puff 175, 197, 207, 209 Love Is Not Blind 195-197, 200, 201-205, 207, 209-210 Macapagal-Arroyo, Gloria 139, 141 Make over 21, 107, 110, 112, 114-115, 119 Makni, Rajiv 111-112 Malaya 92, 96 Malayan Communist Party 20, 89, 92, 94 Malaysia 18, 23, 27, 89-90, 135, 170-181, 185-186, 189-190, 192, 194 Mall 58, 113, 152, 177, 201, 223, 227, 230 Mannequin Challenge 177 Marcos, Ferdinand 133, 145 Marketing 19, 36-37, 49, 62 Martial arts 135, 199, 222 Martial arts cinema 199 Marxist 74, 93, 103 Masato, Nakamura 19, 58-59 McKenzie, Jon 13-14, 21-23, 132-133 McPhee, Colin 36 Mead, Margaret 36 Media Development Authority (MDA) 90-91 Mediascapes 140, 144 Melbourne Festival 22, 149-150, 157, 160 Membuat Obama dan Perdamaian yang dibuat-buat 20, 71-76, 81, 86-87

GLOBALIZATION AND MODERNIT Y IN ASIA

Memory 20, 81-86 Merienda 130, 138-139 Mestizo 142 Methodological nationalism 17 Methodological cosmopolitanism 17 Middle class 109, 113, 116, 141, 170, 175, 178-179 Middle East 73, 180, 190, 225 Migration 31, 130 Mobility 112, 150, 153-154, 156 Mobile uprisings 177 Mob politics 23, 169-170, 179-181, 184, 189 Modernity 15, 17-19, 23-24, 69, 85, 153, 162, 174, 195, 197-201, 203-207, 209-211, 217 Alternative modernities 15 Asian Modernity 18 Capitalist modernity 86, 108 Chinese modernities 198, 201, 203 Gendered modernity 199 Global modernity 15-19, 24 Kawaii modernity 196, 211 Multiple modernities 17, 23, 195, 198, 200 Muslim Malay modernity 173-174, 188 Postmodernity 36, 59, 132, 150, 182 Sanitized modernities 23, 195, 197-200, 209-210 Super-modernity 20 Technologized modernity 19, 22 Western modernity 23 Modern culture 13, 189 Modernism 135 Motivational speech 172 MTV 110 Mukherjee, Sabyasachi 114-115 Multicultural 18 Multicultural Arts Victoria 150, 159-160 Multimedia art installations 159 Mumbai 109-110, 112-113, 120 Munsyid Malaysia 170-171 Museum of Modern Art (New York) 72 Music 22, 27, 38, 40-41, 67-68, 103, 130, 136-138, 141, 170, 177, 179-180, 182-184, 186-188, 194, 196, 213, 216, 219, 221-223, 226, 229-230 Music industry 180 Muslim female body 84-85 Muslim politics 71-75, 86-87 Muslim Southeast Asia 69, 171, 174 Nadamurni 185 Nasheed 170-171, 182, 186-187 Nation state 11, 15-17, 20-21, 23, 29, 31, 91, 98, 101-102, 107, 145, 175, 199, 201, 203, 205-207, 210, 217 National Gallery, Jakarta 75 National University of Singapore 89, 91 Narratives 12, 14, 21-22, 75, 79, 85-87, 89, 96-97, 101-102, 124, 130-131, 138, 143-146, 151, 157-159, 165, 204-205, 209-210 Nasyeed.com 180, 182, 186-187 National security 20-21, 89-90, 94-95, 101

239

Index

Nativism 133 NDTV Good Times 110-115, 120, 123 Neo liberalism 18-19, 60, 64, 66, 113, 120, 122, 124-125, 175 New Age 19, 35-36, 48-49 New York 72 Noise 23, 158, 169, 178-181, 184, 186 Nora, Pierre 20, 73, 82 Nostalgia 19, 59, 133, 195, 203-207, 209-210 Obama, Barrack 20, 71-81, 86-87 Occupy Movement 180, 189 One Life To Love 110 Ontologies 21, 108-109, 116, 120, 124-125, 164 Operation Coldstore 95-96, 102-103 Ordinary experts 123 Orientalism 35 Orthodoxy 21, 89-90, 201, 230 Oshima, Neal 134, 143-144 Oslo 215 Otpor 180 OzAsia Festival, Adelaide 218 Palestine 77, 173, 182, 190 Pan-Asianism 135 Pang Ho-cheung 207 Pan-Malaysian Islamic Part (PAS) 175-176, 179, 182 Papua 223, 226, 231-232 Paradise (images of) 39, 48, 137, 144 Paris 78, 130, 215 Parma, Gede 37 Parody 59, 72 Pastor Roces, Marion 130-135, 139, 141, 143, 145-146 Pray 4 Gaza 183, 190 People’s Action Party (PAP) 91-95, 98-103 Riot porn 188 Performance Klub 150 Performance studies 13 Performativity 13-14, 18-19, 38-39, 41, 44, 46, 51, 116, 132-133 Performative turn 13 Philippines 22, 41, 129-146 Photography 30, 44, 84, 134, 143 PIN (Persatuan Industri Nasyid) 180 Pink Dot Day 99 Place (-making) 166 Playking Foundation 150 Poco-poco dance 224 Pokémon Go 211 Political economy 124 Political pluralism 104, 217, 232 Policy 18, 60, 99, 222 Popular culture 16, 177, 184 Postcolonial 15, 107, 110, 162, 182, 195, 211 Post-Islamist turn 175-176, 182, 191 Postmodernity 36, 59, 132-133, 50, 182 Pragya Prabhat (Knowledge morning) 121

Pragya TV 120-123 Precariat 19 Precarity 19, 23, 191, 204 Propaganda 220 Proselytizing (dakwah) 176, 184, 186 Psychology 55, 119-120 Publics 12-14, 16, 18, 21-22, 24, 31, 37, 44, 47, 49, 90, 94, 97-99, 104, 107-110, 112, 114, 116, 119-120, 123-124, 145, 150, 152, 157, 174-177, 179-180, 187-191, 227, 232 Puji-Pujian 171 Punitive turn 175-176 Purity 23-24, 195, 197, 199-200, 205-207, 210-211 Putrajaya 179 Queer studies 13 Quiz show 176 Quran 82, 84, 178, 186 Quran recital competitions 181 Rabanni 185 Race 52, 90, 97, 189, 224 Racism 24, 225, 231-232 Rahman, Tengku Abdul 96 Raihan 171 Reality TV, 107, 110, 113-115 Recitation (zikr) 176 Remediation 23, 169, 188, 190 Representation 20, 35, 37, 67-68, 73, 82, 85-86, 100, 132-133, 145, 162, 164-165, 205, 216, 232 Reyes, Denisa 144 Ridicule 66, 68, 80 Rimini Protokoll 24, 215-219, 228, 230-231 Road show 181-182, 191 Roberts, Julia 48 Rock show 182, 191 Rough music 183-188 Royal Reservations 111-112 Rubbish Dump 196, 211 San Diego 215 Sangkrit Art Space 75 Sasono, Rizky 219 Scapes 22, 140, 142-146 Schechner, Richard 13 Secularism 108, 116, 120-122, 124-125, 175-176 Security 20-21, 58, 81, 85, 89-90, 94-97, 101, 103, 132, 204, 208 See, Martin 96 Self-help literature 36, 119-123 Selfhood 21, 107-108, 116, 120 Serbia 180 Sexism 24 Sexuality 19, 23, 36-38, 199-200, 203-207, 224, 231 Shah Alam 169-194 Shanghai 133, 137, 141, 144 Shanghai International Exposition 22, 129, 131 Sharia, also ‘syariah’ 175-176, 184, 223, 231 Shopping malls 58, 152, 201, 223, 230

240  Sidhu, Navjot 122 Simfoni Evolusi 185 Singapore 18, 20-21, 72, 89-104, 135, 174 Singapore bershalawat 181 Singapore Censorship Board 21, 89, 94, 98 Singles’ Day 200 Sinha, Pawan 117 Social imaginary, see ‘imaginary’ 13-14, 182, 189, 191 Social life of things 156 Social malaise 58, 64 Social media 23, 51-53, 172-173, 186, 189, 225, 227, 232 Sociology 13 Soja, Edward 152, 163-165 Southeast Asia 16, 23, 81, 135, 162, 170-171, 174, 178, 182, 185 Souvenirs 156 Spa 43-44, 49-50, 111 Space odyssey 156 Spanish ancestry 41, 142 Spectacle 12-14, 21, 23, 62, 77, 90, 114, 159, 180-181, 188 Spies, Walter 36 Spiritualism 18, 21, 36-37, 48-51, 53, 108, 120-122, 123-124, 170, 186 Corporatization of spirituality 50 The neo-spiritual turn 119-122 Spiritual gurus 115-116 Spiritual lifestyle programming 116 Spiritual tourism 19, 36-37, 49 Spratly Islands 131 Srikandhi, Naomi 218 Stand-up comedy 172 State 13, 15-17, 20-21, 23, 31, 60, 91-92, 95, 98, 101-102, 107, 144-145, 173, 174-175, 185, 199, 203, 205-207, 210, 217 Steger, Manfred 11-12, 17, 29 Stereotypes 22, 133, 142, 204-205 Street art 12, 23, 130, 132, 178, 180, 182 Student activism 90, 190 Subjectivities 12, 32, 69, 122, 124, 130, 164 Subversion 94, 164-165, 184, 207 Suharto regime 81, 217, 231 Sumatran ship cloths 46-47 Super consumers 111 Super Premium Soft Double Vanilla Rich 19, 65-69 Surveillance 63, 84-85, 175, 206, 211 Sustainability 32, 61 Syahnur, Wilman 20, 72, 75, 79 Sydney 37, 72 Symbols 12, 14, 20, 75, 82-83, 85, 109, 152, 159, 163, 218 Syria 172-174, 178, 182, 190-191 Tagalog 142 Tahrir Square 174, 180 Taiwan 23, 197-198, 203-207, 210-211

GLOBALIZATION AND MODERNIT Y IN ASIA

Tajudin, Yudi 220 Taman Budaya Yogyakarta 75 Tan Pin Pin 220 TAO Inc. 134 Taste 21, 66, 108, 111-112, 115, 123, 144, 176-177, 229 Tastemakers 108 Tausiyah (words of religious advice) 170, 186 Teater Garasi 24, 216, 218-220, 228-231 Technology 23, 36-37, 40, 53, 60, 110-111, 142, 157, 188-189 Technoscapes 140, 142-143, 145 Television 21, 98, 107-125, 200 Teng Huatao 196, 200 Terrorism 65, 72, 81-82, 85-86, 94, 101-102 Thailand 89, 174 Theatre 19, 24, 36, 46, 59, 63, 67, 98-99, 145, 179, 215-216, 218, 227-228, 230 Theatricality 14 The Girl We Chased Together in Those Years 203 The Single Female Traveller 110 Thirdspace, also ‘Third space’ 22, 151-152, 162-164 Thompson, E.P. 83-84, 86 Time-space compression 63, 153, 159 Tiwari, Noopur 111 TLC India 110 Tolerance 24, 217, 225, 229, 232 To Singapore with Love 20, 89-104 Top Gear 111 Toshiki, Okada 19, 58, 62-63 Tourism 12, 19, 32, 35-38, 43, 48-50, 52, 111, 130, 135, 137-146, 152, 176, 216 Traditional 21, 24, 31, 48, 53, 108, 122, 174, 217, 223-224, 229-230 Traditional clothing 42, 46, 114-116, 137 Traditional dance 43, 50 Traditional instruments 130, 135-136 Transgender 219-220, 222, 226, 229 Transgression 36-40 TransGrobak 158 Transnational 110-111, 146, 152-153 Transnational urbanism 152 Traumatrauma 19, 58-59, 68-69 Travel 20-21, 36, 49-50, 72, 81, 108, 110-111, 120, 135, 137, 141, 156, 161, 164, 218, 220 Travel XP 110 Travelling images 179-181, 191 Travelling object 22, 151-154, 156, 165 Tsai Ming-liang 199, 204 Turner, Victor 13 Ubud 37, 39, 48-53 Ukraine 180 Umbrella protests 198, 208, 211 Ummah 173, 191 Underclass 19 United Liberation Movement for West Papua 231-232 United Malays National Organization (UMNO) 175-176, 179

241

Index

United States 75, 86 Untracing the Conspiracy 103 Urbanization 58, 132-134, 230 Urban space 12, 14, 24, 59-60, 63, 68, 130, 157, 163, 178, 180, 184, 208, 216 Vaastu 116, 118-119, 123-124 Veiling 221 Venice 72 Venice Biennale 59, 82 Vichar Sanjivni (Elixir of Thought) 121 Video-art 157, 160-161, 173, 188, 228 Video Pro Media 187-188 Vienna 215 Vimeo 43, 47 Warner, Michael 13, 189-190 Weddings 19, 32, 36-47, 110, 114-115, 187, 200, 202-203, 206 ‘Well performing cities’ 22, 130 West Bank 77 ‘We the People’ 180

Xpresi Cinta Rasul 173 Yang Fana itu Waktu, Kita Abadi 231 Yap, Tony 154, 159-160, 164 Yoga 19, 21, 36, 48-49, 108, 120 Yoga Barn complex 37, 50 Yoga gurus 108 Yoga retreats 48-49, 53 Yogyakarta 20, 22, 24, 75, 79, 150, 153-154, 156-162, 164, 215-216, 218 You Are the Apple of My Eye 197, 203-207, 209-210 Youth 16, 141, 201, 204-205, 210-211 Youth culture 16, 196 YouTube 40, 47, 172, 178, 187-188 Yuan Yuan 196 Zahari, Said 96 Zee Trendz 110 Zhang Yimou 199 Zurich 215