Inventing the Performing Arts: Modernity and Tradition in Colonial Indonesia by Matthew Isaac Cohen (review)

Abstract

Matthew Cohen is certainly prolific. He seems to come out with at least four or five substantial articles every year, and has published three major books on the performing arts and Indonesia: Komedie Stamboel; Performing Otherness; and the book reviewed here, Inventing the Performing Arts.1 Cohen knows how to make the most of his material, writing on the specific (e.g., wayang, individual theatrical performers, and performances) and the broad (e.g., particularly about crossings and mixings, and the trans-local, transnational, trans-genre, and trans-“ethnic”). He loves the hybrid, the itinerant, and the popular, and he writes about it well.