Southeast Asia in the age of jazz: Locating popular culture in the colonial Philippines and Indonesia

What is it about?

This essay aims to examine what popular culture meant in colonial Indonesia and the Philippines. A new cultural era dawned in the 1920s urban hubs of Southeast Asia, associated with the creation of novel forms of vernacular literature, theater, music and their consumption via the print press, gramophone, radio broadcasting and cinema. People enjoyed and articulated their anxieties with modern life, nationalism, cosmopolitanism and colonial rule within the realm of popular culture.

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Why is it important?

Popular culture is far and foremost regarded a post WWII phenomenon and a largely Euro-American affair. This study tells a different story. Entertainment for mass consumption was global already in the 1920s, yet the term popular culture was not current at all. Moreover, rather than suggest that Europe or America were the centers from where a pop culture radiated to the colonies, the evolution of pop in Southeast Asia had its own dynamics.