Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Dancing In The Diaspora: Remembering The Devadasis, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

Introduction:

In Canada, the classical dance bharatanatyam is both greater and less than an art form, greater because, unlike more common forms such as ballet or jazz dance, it offers its practitioners and its spectators something more than an opportunity to experience art or to be the vehicle for its expression, and less because what it offers along with its art is ethnicity. And in our multicultural society anything tagged as ethnic is caught in an intricate web of exaltation and denigration: by the very act of its celebration, which is frequently state-sponsored and state-endorsed, ethnicity is cast outside and …

The Faith And Rationality Of Dalit Christian Experience, Mathew Schmalz

Mathew Schmalz

No abstract provided.

Images Of The Body In The Life And Death Of A North Indian Catholic Catechist, Mathew Schmalz

Mathew Schmalz

No abstract provided.

Hypostatic Union And The Subtle Body: An Analysis Of Christian Yogic Practice, Mathew Schmalz

Mathew Schmalz

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Atlantic: British India, Book Circulation, And The Transmission Of Knowledge In The Eighteenth Century, Arthur Fraas

Arthur Mitchell Fraas

Scholars have long understood that in the eighteenth century, the publishing, reading, and book-buying communities of Europe and the Atlantic world were inextricably linked. In the English-speaking world, libraries and printers in both colonial North America and Great Britain served to disseminate and collect the rapidly accelerating stream of ideas in print that characterized the era. This talk will explore the need to expand this Atlantic view to include the growing world-wide movement of texts and readers in the eighteenth century and describe the little-studied flow of books and manuscripts between libraries, readers, and collectors in colonial South Asia and …

Whose India?: The Independence Struggle In British And Indian Fiction And History, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

For centuries, India has captured our imagination. Far more than a mere geographical presence, India is also an imaginative construct shaped by competing cultures, emotions, and ideologies. In Whose India? Teresa Hubel examines literary and historical texts by the British and Indian writers who gave meaning to the construct “India” during the final decades of the Empire. Feminist and postcolonial in its approach, this work describes the contest between British imperialists and Indian nationalists at that historical moment when India sought to achieve its independence; that is, when the definition, acquisition, and ownership of India was most vehemently at …

Making Claims: Indian Litigants And The Expansion Of The English Legal World In The Eighteenth Century, Arthur Fraas

Arthur Mitchell Fraas

This paper explores the British Imperial legal world of the mid-eighteenth century. Within this period, the previously confined spaces of English law and legal institutions became open to an ever widening set of legal subjects, both people as well as places. The paper focuses on what was at the time perhaps England’s most remote and murkily defined legal space, the East India Company (EIC) settlements at Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. The paper shows how a series of legal actors: metropolitan judges, Indian litigants and elite lawyers, first bridged the legal worlds of England and the subcontinent. I argue that by …

Primary Sources At A Distance: Researching Indian Colonial Law, Arthur Fraas

Arthur Mitchell Fraas

No abstract provided.

Regarding India, Conversations With Artists. Video Interview Website, Kathryn Myers

Kathryn Myers

Regarding India is series of video interviews with contemporary artists living and working in India. Reflective of a dynamic and diverse contemporary art scene the interviews engage aspects of Indian history, society, culture and current events through the creative work, experiences, and insights of artists. The series is ongoing and will eventually include over sixty interviews.

Facing East, Facing West: Mark Twain's Following The Equator And Pandita Ramabai's The Peoples Of The United States, Brian Yothers

Brian Yothers

Mark Twain's Following the Equator (1897), a narrative of a journey to the South Pacific, Australia, South Asia, and South Africa, has occupied a small but significant space in the consideration of Twain's wider career as both a travel writer and social critic. Twain's work has not, however, been considered in conjunction with the works of later nineteenth-century South Asian travelers in North America. The present article puts Twain's discussion of India and Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) in dialogue with Indian scholar and women's rights activist Pandita Ramabai's 1889 travelogue The Peoples of the United States.

Art Series - Devon Avenue Sampler, Laura Kina

Laura Kina

Devon Avenue Sampler (2009-2011) is a portrait of a diasporic South Asian/Jewish community in Chicago, IL. This textile series, which uses indigo dye and khadi fabric, was hand embroidered by artisans from a fair trade women’s organization in Mumbai, India. View the series: http://www.laurakina.com/devon.html

Girl, Woman, Lover, Mother: Towards A New Understanding Of Child Prostitution Among Young Devadasi Sex Workers In Rural Karnataka, India, Treena Orchard

Dr. Treena Orchard

The emotive issue of child prostitution is at the heart of international debates over ‘trafficking’ in women and girls, the “new slave trade”, and how these phenomena are linked with globalization, sex tourism, and expanding transnational economies. However, young sex workers, particularly those in the ‘third world’, are often represented through tropes of victimization, poverty, and “backwards” cultural traditions, constructions that rarely capture the complexity of the girls’ experiences and the role that prostitution plays in their lives. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with girls and young women who are part of the Devadasi (servant/slave of the God) system of sex …

Dhandha, Dharma And Disease: Traditional Sex Work And Hiv/Aids In Rural India, J. O'Neil, Treena Orchard, J. Swarankar, J. Blanchard, K. Gurav, B. Barlaya, R. Patil, C. Hussain Khan, S. Moses

Dr. Treena Orchard

This paper discusses the results of two ethnographic studies with female sex workers in rural areas of Karnataka and Rajasthan, India. In particular, we focus on women whose socio-economic status, and religious and occupational practices, are part of sex work systems that have historical precedents such that they can be termed “traditional” sex workers. The approach taken in the ethnographic work was informed by current critical approaches in medical anthropology and public health. The paper argues that in the context of an expanding HIV/AIDS epidemic in rural areas of India, understanding the historical and structural factors that operate to perpetuate …