Event Details:

 
Virtual speaker: Jeremy Wallach is Professor in the Department of Popular Culture in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University.

Asia is home to tens of millions of heavy metal fans: Massive, long-established scenes in Japan, Indonesia/Malaysia/Singapore, and Nepal exert influence on rapidly expanding scenes in India, China, mainland Southeast Asia, and other regions. An examination of this phenomenon of musical expansion illuminates not only global metal culture, but also the contours of an emergent Asian modernity, including its built-in instabilities and discontents. At the same time, as Asian bands attract the enthusiastic attention of international audiences, they have compelled a shift in dominant representations of Asian musics, which in the West have been dismissed either as boringly derivative popular songs or traditional styles incomprehensible to the Western ear.  Asian metal is decidedly neither, and its hold upon the imagination of the global music scene has only just begun.

This event is part of the MSU Asian Studies Center's Global Virtual Speaker Program with support funding from the Japan Council Endowment. The talk is organized by Dr. Ethan Segal from the History Department.