Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society

The debates on modernity finally abandoned the material path taken by Marxists and capitalists and are now centred on cultural discussions. Popular culture is the centre of this new historiographical path which seeks to address the important question of how modernity is embodied in cultural practices. In this sense, I find Keppy's book particularly meaningful because it leads us to the centre of the building process of popular culture debate in the Philippines and in Dutch East Indies. The author's work focuses on the meaning of popular culture during the 1920s in both countries and on how a new set of cultural practices appeared. If, as he states 'popular culture significantly exposes mentalities and ethics as a prism for social change', it is important to direct the discussion on how music was appreciated and used in the Philippines and Indonesia. In that sense, he adopts New Cultural History ideas to state that the meaning of 'music' must be contextualized in a determined time and place.

Both Luis Francisco Borromeo, Filipino jazz singer, and Javanese Miss Riboet (Ribut in Bahasa Indonesia), opera singer, were the visible part of the emergence of a new culture in colonized societies. Although as Keppy states that both societies were different, they were at the centre of a worldwide modernization process, and consequently, they emerged in the midst of political and social turmoil. At the same time, both singers revitalized local theatre and music by localizing Western music and giving it a new meaning in their societies. As a first step, Keppy analyses popular culture and its relation with three different but interconnected realms. Firstly, with the growing nationalist sentiment; secondly, within the modernist way of life and thirdly, with the rampant cosmopolitanism. The author convincingly argues that those three aspects are well-connected with the emergence of a new set of cultural practices in the 1920s.

To grasp the consequences of the cultural transformations of that era in the Philippines and in Indonesia, the author reuses the concept of in-between culture. He states that the concept is a functional tool that enables an escape from the earlier debate that divided culture into notions of low and high culture. Consequently, Keppy challenges notions of cultural homogeneity and the belief in an all-powerful imperial force that had the power to impose a consistent ideology. By doing that, Keppy questions the simplicity of the binary conception of culture. Instead, he states that identity emerges as a terrain in which the individual creates a life strategy.

The relation between identity and music is present in every part of Keppy's book as he seeks to reconstruct the now-forgotten history of the emergence of identity sentiments in both societies. One of the main contributions of Keppy's study to an understanding of popular culture is precisely his statement that culture in both places was implemented not only by the metropolis or the local elites but also by the masses. In this respect, the author suggests that both singers created a cosmopolitan pop culture and a popular modernity largely ignored by the United States and by the Netherlands. The comparison between Borromeo and Miss Riboet highlights another important aspect of the current global shift in the [End Page 129] humanities. The use of Western music by both singers blurs the apparent closed cultural circuits between the colony and its metropolis to shed light on a more wide-ranging history of global music. The use of jazz, tango, and other foreign musical styles is representative of an era in which jazz was used as a musical wildcard for which every society had a different meaning.

Even though both musical movements were comparable, the truth is that their development was different. For example, in the case of Borromeo music, the evolution of popular art 'offers a complex picture of non-elite and elite participation in...