Henry Spiller. Javaphilia: American Love Affairs with Javanese Music and Dance

Abstract

Javaphilia: Love Affairs with Javanese Music and Dance Henry Spiller Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2015, xii+266p.In this monograph, Henry Spiller has critically examined the self-fashioning of four North figures who positioned themselves as masters of Javanese dance and/or music to Western audiences throughout the twentieth century. In the process of this self-fashioning, these individuals appropriated specific facets of Javanese cultural production and then redeployed them in a new context, largely at home in the United States, to construct an unconventional or alternative identity and/or career for themselves, reifying problematic and essentializing tropes, and participating in an Orientalist discourse along the way. However, I believe it is to the author's credit that he has described these individuals' personal and professional lives with kindness and humor, finding, and acknowledging, parallels with his own experience and involvement with the study and teaching of gamelan, as well as pointing out the cultural and academic contributions that these four figures have made to North understandings of Javanese culture.In his first chapter, Spiller lays out the thematic and theoretical structure of the book, providing brief overviews of the characters whose lives he will describe in what he calls microhistories: Eva Gauthier (1885-1958), Hubert Stowitts (1892-1953), Mantle Hood (1918-2005), and Lou Harrison (1917-2003) (p. 24). He also spends some time situating his work within the context of recent research on Javanese culture and music (for example, that of Matthew Cohen) as well as tracing the lineage of orientalisms, orientalisms in particular, in which these figures participate. In this, he is specifically working from Gina Marchetti's, L. S. Kim's, Erika Lee's, and Malini Johar Schueller's conceptualizations of orientalism within the United States. Taking North America's particular historical circumstances into account, including the United States' economic and military incursions and involvement in the Philippines, China, and Japan during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as a history of immigration by Asian communities to the West Coast, Schueller identifies two particular forms of orientalism: first, the concept of Asia as a timeless, ancient place somehow simultaneously existing in contemporary world, and second, the concept of the East as a fundamentally spiritual Other. Furthermore, this history of immigration also created a space in which American orientalisms reflected approaches to situating one's self within larger communities and forging coherent self-understandings by articulating relationships to one's community and drawing boundaries with one's Others (pp. 19-21). Therefore, Spiller argues that the four individuals he addresses in this volume were uniquely positioned, in terms of likelihood and methods, to appropriate Javanese cultural practices, as they understood them, to re-fashion their own identities (p. 22). Finally, the chapter itself, and indeed the book in its entirety, is framed by the juxtaposition of two expositions: the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893, and Expo '86, held in Vancouver in 1986. The comparison serves first to provide a historical context for imaginings of Javanese culture during the twentieth century, and second, to highlight the proliferation of perspectives, both Indonesian and nonIndonesian, on Javanese gamelan performance that were evident 100 years later.The second chapter focuses in more detail on the 1893 Columbian exposition and its effect on conceptions of Java from the nineteenth century on. Here, Spiller addresses the physical layout of the exposition, and the history of world's fairs, specifically noting how they were designed to justify the supposed superiority of the host country or culture, and further to that, the processes of industrialization and empire. …