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Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India de Davesh Soneji

Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India: South Asia Across the Disciplines

Autor Davesh Soneji
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 15 ian 2012

Autorul Davesh Soneji, profesor asociat la McGill University și un expert recunoscut în artele performative din India de Sud, fundamentează această lucrare pe o cercetare interdisciplinară riguroasă. Unfinished Gestures reprezintă o extensie naturală a preocupărilor sale anterioare din Performing Pasts, unde a explorat tensiunea dintre modernitate și tradiție. În acest volum, Soneji se concentrează specific asupra comunităților de curtezane cunoscute sub numele de devadasi, oferind o istorie socială și culturală care dezmembrează miturile coloniale și naționaliste despre aceste femei.

Descoperim aici o analiză nuanțată a modului în care modernitatea colonială și reformele sociale din secolele XIX și XX au dus la stigmatizarea și marginalizarea economică a unui grup care, istoric, deținea un rol central în estetica regiunii. Comparabil cu Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance de Anna Morcom în rigurozitate, dar actualizat pentru a include o perspectivă etnografică profundă asupra supraviețuirii acestor tradiții în prezent, volumul lui Soneji demonstrează cum estetica și performanța devin forme de rezistență subalternă.

Structura cărții ghidează cititorul de la producția dansului în Tanjore-ul colonial, prin istoria culturală a dansului de salon din Madras, până la analiza discursului despre căsătorie și masculinitate în cadrul reformelor. Un element distinctiv este includerea anexelor cu documente istorice și texte legislative, care permit o înțelegere factuală a procesului de incriminare a stilului de viață devadasi. Prin combinarea muncii de teren cu datele de arhivă, Soneji reușește să recupereze vocile unor femei a căror istorie a fost adesea redusă la termeni simpliști de moralitate publică.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780226768106
ISBN-10: 0226768104
Pagini: 312
Ilustrații: 48 halftones, 6 line drawings
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.4 kg
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
Seria South Asia Across the Disciplines

De ce să citești această carte

Recomandăm această carte cercetătorilor și studenților interesați de antropologia culturală și studiile de gen în context asiatic. Cititorul câștigă o înțelegere profundă a modului în care legile și reformele sociale pot distruge structuri culturale complexe. Este o resursă esențială pentru a înțelege rădăcinile politice ale dansului clasic indian și mecanismele de marginalizare socială care persistă și astăzi în India de Sud.

Despre autor

Davesh Soneji este profesor asociat specializat în religiile Asiei de Sud în cadrul Universității McGill. Expertiza sa vastă în istoria socială a artelor performative este demonstrată prin lucrări de referință precum Bharatanatyam: A Reader și colaborarea sa ca editor pentru Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India. Cercetările sale se concentrează pe intersecția dintre religie, gen și artele spectacolului, punând accent pe comunitățile marginalizate și pe transformările suferite de acestea în perioada colonială și post-colonială.

Descriere scurtă

 
Unfinished Gestures presents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India who are generally called devadasis, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following a hundred years of vociferous social reform, including a 1947 law that criminalized their lifestyles, the women in devadasis communities contend with severe social stigma and economic and cultural disenfranchisement. Adroitly combining ethnographic fieldwork with historical research, Davesh Soneji provides a comprehensive portrait of these marginalized women and unsettles received ideas about relations among them, the aesthetic roots of their performances, and the political efficacy of social reform in their communities.
 
Poignantly narrating the history of these women, Soneji argues for the recognition of aesthetics and performance as a key form of subaltern self-presentation and self-consciousness. Ranging over courtly and private salon performances of music and dance by devadasis in the nineteenth century, the political mobilization of devadasis identity in the twentieth century, and the post-reform lives of women in these communities today, Unfinished Gestures charts the historical fissures that lie beneath cultural modernity in South India.

Notă biografică

Davesh Soneji is associate professor of South Asian religions at McGill University. He is coeditor of Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India and editor of Bharatanatyam: A Reader.

Cuprins

List of Illustrations 
Acknowledgments 
Introduction: On Historical, Social, and Aesthetic Borderlands 

1. Producing Dance in Colonial Tanjore 
2. Whatever Happened to the South Indian Nautch? Toward a Cultural History of Salon Dance in Madras 
3. Subterfuges of “Respectable” Citizenship: Marriage and Masculinity in the Discourse of Devadàsã Reform 
4. Historical Traces and Unfinished Subjectivity: Remembering Devadasi Dance at Viralimalai 
5. Performing Untenable Pasts: Aesthetics, and Selfhood in Coastal Andhra Pradesh 
 

Coda: Gesturing to Devadàsã Pasts in Today’s Chennai 
Appendix 1: Selected Documents from the Files of Muthulakshmi Reddy 
Appendix 2: The Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act of 1947 
Notes 
References 
Index

Recenzii

 “This pioneering work reveals the complex cultural and social history of classical South Indian music and dance as they evolved over the last three centuries. By intense fieldwork with the last surviving artistes from the world of traditional temple and salon performance, and through painstaking study of the primary sources in Tamil and Telugu, Soneji reconstructs the heartbreaking story of the so-called devadasis, including their marginalization at the hands of a prudish colonial government and a puritanical, Anglicized elite. He has opened a window to a musical world of astonishing richness and expressive power and to an aesthetic sensibility that has largely disappeared, and he has explained the social and cultural processes that undermined that sensibility and, indeed, the entire cultural system in which it once flourished. Anyone who has discovered the great power of Karnatak music should read this book in order to understand how this refined tradition acquired its present public forms, and in order to get beyond the standard, highly distorted narrative of its origins. Soneji is the foremost historian of this musical world as it developed from late medieval to early modern modes of performance.”

“This book offers fresh and thought-provoking insight into the cultural, political, and economic history of the so-called devadasis in South India over the past 200 years. . . . By combining analyses of courtly archives, literary sources, and personal records with ethnographies, Soneji shifts attention away from institutional, patriarchal power and the middle-class moral economy of ‘rescuing’ a (fallen) tradition in favor of emphasizing the resilience of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women as they encountered colonial modernity.”

“Unfinished Gestures is an important and original book, both lively and learned, that offers a new perspective on the professional artists/courtesans of South India known as devadasis. Where earlier constructions—and critiques—of the roles and identities of devadasis have focused on the uncomfortable juxtaposition of religion and sex that these women seem to represent, Soneji’s extensive archival and ethnographic research allows for a far more nuanced and complete understanding of the aesthetic, economic, and social dimensions of the lives of devadasis in the last two hundred years. Soneji enriches our knowledge of the history of the devadasis in the unexplored eras of late colonial Tanjore and Madras, and provides us with a rare sense of these women’s self-understandings, in the past and in the present. Locating the devadasis within the complexities of gender and nation, caste and religion, this volume not only makes an exciting contribution to the study of India’s history, but illuminates the ambiguities and still-unfinished projects of the India of today.” —Leslie C. Orr, Concordia University
 

“Sensitive, sympathetic, and very well-written, Unfinished Gestures moves the debate about devadasis in a new and interesting direction and will be the standard bearer in the field. Soneji’s ethnographic work supports his historical claims and brings to life the poignancy of contemporary devadasis’ lives.”

“Soneji provides an exhaustive historical account of devadasi beginning with the nautch girls of colonial Tanjore leading up to the 1947 law criminalizing the devadasi lifestyle as a form of prostitution…. [He] documents their real and imagined positioning in postcolonial India through a historical framework supplemented by first-person accounts by those from the community and with descriptions of performances he attended.”  

“Weaving together history, literature, ethnography, and ethnomusicology, Davesh Soneji's impressive work, Unfinished Gestures, showcases the heterogeneity, hybridity, and ingenue of India’s devadasi artists in the colonial period and beyond. . . . Davesh Soneji’s painstaking archival data, music excerpts, and fluid linguistic engagement with Tamil, Telugu, Sanskrit, Hindi, Persian, and European-language materials make this book’s narration of devadasis’ history vivid and compelling.”