Until the 1930s no woman could perform in public and retain respectability in India. Professional female performers were courtesans and dancing girls who lived beyond the confines of marriage, but were often powerful figures in social and cultural life. Women's roles were often also taken by boys and men, some of whom were simply female impersonators, others transgender. Since the late nineteenth century the status, livelihood and identity of these performers have all diminished, with the result that many of them have become involved in sexual transactions and sexualised performances. Meanwhile, upper-class, upper-caste women have taken control of the classical performing arts and also entered the film industry, while a Bollywood dance and fitness craze has recently swept middle class India. In her historical on-the-ground study, Anna Morcom investigates the emergence of illicit worlds of dance in the shadow of India's official performing arts. She explores over a century of marginalisation of courtesans, dancing girls, bar girls and transgender performers, and de- scribes their lives as they struggle with stigmatisation, derision and loss of livelihood.
Until the 1930s no woman could perform in public and retain respectability in India. Professional female performers were courtesans and dancing girls who lived beyond the confines of marriage, but were often powerful figures in social and cultural life. In her study, Anna Morcom investigates the emergence of illicit worlds of dance in the shadow of India's official performing arts. She explores over a century of marginalisation of courtesans, dancing girls, bar girls and transgender performers, and describes their lives as they struggle with stigmatisation, derision and loss of livelihood.
Until the 1930s no woman could perform in public and retain respectability in India. Professional female performers were courtesans and dancing girls who lived beyond the confines of marriage, but were often powerful figures in social and cultural life. Women's roles were often also taken by boys and men, some of whom were simply female impersonators, others transgender. Since the late nineteenth century the status, livelihood and identity of these performers have all diminished, with the result that many of them have become involved in sexual transactions and sexualised performances. Meanwhile, upper-class, upper-caste women have taken control of the classical performing arts and also entered the film industry, while a Bollywood dance and fitness craze has recently swept middle class India. In her historical on-the-ground study, Anna Morcom investigates the emergence of illicit worlds of dance in the shadow of India's official performing arts. She explores over a century of marginalisation of courtesans, dancing girls, bar girls and transgender performers, and de- scribes their lives as they struggle with stigmatisation, derision and loss of livelihood.
Until the 1930s no woman could perform in public and retain respectability in India. Professional female performers were courtesans and dancing girls who lived beyond the confines of marriage, but were often powerful figures in social and cultural life. In her study, Anna Morcom investigates the emergence of illicit worlds of dance in the shadow of India's official performing arts. She explores over a century of marginalisation of courtesans, dancing girls, bar girls and transgender performers, and describes their lives as they struggle with stigmatisation, derision and loss of livelihood.
‘This is a remarkable book, of great originality, rigour, and importance in the study of modern Indian popular culture. Combining extensive fieldwork, archival research, and astute interpretation, Morcom presents a rich exploration of the contradictory effects of modernity, nationalism, and bourgeois values on a diverse range of Indian dance traditions, old and new.’ — Peter Manuel, Professor, Graduate Center of the City University of New York ‘Anna Morcom’s extraordinarily compelling book represents one of the most significant interventions in the study of dance in contemporary South Asia. Masterfully bridging discourses on class, gender, globalisation, economics, morality, and aesthetics, it effectively foregrounds the forms of inequality and power at work in the production, consumption, and politicisation of dance in today’s India.’ — Davesh Soneji, McGill University, author of Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory and Modernity in South India ‘A hugely valuable addition to the literature on the performing arts in India, focusing as it does on communities of highly marginalised dancers who have received scant academic attention. Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance deals with a wide-ranging set of dance sectors including female hereditary performers, bar dancers, transgender erotic performers and kothi dancers, interpreting the author’s rich ethnographic detail through a variety of theoretical lenses. On all counts, a very welcome and timely scholarly contribution.’ — Prabha Kotiswaran, author of Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India ‘This fascinating investigation of the hidden hereditary communities of female and transgender dancers in contemporary India compels us to rethink our assumptions about Indian public culture, sexualities, and entertainment. Expertly moving between colonial and postcolonial discourses on these communities, Anna Morcom reveals the ways in which postcolonial nation-building in the name of progress and modernity has excluded a range of non-elite subjectivities and marginalised their role as carriers of embodied culture. Morcom’s book not only chronicles their complex relationships with mainstream society and legitimate performing arts (including Bollywood), their legal struggles, and their talents, but, in doing so, offers a compassionate and timely valourisation of these illicit and yet ever-present worlds.’ — Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Professor, King’s College London, and author of Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir Until the 1930s no woman could perform in public and retain respectability in India. Professional female performers were courtesans and dancing girls who lived beyond the confines of marriage, but were often powerful figures in social and cultural life. Women’s roles were often also taken by boys and men, some of whom were simply female impersonators, others transgender. Since the late nineteenth century the status, livelihood and identity of these performers have all diminished, with the result that many of them have become involved in sexual transactions and sexualised performances. Meanwhile, upper-class, upper-caste women have taken control of the classical performing arts and also entered the film industry, while a Bollywood dance and fitness craze has recently swept middle class India. In her historical and on-the-ground study, Anna Morcom investigates the emergence of illicit worlds of dance in the shadow of India’s official performing arts. She explores over a century of marginalisation of courtesans, dancing girls, bar girls and transgender performers, and describes their lives as they struggle with stigmatisation, derision and loss of livelihood.
Sissy Fletcher, the preacher's daughter, disappeared on the night of the Rodeo Dance ten years ago and has been missing ever since. Until now, that is—a team drilling an oil well has made a grisly discovery in an isolated pasture. Seeing as how it's an election year, finding her killer is a bigger priority than it might usually be in sleepy Washington County, Texas, where not much ever happens anyway. Though it's becoming clear that the town isn't quite as sleepy as it seems. Martin Fletcher, Sissy's brother, seems to believe he's on a mission from God to raise hell in Washington County. He and his partner, Dud Hughes, aim to start small, with armed robbery, and work their way up to bigger things, but an inquiry into his sister's death threatens to draw a little more attention his way than he wants just now. As the mood begins to the shift in the town, three men put their heads together to work the case: ex-Texas Ranger Jeremiah Spur, who is retired but can't get the thrill of the chase out of his blood; the current sheriff, Dewey Sharpe, who just may not be as dumb as he looks; and Deputy Clyde Thomas, an African-American ex-Dallas cop who is probably the savviest of the bunch. All in all, James Hime's TheNight of the Dance, is a terrifically original, jaunty, and action-packed debut from a writer to watch.
The women of communities in Hindu India and Christian Orthodox Finland alike offer lamentations and mockery during wedding rituals. Catholic women of southern Italy perform tarantella on pilgrimages while Muslim Berger girls recite poetry at Moroccan weddings. Around the world, women actively claim agency through performance during such ritual events. These moments, though brief, allow them a rare freedom to move beyond culturally determined boundaries. In Ritual Soundings, Sarah Weiss reads deeply into and across the ethnographic details of multiple studies while offering a robust framework for studying music and world religion. Her meta-ethnography reveals surprising patterns of similarity between unrelated cultures. Deftly blending ethnomusicology, the study of gender in religion, and sacred music studies, she invites ethnomusicologists back into comparative work, offering them encouragement to think across disciplinary boundaries. As Weiss delves into a number of less-studied rituals, she offers a forceful narrative of how women assert agency within institutional religious structures while remaining faithful to the local cultural practices the rituals represent.
This book examines the role music has played as a political tool in the struggle over Tibet since the 1950s, and exposes some of the consequences of this politicisation on the musical traditions themselves and on Tibetan cultural identity. It draws on interviews with Tibetans brought up in Tibet carried out by TIN researchers, as well as a range of published and unpublished material. The study provides a historic retrospective of the transformation of Tibetan musical culture during the past half-century. Introducing the ideologies that were brought to bear on Tibetan music as Tibet came under the control of the People's Republic of China in 1951, it describes the development of the actual policies implemented until the early 1980s. It then investigates the vibrant Tibetan pop music scene that has emerged since the late 1980s. Further parts of the book analyse in details the use of music for Chinese state propaganda, as well as the way Tibetans have used music to express dissent and resist Chinese political, social and cultural domination. It examines the explicit messages and subtexts of propaganda, and questions its effectiveness. It also examines the varying forms of Tibetan 'protest songs', the metaphors used for escaping censorship, the state's reactions and its ultimate failure to fully control the feelings and perceptions of Tibetans. Finally, the book addresses the reactions to the extensive change and in particular, sinicisation of Tibetan musical culture in Tibet. Lyrics of many songs presented in the original Tibetan or Chinese as well as in English translation offer a unique insight into contemporary Tibet and its living musical culture.
'Unfinished Gestures' presents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize: “[Bahadur] combines her journalistic eye for detail and story-telling gifts with probing questions . . . a haunting portrait.” —The Independent In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a “coolie” —the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and traveling alone, this woman, like so many coolies, disappeared into history. Now, in Coolie Woman, her great-granddaughter embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Gaiutra Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother’s story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on their complex lives. Shunned by society, and sometimes in mortal danger, many coolie women were runaways, widows, or outcasts. Many left husbands and families behind to migrate alone in epic sea voyages—traumatic “middle passages” —only to face a life of hard labor, dismal living conditions, and, especially, sexual exploitation. As Bahadur explains, however, it is precisely their sexuality that makes coolie women stand out as figures in history. Greatly outnumbered by men, they were able to use sex with their overseers to gain various advantages, an act that often incited fatal retaliations from coolie men and sometimes larger uprisings of laborers against their overlords. Complex and unpredictable, sex was nevertheless a powerful tool. Examining this and many other facets of these remarkable women’s lives, Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora—from India to the West Indies in one century, Guyana to the United States in the next—that is at once a search for roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.
