Performing Identities: Celebrating Indigeneity in the Arts

by G N Devy, Geoffrey V. Davis, K.K. Chakravarty

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Performing Identities brings together essays by scholars, artists and activists engaged in understanding and conserving rapidly disappearing local knowledge forms of indigenous communities across continents. It depicts the imaginative transactions evident in the interface of identity and cultural transformation, raising the issue of cultural rights of these otherwise marginalized communities.

Contents: Introduction/K.K. Chakravarty. 1. The hyena wears darkness: stories as teaching tools/Pia Thielmann. 2. Reading folktales juxtapositionally: embedded political insights and implied social value systems in two traditional (Khoekhoe And Khasi) narratives/Annie Gagiano. 3.Kissa – Heer: A gem of oral tradition/Charu Chitra. 4. Magical rhythms: psycho-sexual and religious significance of tribal dance/Mini John. 5. Foregrounding the margin: socio-cultural gender-friendly traditions of the lepchas of north-east India and the Igbos of South-East Nigeria/Shreya Bhattacharji. 6. Charting the multiple scripts of santali: notes towards a visual history of Adivasi languages and literatures/Nishaant Choksi. 7. Translating identity as lexicon: P.O. Bodding and a Santal dictionary/Ivy Imogene Hansdak. 8. Marginalised music : a case study from Western Orissa/India/Lidia Guzy. 9. Storying sovereignty and ‘sustainable self-determination’ in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah/Julie Mullaney.10.The socio-political imperative of festivals in a contested space: the examples of the Okiroro (Awan-Okere) and Agbassa Idju festivals of Warri, Nigeria Alero Uwawah and Israel Meriomame Wekpe. 11. Ogoni dances, masquerades and worldview/Barine Saana Ngaage. 12. ‘Black Indian’ women and blood rules: gender, mixed race and hyphenated hybridities on the margins of America/Christine Vogt-William. 13. Cultural celebrations of life: rituals of a hill tribe/Mohan Doss. 14. The Xam narratives of the Bleek and Lloyd collection: are they mythology and do they belong to the nineteenth century?/Michael Wessels. 15. Staging the Indian reserve: Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters/Cecile Fouache. 16. Indigenous knowledge and global translation: reconstruction of Australia through aboriginal imagination in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria/Sei Kosugi. 17. Contesting the Curative Space: The Politics of Healing in the Narratives of Abanyole ethnomedical practitioners/Dishon G. Kweya. 18.Conquering adversity through art: an evaluation of Moranic performances by the Maasai people of Kenya/Joseph Muleka…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR K.K. Chakravarty

Dr. Kalyan Kumar Chakravarty is a renowned art-historian with M.A. in History from Calcutta. University. M.P.A. in Public Administration and Ph.D. in Fine Art from Harvard University, U.S.A. He has lectured extensively in India and abroad. He has many publications to his credit including books on Orccha, Gwalior Fort. Khajuraho, Rock Art in India and the World, Dangwada excavation, the Indian Family. He has launched and edited important issues of the archaeological magazine Puratan. Some of his forthcoming publications are the Early Buddhist Art of Bodhgaya, Art of Daksina Kosala, articles in the Macmillan Dictionary of Art, London, an edited volume on Tribal Identity. He has chaired sessions in national and international seminars including World Archaeology Congress, World Ethnobiology Congress, Indian Science Congress. He is member of many expert committees and learned societies at the State, national and international level. A senior member of the Indian Administrative Service, he has specially concerned himself with development of museums and organization of excavation, conservation and non-invasive recycling of monuments, ecological monitoring of cultural and administrative initiatives throughout his eventful career. At present, he is Director, Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya (National Museum of Man) at Bhopal, promoting a multidisciplinary museum movement dedicated to the revitalization of dead, languishing, vanishing arts and crafts, ethnic identity, skills and knowledge.