Tales of Southeast Asia's Jazz Age: Filipinos, Indonesians and Popular Culture, 1920–1936 by Peter Keppy (review)

Peter Keppy has written extensively on Indonesia since the 1990s. His Politics of Redress: War Damage and Restitution in Indonesia and the Philippines, 1940–1957 (KITLV Press, 2010) was his first major work, in which he tackled postwar issues in both countries. The present work is the author's second, in which he fuses together the intersections of politico-historical events and popular music in the two Southeast Asian nations.

Viewed against the political backdrop of colonization characterized by two contrasting modes of subjugation—Indonesia under the repressive Dutch government and the Philippines under the "benevolent assimilation" of the American insular government—both countries were gifted with artists who touched their respective nation's popular imagination. Keppy chose Luis Borromeo, aka Borromeo Lou, who was among the first proponents of jazz music in the Philippines, to initiate his discussion on popular culture in the Philippines, and he picked the multitalented Ms. Riboet, actress, dancer, singer, and recording artist, as an appropriate representative of both low- and high-brow Indonesian culture.

The author uses three key concepts to weave his data to produce the present work. Two of the concepts, "pop cosmopolitanism" and "participatory culture," are derived from media scholar Henry Jenkins, and the last one, "popular modernism," is a take on anthropologist Joel Kahn's cultural theory. To make a small twist to Jenkins's theory, Keppy uses the term "participatory pop" instead of "participatory culture." The inclusive term "participatory culture" could have sufficed to navigate seamlessly through both mass and elite cultures discussed in the book because, after all, the author does not offer any new meaning for the phrase "participatory pop." Besides, the words "participatory" and "popular" basically connote the same thing. Any cultural artifact could not have been created or formed without the participation or popular support of its audience as both consumer and producer.

On the one hand, Keppy highlights specific groups of Filipinos (as the following chapter titles attest: "Cabaret Girls and Legislators" and "Jassistas, Balagtansistas [sic], Zarzuelistas") to suggest a varied cultural scenario that Borromeo negotiated as a musician. On the other hand, aside from being a singer, Ms. Riboet was introduced by the author as a cultural broker, a bridge between arts and artists and the masses. These interconnections among artists, producers, and consumers suggest a broad participation of people in the creation of popular culture.

The book has ten chapters, the first of which introduces both Borromeo and Riboet as leitmotif in discussing popular culture in their respective countries. The next five chapters narrate stories of Borromeo's work relationships with other Filipino artists, his active theater life, and the groups he founded or performed with. The last four chapters are devoted to a close reading of Riboet's career and the development of politics and popular theater in Indonesia; the genres "popular theater" and political theater were fortes of the theater groups Komedie Stamboel and Dardanella at the height of their popularity.

Although Keppy utilizes them as handles for discussion, Borromeo and Riboet are not given equal treatment. The obvious wealth of data on Indonesia and Riboet (or perhaps the number of years devoted by the author to the study of Indonesia) has yielded a richly woven story about popular theater in Batavia and other centers of cultural activity in the Dutch East Indies. There is also the impression that the author is much more knowledgeable about this colony than the Philippines, as inaccuracies about the latter are found in the text. A few examples of these slips are as follows: "as a consequence of impending Philippine Independence in 1935" (132) (the Philippines was granted its independence by the US in 1946); and "In the early 1930s, Bocobo would lead a research project aimed at documenting native music and dances" (46) (Bocobo was president of the University of the Philippines [UP] when he created the "UP Committee on Folk Songs and...