Uttara Asha Coorlawala, “Writing Out Otherness”
Increasingly, global-local situations call for theory to honor culturally diverse discourses and histories. This paper is concerned with the ways that critical writings affect material concerns of dancers. The paper stages crises of alterity and difference and addresses the need for identity discourses to acknowledge multiple subjectivities and locations; to propel readers beyond the comfort zones of binaries, singular constructing visions and fixed identities.
Alterity compels Asian artists to negotiate whiteness as praxis, and as theories of performance. However, even as our writings valorize resistance and interventions in performance, are our writings in fact controlling channels of access?[i] Is the dancer-as-subaltern[ii] always to be the data that validates western theory and theorizing–regardless of the origin and commitments of the writer? How may she, or he, the other, redefine herself, to whom, and still be heard?
This paper attends to the discomforts of participant-observation with conceptual consturctins of performance; to the discomforts produced by dichotomous gazes on bodies that must perform nationality; to the performance of pluralities of Asianness from within the glass walls of the hothouse located in Euro-American dance discourse. I propose it is necessary to re-consider theories of performance as an interrogation of tacit knowledge and [iii] the way that tacit knowledge informs cultural identity as in the example of the epistemologies of perception of say the Natya Shastra discourses. This paper asks how do we write non-violently so that identities can travel amidst moving spaces, cultural, personal, theoretical, performative spaces.
[i] The subaltern studies collective was founded by Ranajit Guha, with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Partha Chatterjee in Calcutta and addressed issues of authoritarian democracy, the peasant, and self-representation during the mid 70s while Indira Gandhi declared a state of Emergency in India (1975-1977).
[ii] The dancers of whom I speak in this paper, are not strictly subalterns. However, the point of this essay is to show that othering structures of knowledge limit the agency of the Asian dancer. See Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ” Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988: 271-313.
[iii] This is not to valorize culturally significant groups as either “pure” and uninflected by the pervasive influence of technologies, or wholly resistant to dominant discourses. See Escobar, Arturo, 1992. 12;