Genre Publics: Popular Music, Technologies, and Class in Indonesia (Music / Culture)

How popular music structures Indonesians' social and political subjectivities

Genre Publics is a cultural history showing how new notions of 'the local' were produced in context of the Indonesian 'local music boom' of the late 1990s. Drawing on industry records and interviews, media scholar Emma Baulch traces the institutional and technological conditions that enabled the boom, and their links with the expansion of consumerism in Asia, and the specific context of Indonesian democratization. Baulch shows how this music helped reshape distinct Indonesian senses of the modern, especially as 'Asia' plays an ever more influential role in defining what it means to be modern.

EMMA BAULCH is associate professor in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University in Malaysia. She is the author of Making scenes: reggae, death metal and punk in 1990s' and co-author of Poverty and Digital Inclusion.