Vient de paraître : « Indonesian Cultural Diplomacy and the First International Gamelan Festival and Symposium at Expo 86 », par Jonathan Goldman et Jeremy Strachan, American Music, vol. 38, no 4 (hiver 2020), p. 428-453, DOI : 10.5406/americanmusic.38.4.0428.
« The First International Gamelan Festival and Symposium took place between 18–21 August at Expo 86 in Vancouver. Sponsored by the Republic of Indonesia, the Symposium was promoted as an event where tradition, modernity, and East and West would intersect through music in a fruitful exchange of ideas. But Expo 86 was held during the height of Indonesian president Suharto’s ‘New Order’ regime of pro-capitalist expansion and industrialization that began when he took power in 1967. We argue here that the Symposium, planned to coincide with Indonesian Independence Day, afforded the Republic an opportunity to leverage gamelan’s potential as an instrument of cultural diplomacy, and became a means for exporting and presenting Indonesian sovereignty on a global stage. In this article, we assess the Symposium’s lasting impacts not only on Canada and the U.S., but also on Indonesian gamelan performance in its global contexts. Whereas the West’s encounters with gamelan have often been framed as by-products of globalization and its inherent asymmetries, the Symposium at Expo 86 complicates this narrative to demonstrate gamelan’s multivalent cultural capital within the postcolonial imaginary. The Symposium, overall, led to a myriad of cultural, artistic and political outcomes, and highlighted gamelan’s pliable capacity as a site for envisioning modernity through the gesture of intercultural exchange. While the opportunity for creative and aesthetic innovation presented itself in Vancouver at Expo, it’s clear that gamelan was instrumentalized as a tool for Indonesian diplomacy, implicating and complicating historical dialogues about Eastern/Western exchange. »
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