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Wayang, or Javanese puppet theater, has been around for millennia, bringing people together for live performances while reflecting the changes and tensions in society. Television has been around for decades, bringing news and entertainment from around the world directly into homes and public spaces while completely reshaping culture. The two formats—one an ancient art, the other a relatively new media—seem like disparate pieces yet they are both intensely part of the Javanese world. They are inescapable from each other in a relationship that has been described as a “difficult marriage”: intimate on the one hand, deeply alienating on the other, institutionalized yet at the same time mercurial and shifting.

This book explores the ways two complex forms of media coexist and meet as well as haunt and invade each other. It looks at performance aesthetics and the technicalities of television production, as well as issues of time, space, light, place, and movement. It compares audience experiences of live and televised performances, and highlights the collaboration and struggle between performers and television producers. Interviews with performers from both sides are brought into a larger conversation on media and technology, one that includes ideas from Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Paul Virilio, and James Siegel. The book also looks ahead to new formats that have the potential to disrupt in ways never imagined: the worlds of streaming and social media.

Wayang kulit, or shadow puppetry, connects a mythic past to the present through public ritual performance and is one of most important performance traditions in Bali. The dalang, or puppeteer, is revered in Balinese society as a teacher and spiritual leader. Recently, women have begun to study and perform in this traditionally male role, an innovation that has triggered resistance and controversy.

In Women in the Shadows, Jennifer Goodlander draws on her own experience training as a dalang as well as interviews with early women dalang and leading artists to upend the usual assessments of such gender role shifts. She argues that rather than assuming that women performers are necessarily mounting a challenge to tradition, “tradition” in Bali must be understood as a system of power that is inextricably linked to gender hierarchy.

She examines the very idea of “tradition” and how it forms both an ideological and social foundation in Balinese culture. Ultimately, Goodlander offers a richer, more complicated understanding of both tradition and gender in Balinese society. Following in the footsteps of other eminent reflexive ethnographies, Women in the Shadows will be of value to anyone interested in performance studies, Southeast Asian culture, or ethnographic methods.

“Things puppets can do to us: charm, deceive, captivate, fool, trick, remind, amuse, distract, bore, repulse, annoy, puzzle, transport, provoke, fascinate, stand in for, kill.” In You, Me, and the Violence, Catherine Taylor ponders the nature of personal and political autonomy, focusing on the surprising juxtaposition of puppetry and military drones. In a book at once politically significant and narratively engaging, Taylor blends genres to question the roles of individuals within society and expose the gritty and emotional underpinnings of the seemingly mechanical process of a remote soldier.
From conversations with her own brother about his military experiences to Punch and Judy, from the original tale of Pinocchio to the radio chatter of soldiers in active drone operation, Taylor writes about family, power, and the “theater” of war in a voice both sly and sobering, heartbreaking and hopeful.