Bishnupriya Dutt – författare

Maya Rao, performer, performance maker and feminist, has not only contributed to Indian feminist theatre, but is a trailblazer, who set new standards in solo performances, mapped an alternate career trajectory for women in theatre and, in the face of right-wing state repression in India, has engaged significantly in performance activism. This Element looks back at her early career in the 1980s when she was creating agit prop theatre for the feminist movement and forward to her performance activism in the twenty-first century, with detailed attention to Rao's acclaimed protest Walk, and her participation in the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act. The study also encompasses her parallel work in the theatre, from early collaborations with feminist directors to her solo projects. The author traces her creative-political journey towards an egalitarian feminist future.

Through the lens of performance and politics, this collection zooms in on the context-specific dimensions, analogies, and micro-histories of the Left to better understand the larger picture. It proposes a search for the Left not from totalising Leftist ideological positions and partisan politics but from ethical dimensions through smaller-scale Left-leaning struggles; not from the political to the aesthetic, but from the potentiality of art to offer new political imagination and critique; not from the individual subordinated to the collective, but from the dialectics of subjectivity and collectivity. This is not an attempt at a sweeping global overview of Leftist cultures either, but a collection that brings together culture-specific and comparative perspectives. This book searches for fragments of and on the Left, past and present, through which to rethink and patch a fragmented world.

Through the lens of performance and politics, this collection zooms in on the context-specific dimensions, analogies, and micro-histories of the Left to better understand the larger picture. It proposes a search for the Left not from totalising Leftist ideological positions and partisan politics but from ethical dimensions through smaller-scale Left-leaning struggles; not from the political to the aesthetic, but from the potentiality of art to offer new political imagination and critique; not from the individual subordinated to the collective, but from the dialectics of subjectivity and collectivity. This is not an attempt at a sweeping global overview of Leftist cultures either, but a collection that brings together culture-specific and comparative perspectives. This book searches for fragments of and on the Left, past and present, through which to rethink and patch a fragmented world.

This book explores how citizenship is differently gendered and performed across national and regional boundaries. Using ‘citizenship’ as its organizing concept, it is a collection of multidisciplinary approaches to legal, socio-cultural and performative aspects of gender construction and identity: violence against women, victimhood and agency, and everyday issues of socialization in a globalized world. It brings together scholars of politics, media, and performance who are committed to dialogue across both nation and discipline.This study is the culmination of a two-year project on the topic of 'Gendered Citizenship', arising from an international collaboration that has sought to develop a comparative and yet singular perspective on performance in relation to key political themes facing our countries of origin in the early decades of this century. The research is interdisciplinary and multinational, drawing on Indian, European, and North and South American contexts.