Dance, Music and Cultures of Decolonisation in the Indian Diaspora

Dance, Music and Cultures of Decolonisation in the Indian Diaspora

Author: Tina K Ramnarine

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-06-09

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1000766535

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Dance, Music and Cultures of Decolonisation in the Indian Diaspora provides fascinating examples of dance and music projects across the Indian Diaspora to highlight that decolonisation is a creative process, as well as a historical and political one. The book analyses creative processes in decolonising projects, illustrating how dance and music across the Indian Diaspora articulate socio-political aspirations in the wake of thinkers such as Gandhi and Ambedkar. It presents a wide range of examples: post-apartheid practices and experiences in a South African dance company, contestations over national identity politics in Trinidadian music competitions, essentialist and assimilationist strategies in a British dance competition, the new musical creativity of second-generation British-Tamil performers, Indian classical dance projects of reform and British multiculturalism, feminist intercultural performances in Australia, and performance re-enactments of museum exhibits that critically examine the past. Key topics under discussion include postcolonial contestations, decolonising scholarship, dialogic pedagogies and intellectual responsibility. The book critically reflects on decolonising aims around respect, equality and the colonial past’s redress as expressed through performing arts projects. Presenting richly detailed case studies that underline the need to examine creative processes in the cultures of decolonisation, Dance, Music and Cultures of Decolonisation in the Indian Diaspora will be of great interest to scholars of South Asian Studies, Diaspora Studies, Performing Arts Studies and Anthropology. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of South Asian Diaspora.


Cultural Memory and Popular Dance

Cultural Memory and Popular Dance

Author: Clare Parfitt

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-12-02

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 3030710831

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This book focuses on the myriad ways that people collectively remember or forget shared pasts through popular dance. In dance classes, nightclubs, family celebrations, tourist performances, on television, film, music video and the internet, cultural memories are shared and transformed by dancing bodies adapting yesterday’s steps to today’s concerns. The book gathers emerging and seasoned scholarly voices from a wide range of geographical and disciplinary perspectives to discuss cultural remembering and forgetting in diverse popular dance contexts. The contributors ask: how are Afro-diasporic memories invoked in popular dance classes? How are popular dance genealogies manipulated and reclaimed? What is at stake for the nation in the nationalizing of folk and popular dances? And how does mediated dancing transmit memory as feelings or affects? The book reveals popular dance to be vital to cultural processes of remembering and forgetting, allowing participants to pivot between alternative pasts, presents and futures.


Finding Democracy in Music

Finding Democracy in Music

Author: Robert Adlington

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-02

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 100016361X

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For a century and more, the idea of democracy has fuelled musicians’ imaginations. Seeking to go beyond music’s proven capacity to contribute to specific political causes, musicians have explored how aspects of their practice embody democratic principles. This may involve adopting particular approaches to compositional material, performance practice, relationships to audiences, or modes of dissemination and distribution. Finding Democracy in Music is the first study to offer a wide-ranging investigation of ways in which democracy may thus be found in music. A guiding theme of the volume is that this takes place in a plurality of ways, depending upon the perspective taken to music’s manifold relationships, and the idea of democracy being entertained. Contributing authors explore various genres including orchestral composition, jazz, the post-war avant-garde, online performance, and contemporary popular music, as well as employing a wide array of theoretical, archival, and ethnographic methodologies. Particular attention is given to the contested nature of democracy as a category, and the gaps that frequently arise between utopian aspiration and reality. In so doing, the volume interrogates a key way in which music helps to articulate and shape our social lives and our politics.


Critique of Authenticity

Critique of Authenticity

Author: Thomas Claviez

Publisher: Vernon Press

Published: 2020-01-10

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1622738640

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The volume provides a critical assessment of the concept of authenticity and gauges its role, significance and shortcomings in a variety of disciplinary contexts. Many of the contributions communicate with each other and thus acknowledge the enormous significance of this politically, morally, philosophically and economically-charged concept that at the same time harbors dangerous implications and has been critically deconstructed. The volume shows that the alleged need or desire for authenticity is alive and kicking but oftentimes comes at a high price, connected to a culture of experts, authority and exclusionary strategies.


Blindness and Spectatorship in Ancient and Modern Theatres

Blindness and Spectatorship in Ancient and Modern Theatres

Author: Marchella Ward

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-12-14

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1009372750

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The use of disability as a metaphor is ubiquitous in popular culture – nowhere more so than in the myths, stereotypes and tropes around blindness. To be 'blind' has never referred solely to the inability to see. Instead blindness has been used as shorthand for, among other things, a lack of understanding, immorality, closeness to death, special insight or second sight. Although these 'meanings' attached to blindness were established as early as antiquity, readers, receivers and spectators into the present have been implicated in the stereotypes, which persist because audiences can be relied on to perpetuate them. This book argues for a new way of seeing – and of understanding classical reception - by offering assemblage-thinking as an alternative to the presumed passivity of classical influence. And the theatre, which has been (incorrectly) assumed to be principally a visual medium, is the ideal space in which to investigate new ways of seeing.


Fire Under My Feet

Fire Under My Feet

Author: Ofosuwa M. Abiola

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-16

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1000441385

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Fire Under My Feet seeks to expose the diverse, significant, and often under-researched historical and developmental phenomena revealed by studies in the dance systems of the African Diaspora. In the book, written documentation and diverse methodologies are buttressed by the experiences of those whose lives are built around the practice of African diaspora dance. Replete with original perspectives, this book makes a significant contribution to dance and African diaspora scholarship simultaneously. Most important, it highlights the work of researchers from Ecuador, India, Puerto Rico, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and it exposes under-researched and omitted voices of the African diaspora dance world of the aforesaid locations and Puerto Rico, Columbia, and Trinidad as well. This study showcases a blend of scholars, dance practitioners, and interdisciplinarity, and engages the relationship between African diaspora dance and the fields of history, performance studies, critical race theory, religion, identity, and black agency.


Resist(d)ance

Resist(d)ance

Author: Cyrielle Tamby

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2020-06-04

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13: 334617591X

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Master's Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject African Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) (Europa Universität Viadrina / University of California, Berkeley), course: Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät / African Diaspora Studies, language: English, abstract: While celebrated at first, Jamaica has struggled a lot with its independence and its implications for the people of Jamaica as well as different subcultures. In the aftermath of racial conflicts in the years following 1962, the genre of Dancehall surfaced and established itself in the 1980s. For the people living in the inner city of Kingston, which was largely separated from uptown, Dancehall was not just music, but represented a whole lifestyle. While Dancehall has not lost any of its meaning since then, it certainly has changed and become important to many more people all around the world. But how exactly is this type of dance related to black identity, colonialism and the experience of racism? How did it manage to conquer the streets of Jamaica? And in what way is it represented in the digital world? Cyrielle Tamby first explores the diasporic experience of blackness, and accounts for common grounds in being Black in Europe and in Jamaica. She scrutinizes the problem of silenced narratives in Jamaica, before moving on to the different aspects of dance as a form of resistance. Using the implication of her findings, the author then examines how knowledge can and has to be rethought through cultural production in diasporic making. Cyrielle Tamby claims in this book how the richness of popular cultures from the African diaspora that circulates across numerous podcast, literature, music and dance can challenge the lack of knowledge about the history of Black people. Her work is based on literary research as well as personal experience and provides the reader with some fascinating results.


Dis-Orienting Rhythms

Dis-Orienting Rhythms

Author: Sanjay Sharma

Publisher: Zed Books

Published: 1996-11

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13:

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Aims to produce a new understanding of the world significance of South Asian culture in multi-racist societies. It focuses on the role that contemporary South Asian dance music has played in the formation of a new urban cultural politics.


War Dance

War Dance

Author: William K. Powers

Publisher:

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

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Eleven essays on shared characteristics of traditional dances and music used in modern day Pow Wows.