Christine L. Garlough
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617037320
- eISBN:
- 9781621039242
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617037320.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Social Groups
This book is the product of five years of field research with progressive activists associated with the School for Indian Languages and Cultures (SILC), South Asian Americans Leading Together ...
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This book is the product of five years of field research with progressive activists associated with the School for Indian Languages and Cultures (SILC), South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), the feminist dance collective Post Natyam, and the grassroots feminist political organization South Asian Sisters. It explores how traditional cultural forms may be critically appropriated by marginalized groups and used as rhetorical tools to promote deliberation and debate, spur understanding and connection, broaden political engagement, and advance particular social identities. Within this framework, the author examines how these performance activists advocate a political commitment to both justice and care, and to both deliberative discussion and deeper understanding. To consider how this might happen in diasporic performance contexts, she weaves together two lines of thinking. One grows from feminist theory and draws upon a core literature concerning the ethics of care. The other comes from rhetoric, philosophy, and political science literature on recognition and acknowledgment. This dual approach is used to reflect upon South Asian American women’s performances that address pressing social problems related to gender inequality, immigration rights, ethnic stereotyping, hate crimes, and religious violence. Case study chapters address the relatively unknown history of South Asian American rhetorical performances from the early 1800s to the present. Avant-garde feminist performances by the Post Natyam dance collective appropriate women’s folk practices, and Hindu goddess figures make rhetorical claims about hate crimes against South Asian Americans after 9/11.Less
This book is the product of five years of field research with progressive activists associated with the School for Indian Languages and Cultures (SILC), South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), the feminist dance collective Post Natyam, and the grassroots feminist political organization South Asian Sisters. It explores how traditional cultural forms may be critically appropriated by marginalized groups and used as rhetorical tools to promote deliberation and debate, spur understanding and connection, broaden political engagement, and advance particular social identities. Within this framework, the author examines how these performance activists advocate a political commitment to both justice and care, and to both deliberative discussion and deeper understanding. To consider how this might happen in diasporic performance contexts, she weaves together two lines of thinking. One grows from feminist theory and draws upon a core literature concerning the ethics of care. The other comes from rhetoric, philosophy, and political science literature on recognition and acknowledgment. This dual approach is used to reflect upon South Asian American women’s performances that address pressing social problems related to gender inequality, immigration rights, ethnic stereotyping, hate crimes, and religious violence. Case study chapters address the relatively unknown history of South Asian American rhetorical performances from the early 1800s to the present. Avant-garde feminist performances by the Post Natyam dance collective appropriate women’s folk practices, and Hindu goddess figures make rhetorical claims about hate crimes against South Asian Americans after 9/11.
Sandra Chatterjee and Cynthia Ling Lee
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780199377329
- eISBN:
- 9780199377350
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199377329.003.0003
- Subject:
- Music, Dance
This essay recounts and analyzes the Post Natyam Collective’s process of creating the contemporary abhinaya work, “rapture/rupture.” Working in a feedback loop between theory and practice, it ...
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This essay recounts and analyzes the Post Natyam Collective’s process of creating the contemporary abhinaya work, “rapture/rupture.” Working in a feedback loop between theory and practice, it researched ways to denaturalize Indian classical kathak’s script of idealized femininity to facilitate fluid, diverse possibilities for performing gender and cultural belonging in South Asian aesthetic contexts. “Rapture/rupture” produces a dancing subject whose ethnic mismatch, hybrid movement vocabulary, gender nonconformity, and same-sex love across cultural difference exceed the boundaries of a kathak discourse that calls for purist notions of culture, race, nation, religion, and femininity. In theoretically analyzing how gender, cultural belonging, and desire are conceptualized through abhinaya, postmodern dance, US identity politics, and poststructuralist critiques of identity, it argues that embracing lack—being “not enough”—is a mode of exceeding dominant boundaries that enables a multilayered, intersectional dance-making practice that queers gender, queers cultural belonging, and embodies queer female desire.Less
This essay recounts and analyzes the Post Natyam Collective’s process of creating the contemporary abhinaya work, “rapture/rupture.” Working in a feedback loop between theory and practice, it researched ways to denaturalize Indian classical kathak’s script of idealized femininity to facilitate fluid, diverse possibilities for performing gender and cultural belonging in South Asian aesthetic contexts. “Rapture/rupture” produces a dancing subject whose ethnic mismatch, hybrid movement vocabulary, gender nonconformity, and same-sex love across cultural difference exceed the boundaries of a kathak discourse that calls for purist notions of culture, race, nation, religion, and femininity. In theoretically analyzing how gender, cultural belonging, and desire are conceptualized through abhinaya, postmodern dance, US identity politics, and poststructuralist critiques of identity, it argues that embracing lack—being “not enough”—is a mode of exceeding dominant boundaries that enables a multilayered, intersectional dance-making practice that queers gender, queers cultural belonging, and embodies queer female desire.
