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Chapter five critically explores the potential for agency among various groups of nationally and internationally mobilized female “labor”–including state dancers and expatriate academics–through the theoretical lens of Aihwa Ong’s “flexible citizenship” and the concept of privileged “free trade zones” for certain classes of workers abroad.

Chapter one analyzes the Cold War-inspired massacres of up to one million accused communists in Indonesia in 1965-67 during the rise of president Suharto’s “New Order” regime. Further, it explains and questions the regime’s particular targeting of female dancers, artists, and members of Gerwani, a progressive, proto-feminist women’s organization.

Chapter three examines strategic transmission of “folk” dance technique within villages and family compounds as a coded distribution of alternate historical narratives. Entering the context of national display or global arts organizations like Smithsonian and UNESCO, such forms become commodified, yet potentially function to sublimate otherwise suppressed political perspectives.

Chapter Four employs detailed ethnographic descriptions of traditional dance in the context of diplomacy and aid in Cambodia. Unlike Indonesia, because the genocide under Pol Pot was condemned by the anti-communist international community, the commoditized, tourist-friendly national forms are generally viewed as a critical commemoration and triumph over political violence.

Chapter two interrogates the New Order’s post-1965 cultural reconstruction as a form of ideological domination and self-legitimation: the commemoration of a set of depoliticized, “ancient” national traditions was strictly enforced, while recollections of mass murder and loss in the course of recent history were violently suppressed, effecting an “Amnesia Project.”

This chapter offers an analysis of the aesthetics and meanings within This One and That One (Εκείνος και… Εκείνος), a satirical drama series from the era of the Colonels’ dictatorship, drawing on surviving fragments of the only remaining episode (‘The Egg’) and interviews with its author. Despite its Beckettian character, based on surreal dialogues between its two characters and minimalist aesthetics, the author argues that the series was surprisingly popular because, in an era of strict television censorship, its form allowed it to smuggle an implicit message of opposition to the status quo past the censors. She shows that open meanings laden with metaphor that could be read as mocking social convention enabled the series to challenge officially-sanctioned expectations about work, discipline, thrift and anti-communism, and argues that the series remains a unique, experimental object and represents an important site for cultural resistance.

Over half a century, the efforts of Osmania University intellectual to address the Telangana problem—writing and publishing literature, forming organizations and mobilizing masses—finally led to a the formation of a separate statehood. The formation of a new state does not guarantee the welfare and representation of historically marginalized and primordial identities. It demands a deeper struggle involved for such identities to assert themselves. The post-Telangana phase has not delivered any concrete program to its youth who sacrificed for its statehood. As a result, students have started their struggle to make Samajik or ‘socially inclusive’ Telangana. The chapter highlights the contemporary ongoing student agitation in post-Telangana phase. It concludes that the history of Telangana would be remembered as the history of students’ resistance.