Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the tension between subversive and non-subversive legend narration in the Kutiyattam Sanskrit theatre community. Focusing on a colonial-era legend still told today, it ethnographically considers breaks and continuities in subversive narrative meaning in a postcolonial context.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the tension between subversive and non-subversive legend narration in the Kutiyattam Sanskrit theatre community of Kerala, India. It focuses on the colonial-era legend of the Englishman and the dog, first published in 1909 and still widely told by artists today. Describing an encounter where an actor makes a fool of a British colonialist, the legend represents a living example of Indian folk commentary upon colonialism, hitherto only studied in colonial archives.

Exploring how the legend is told and interpreted by Kutiyattam artists today, this paper considers the following questions: How do artists interpret the legend, and what does this tell us about perceptions of British colonialism and/or artistry today? To what extent has there been a break in the subversive meaning of the legend in a postcolonial context? What can different versions reveal about both the way the past is imagined, and what lessons it may hold for the present? And, how does a past of exclusionary caste performance get mapped onto a heterogeneous present, and what may this reveal about possibilities for the future?

Paper short abstract:

Can Afro-descendant performances be understood as corporeal and oral narratives? What does it mean to perform these narratives in the streets of São Paulo? This paper focuses on these "alternative" narratives and on the memories and histories that they tell, challenging the hegemonic ones.

Paper long abstract:

The present paper focuses on the Bloco Afro Ilú Obá de Min, a Brazilian street carnival group that was born in 2004 and has been active in São Paulo for fifteen years. Today the group is formed by 400 black and white women and defines itself as a "feminine entity", working to preserve and to diffuse the black culture; and to strengthen and to empower the black women in the Brazilian society. Every weekend, the bloco's women occupy different urban public spaces, performing rhythms, songs, dances and spiritualities of African matrix, that become ways of revindication of its African ancestry and resistance against racism and sexism.

This paper, particularly, tries to understand the bloco's Afro-descendant performances as corporeal and oral narratives that tell memories and histories silenced along the centuries, but not forgotten by those who continue to tell them with their own bodies and voices. From this point of view, these "alternative" narratives seem to challenge the white hegemonic Brazilian memory, claiming the black presence within the Brazilian society and, at the same time, reactivating and generating "alternative" memories, epistemologies and knowledges too.

Paper short abstract:

The paper is concerned with the social and cultural impact of experimental music projects in Germany and their emerging networks with cultural institutions in the MENA region, demonstrating how the notion of "conflict" in electro-acoustic experiments can challenge postcolonial narratives.

Paper long abstract:

The study of popular music from the MENA region has long been dominated by narratives that not only foster the orientalization and politicization of Arabic musicians, but subsume music from the MENA region under the umbrella of "Arabic music" and "sounds of resistance", thus maintaining postcolonial struggles of musicians and power structures based on past and present geopolitical interests of Europe and North-America. Such narratives disregard individual class struggles and ranging social and economic opportunities across different diasporic communities. As a result of narratives that reproduce the eroticization of the female body to the fetishization of resistance and humanitarianism, musicians with kin relations to the MENA regions have found ways to create opportunities from such narratives through self-exotisation strategies in DIY music productions. Drawing on the narrational strategies of dominant forces within the Euro-American world music market, this paper will focus on the use of "productive conflict" in counter-hegemonic collaborative music projects to deconstruct narratives of victimhood and humanitarianism. Planet Ears, a newly established platform in Germany, aims to challenge the idea of a harmonic and hybrid perception of contemporary Arabic music, and instead publically showcase the impact of human movement, as well as the social and political potential of productive conflicts and fluid processes in collaborative music-making. The resulting experimental music projects illustrate Mieke Bal's notion of migratory aesthetics as the underlying logic of contemporary cultural production, creating opportunities for changing discourses and commercial, as well as academic, narratives on music from the MENA region.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the complicated mediation of historical narratives among Greeks in America. Based on Greek American schoolbooks, I will demonstrate that history is taught through broken and segmented narratives which aim to indoctrinate children and create strong ethnic identities.

Paper long abstract:

History has always been central to Greek education, particularly in the diaspora. Greek immigrants pay special attention to the historical awareness of their children. The paper will focus on the complicated mediation of historical narratives among Greeks in America. Based on Greek American schoolbooks, I will demonstrate that history is taught through broken and selective narratives. Interestingly, only two periods of the whole Greek history are included in these narratives: the classical antiquity (5th and 4th century B.C.) and the Greek revolution against the Ottoman occupation (1821-1830). All these stories oscillate between history and mythology. Their leitmotif is the self-sacrifice of Greek heroes. The paper will examine the role of these broken histories in creating strong ethnic identities in the diaspora. The conscious selection of these segmented historical narratives demonstrates the wish to mediate a glorious past. Moreover, it emphasizes the continuity from antiquity and the national struggles to success. Additionally, narratives about Antiquity or the Revolution come in the form of short theatrical dialogues to be used in school performances. Their performative character contributes to the formation of the historical awareness of the Greek children. Finally, these broken narratives of an appropriated history aim to indoctrinate the children to praise their heritage and imitate their ancestors.

Paper short abstract:

On mission to uncover the stories of women in my community, my questions were met - like clockwork - with self-dismissal. In an insightful twist, what first felt like lack of data has emerged as unarticulated discourse that now lies at the heart of my storytelling - it is time to break the silence.

Paper long abstract:

My frustration was painfully more obvious than the substance of my mother's contribution when, in wrapping my interview with her I had asked, "So, what did you do all day, mama?" I was gathering data for my project on women's stories in our community, beginning with my most accessible informant, only to find myself thoroughly annoyed by my mother's apparent lack of self-awareness. I first got a baffled stare back, almost as if she had found my question absurd. Then she trumped it by summing up a solid hour's recount of her early married life as a lonesome 'gaijin' housewife in Japan in one word - "Nothing." I followed faithfully by gawking in turn. Day-in-day-out, for days on end, to my mother, she had spent her days doing "nothing". This was what was absurd – this illogical sequence of rich detail followed by total negation. To my mother however, that was just how it was, for this is how it has always been. That her matter-of-factness irked me so bore deep insight did not occur to me immediately. But then auntie after auntie interviewed revealed a pattern of dismissiveness. Be it the reality of their trauma from war-time separation; the hardships of their adjustment to alien country as new brides; their roles, in the daily sustenance of their diasporic settlement – it all came down to nought. I now had a theme of silence emergent, more poignant than the stories I sought; itself precisely the story to tell.