Public Women in British India

Icons and the Urban Stage

Rimli Bhattacharya (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

350 Seiten

2018
Routledge India (Verlag)
978-1-138-28255-1 (ISBN)

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This book foregrounds the subjectivity of ‘acting women’ amidst violent debates on femininity and education, livelihood and labour, sexuality and marriage. It looks at the emergence of the stage actress as an artist and an ideological construct at critical phases of performance practice in British India. The focus here is on Calcutta, considered the ‘second city of the Empire’ and a nodal point in global trade circuits.

Each chapter offers new ways of conceptualising the actress as a professional, a colonial subject, simultaneously the other and the model of the ‘new woman’. An underlying motif is the playing out of the idea of spiritual salvation, redemption and modernity. Analysing the dynamics behind stagecraft and spectacle, the study highlights the politics of demarcation and exclusion of social roles. It presents rich archival work from diverse sources, many translated for the first time.

This book makes a distinctive contribution in intertwining performance studies with literary history and art practices within a cross-cultural framework. Interdisciplinary and innovative, it will appeal to scholars and researchers in South Asian theatre and performance studies, history and gender studies.

Rimli Bhattacharya currently teaches at the Department of English, University of Delhi, India. She has trained in Comparative Literature at Jadavpur and Brown Universities and has been Visiting Professor at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, the University of Pennsylvania and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. She has collaborated with artists and filmmakers on multimedia projects and has published on critical areas in gender and performance, children’s literature and primary education. Her corpus of classic translations from Bangla into English includes novels by Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore. She is the author of the key text Binodini Dasi: ‘My Story’ and ‘My Life as an Actress’ (1998) and The Dancing Poet: Rabindranath Tagore and Choreographies of Participation (forthcoming).

List of Figures. Preface. Acknowledgements.Note on Transliteration and Translation. Introduction 1. Genealogies: or, what’s in a name? 2. Benediction in performance: playing the saint and meeting the saint: 1880s–1990s 3. Counter Seductions: and metropolitan dysfunction 4. The ‘Female’ Confessional Voice: actress-stories as captivating copy 5. ‘A Strange Meeting’ at the Star Theatre, 1912: mourning on stage. Postscript. Appendix. Select Bibliography. Index

Erscheinungsdatum	13.06.2018
Zusatzinfo	55 Halftones, black and white; 55 Illustrations, black and white
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	138 x 216 mm
Gewicht	703 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Theater / Ballett
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Wirtschaftsgeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
ISBN-10	1-138-28255-3 / 1138282553
ISBN-13	978-1-138-28255-1 / 9781138282551
Zustand	Neuware