From the introduction: “The Promise of critical liberation that postcolonial and transnational perspecties offer by urging us to think the complex imbrication of the global in the local remains an unfulfilled promise in South Asian dance scholarship. I will elaborate this point by describing the global thrust of Rukmini Devi’s art and education movement, which could not be recuperated within the territorializing intellectual framework of Indian nationalism, and explain why she, in fact, manifests herself as a discursive failure in standard scholarly accounts of Bharatanatyam in the United States.”
Centering Devadasis and Tawaifs
