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KNOWING THE DANCER: EAST MEETS WEST

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2004

Jeffrey L. Spear  and
Avanthi Meduri
Jeffrey L. Spear
Affiliation:
New York University
Avanthi Meduri
Affiliation:
Centre for Contemporary Culture, New Delhi
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Extract

The clean and the proper (in the sense of incorporated and incorporable) becomes filthy, the sought-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame.—Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror THE HISTORY WE ARE SKETCHING is one of boundaries double crossed between India and the West and between periods of the South Asian past. On one level our story is about an historical irony, how late nineteenth-century Orientalism resuscitated the romantic mystique of the eastern dancer in the West just as South Indian dancers were being repressed in their homeland by Indian reformers influenced by western mores. Within that history there is another dynamic that is less about crossing than about shifting boundaries, boundaries between the sacred and the profane and their expression in colonial law. We will be looking at these movements and transformations within the context of current scholarship that is historicizing even those elements of Indian culture conventionally understood to be most ancient and unchanging.

Type
EDITORS' TOPIC: VICTORIAN BOUNDARIES
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , September 2004 , pp. 435 - 448
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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