Jisha Menon

rehearsing the partition: gendered violence in Aur Kitne Tukde

This article argues that the specifically sexual nature of the political violence of the 1947 Partition of British India installs womens bodies as unambiguously sexed and ethnic. Through an analysis of Kirti Jains 2001 theatre production of Aur Kitne Tukde (How Many Fragments?), I consider how Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs appropriate colonialist and nationalist ideologies surrounding the notion of ‘woman’ as repository of cultural value. The women in Jains play are not a priori subjects who experience violence but rather the experience of violence makes (and unmakes) them as gendered, ethnic and national subjects. I argue that they come into subjecthood after a violent objectification and are re-constituted by their experience of national and sexual violence. The performance of nationalism – through embodied acts of sexual violence, conversion, martyrdom and state violence – is enacted upon female bodies that are transformed into political artefacts. I ask how bodies are staged and commodified by acts of political violence and argue that marking female bodies through acts of political violence constitutes a mode of transcription to communicate with other men that will encounter this body.

Valuing Ecologies of Performance: Culture and capital in a neoliberal world

‘Ecologies of Performance’ is an essay shared among four authors who bring their research and creative practices to questions of place, culture and capital. Addressing widely divergent habitations of performance, we consider the relationship between culture and capital in United Kingdom, South Africa and Japan. Dominic Gray, the Projects Director of Opera North at Leeds, charts the itineraries of opera in England over the last decade. He advocates a radical rethinking of opera, which urges its audiences to engage with the politics of place and time. Mike van Graan considers theatre in the context of contemporary democratic struggles and offers an account that threads together the Arab Spring, Millennium Development Goals and the African Renaissance. For van Graan, the blurred and complex constellations of power, race and class rather than the moral dichotomies of black and white provide the post-Apartheid terrain for creative and political interventions. Peter Eckersallquestions what it means to say that we value something and expect that something such as the arts will provide value-added functionality. He offers a snapshot of his experience of Leeds, UK in the 1980s. He then considers examples of how artists have responded to the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima in Japan. Here artists have made renewed claims to imagination in dealing with the aftermath of disaster. Finally, Jisha Menon links these perspectives to disciplinary questions in performance studies. In a performative vein, we aim to shift the ‘value’ of performance from what it means to what it does.

Introduction: Performing the Secular: Religion, Politics, and the Public Sphere

In this introductory essay, the authors bring discourses of the secular to bear on contemporary performance cultures across the world. They argue that the recent rise in religious extremism, and the threats against and attacks on artists and theatre practitioners in particular, cannot be understood outside the frameworks of secular modernity . Examining a range of contemporary positions on the secular from Charles Taylor ’s formulation to that of Saba Mahmood and Talal Asad , among others, the authors demonstrate that religious extremism is intrinsic rather than antithetical to the project of secular modernity .

Calling Local/Talking Global: the cosmo-politics of the call-center industry

This article considers dramatic performances of cosmopolitan encounters within the transnational framework of the call-center industry in India. Have the virtual intimacies generated by new media and market technologies ushered in a cosmopolitan connectivity? What utopic gestures do we glimpse from portrayals of cross-cultural contact in the age of the copy? By considering the intersection of consumer fantasy, global capital, and the neoliberal state, this article tracks the affinities between economic globalization and cultural cosmopolitanism.