ABSTRACT
Popular music in the Nusantara region highlights shared and interactive cultural, historical, political, geographical, and sonically mediated spaces of maritime Southeast Asia which includes “the totality of cultures and societies of a region encompassing the present nation states of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and (tangentially) Singapore”. The term Nusantara is historically associated with the Majapahit empire in its broader sense, which included peninsular Malaysia, coastal Borneo communities, as well as the southern Philippines. Made in Nusantara adds further to the multi-subject approach by encapsulating, in inclusivist terms, how popular music may be contextualised within a complex regional space of historical and cultural relationships and interactions. Thus, it is within and between this maritime space of fluid identities, affinities, and contestations that popular music is made in the Nusantara. Additionally, for all Nusantara nations, the historical and political context of European and Anglo-American colonialism plays a particularly important role.
