¿Perhaps the best English-language puppetry book in years.¿ ¿Library Journal ¿Accessible and unexpectedly involving ... an essential book for anyone seriously interested in wayang.¿ ¿

As with many performing arts in Asia, neither the highly stylized images of the Javanese shadow play nor its musical complexity detracts from its wide popularity. By a context-sensitive analysis of shadow-play performances, Ward Keeler shows that they fascinate so many people in Java because they dramatize consistent Javanese concerns about potency, status, and speech. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"Javanese society and wayang theatre are closely connected; not only are ideas from the wayang stories deeply embedded in Javanese culture, wayang is also a means of expression. The heroes of wayang stories, accompanied by their servants, demons and gods, have been part of everyday life in Java for centuries. They have played the part of role models and examples, but at times they have also served as mouthpieces that are able to express sentiments that would otherwise remain unspoken. Over the centuries, the ancient wayang theatre has developed into a distinctive form of art. Foreign influences provided new stories, characters were added, new styles were refined at the courts, and, in the twentieth century, wayang theatre even served as a vehicle for propaganda, especially during the struggle for independence from Dutch colonial rule."--

Perhaps no other culture has placed so much emphasis on a theatrical form as a medium of transmitting cultural values as the Javanee. Wayang Kulit--the shadow play performed with puppets--provides one of the oldest continuous traditions of storytelling in the region. This is the first account of the subject for the general reader, explaining its importance in the everyday life of the Javanese.

Much has been said about how Javanese puppet theatre, Wayang Kulit, richly reflects the Javanese world, and how changes and tensions in performance practice mirror those in culture and society. 0For decades, television has been as intensely part of the Javanese world as Wayang. This book explores the ways two complex media and modes of being, seeing and fantasising, with their different cultures, coexist and meet, and haunt or invade each other. It is what what a Javanese commentator calls a 'difficult marriage' - intimate on the one hand, deeply alienating on the other, institutionalised yet at the same time mercurial and shifting.0This encounter is explored on many levels including performance aesthetics, the technicalities of television production, issues of time, space, light, place, and movement, audience experience of live and televised performances, and the collaboration and struggle between performers and television producers. Central to the book are personal perspectives and experiences, as well as Javanese discussions surrounding the interaction between Wayang and television and their cultures.0They are brought into a conversation with reflections on media and technology by writers such as Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Paul Virilio, and James Siegel. Wayang's relationship with television is considered in the context of the theatre's intercourse with older and newer media, including electricity, radio, audio- and video-recording, the internet and social media.

Shadows of Empire explores Javanese shadow theater as a staging area for negotiations between colonial power and indigenous traditions. Charting the shifting boundaries between myth and history in Javanese Mahabharata and Ramayana tales, Laurie J. Sears reveals what happens when these stories move from village performances and palace manuscripts into colonial texts and nationalist journals and, most recently, comic books and novels. Historical, anthropological, and literary in its method and insight, this work offers a dramatic reassessment of both Javanese literary/theatrical production and Dutch scholarship on Southeast Asia. Though Javanese shadow theater (wayang) has existed for hundreds of years, our knowledge of its history, performance practice, and role in Javanese society only begins with Dutch documentation and interpretation in the nineteenth century. Analyzing the Mahabharata and Ramayana tales in relation to court poetry, Islamic faith, Dutch scholarship, and nationalist journals, Sears shows how the shadow theater as we know it today must be understood as a hybrid of Javanese and Dutch ideas and interests, inseparable from a particular colonial moment. In doing so, she contributes to a re-envisioning of European histories that acknowledges the influence of Asian, African, and New World cultures on European thought--and to a rewriting of colonial and postcolonial Javanese histories that questions the boundaries and content of history and story, myth and allegory, colonialism and culture. Shadows of Empire will appeal not only to specialists in Javanese culture and historians of Indonesia, but also to a wide range of scholars in the areas of performance and literature, anthropology, Southeast Asian studies, and postcolonial studies.