Puppets and Cities: Articulating Identities in Southeast Asia by Jennifer Goodlander

Reviewed by: Puppets and Cities: Articulating Identities in Southeast Asia by Jennifer Goodlander Lisa Morse PUPPETS AND CITIES: ARTICULATING IDENTITIES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA. By Jennifer Goodlander. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018; pp. 224. In Puppets and Cities, Jennifer Goodlander investigates the relationship among puppet performances, their audiences, and the city spaces they inhabit to determine how such interactions inform local and national identity. An ethnographic survey divided into case studies, the book begins with a theoretically orienting first chapter in which the author characterizes the city not simply as a performance space but as itself a puppet—dependent on human interaction to express identity. Building on the framework of social theorist P. W. Preston, who asserts that identity is a product of locale, network, and memory, the author aligns the city with Preston’s locale, the theatre with network, and the puppet with memory. Goodlander then explores the interrelationship among these elements within specific cities, considering their individual history, cultural values, economies, and traditions. In all, Puppets and Cities is an excellent resource for all students of Southeast Asian puppetry, as well as for theatre and performance scholars more generally. Following a brief overview of major periods in Indonesian history, chapter 2 considers two museums, and the puppet displays within them, as places where history and modernity co-create diverse Indonesian identities. Located near Jakarta’s center, the Museum Nasional Indonesia (MNI) is a product of colonial and postcolonial influences, displaying placards, puppet figures, and collected images of puppets as not only traditional ancient forms, but also as performing objects with specific personalities and characteristics that are relevant today. Within these contexts, Goodlander examines the interrelationship of past and present, and a progression from an ethnographic Dutch colonial view of wayang to an Indonesian postcolonial perspective favoring distinct Indonesian identities. While European influences permeate displays at the MNI, End Page 399 images of Indonesian independence invoke a sense of nostalgia in the Museum Wayang. Goodlander describes an exhibit of wayang revolusi, which is a modern form of wayang encouraging Indonesian nationalism, as a space where local and global identities are put on display and celebrated. In this way, both museums engage with the past and present as they move toward building a national identity. Chapters 3 and 4 concentrate on puppet performances from Siem Reap, Cambodia, first the 2013 Season of Cambodia Festival (SOC) near the former twin towers site in New York City, and second the 2016 Giant Puppetry Project in Siem Reap. In both cases, Goodlander reveals how the past and the present are renegotiated in performance. The semiotics of the performance space for the SOC Festival’s sbiek thom (large puppet) performance aligned the genocide in Cambodia with the terrorist attacks in New York City, achieving a shared “memory after violence” that amplified the festival’s message of transformation and healing (44). Goodlander discusses how performers reimagine sbeik thom traditions, nearly erased by the Khmer Rouge, to envision a new Cambodian identity through inter-cultural performance. Three years later, the Giant Puppetry Project’s central parade, which brought together local and international audiences, artists, and sponsors, provides an opportunity for Good-lander to rethink the relationship between audience and performance in the formation of community. In her analysis, the parade exposes how Cambodia’s dependence on foreign aid and global influence holds back the reclamation of Khmer identity. Positioning the village at the center of Southeast Asian identity in chapter 5, Goodlander examines characteristics of tradition (country) and modernity (city) in a variety of performances from Laos, Indonesia, and Vietnam, in each case revealing an underlying longing for nostalgia. Modeled on a development in California yet built on a rice field on the island of Java, the residential development of Kotabaru in Bandung, Indonesia was the location for the Gunungan International Mask and Puppet Festival, which presented a traditional Balinese shadow puppetry (wayang kulit) performance with an international aesthetic. Describing innovations such as special lighting, projections, and the co-presence of human and puppet actors onstage, combined with traditional wayang aesthetics and characters in a rural setting, Goodlander illustrates a longing for rural identity within the modern landscape in a fusion of past and present. In chapter...