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Unfinished gestures : devadāsīs, memory, and modernity in South India / Davesh Soneji.
LIBRA BL1237.58.D48 S66 2012
Available from offsite location
Van Pelt Library BL1237.58.D48 S66 2012
By Request
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Soneji, Devesh.
- Series:
- South Asia across the disciplines
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Devadāsīs--India, South.
- Devadāsīs.
- Devadāsīs--India, South--Social conditions.
- Dance--Social aspects--India, South.
- Dance.
- Prostitution--India, South.
- Prostitution.
- Social change--India, South.
- Social change.
- Dance--Social aspects.
- Social conditions.
- South India.
- Physical Description:
- xiii, 313 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
- Place of Publication:
- Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2012]
- Summary:
- Unfinished Gestures presents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India who are generally called devadasis, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following a hundred years of vociferous social reform, including a 1 947 law that criminalized their lifestyles, the women in devadasi communities contend with severe social stigma and economic and cultural disenfranchisement. Adroitly combining ethnographic fieldwork with historical research, Davesh Soneji provides a comprehensive portrait of these marginalized women and unsettles received ideas about relations among them, the aesthetic roots of their performances, and the political efficacy of social reform in their communities. Book jacket.
- Contents:
- On historical, social, and aesthetic borderlands
- Producing dance in colonial Tanjore
- Whatever happened to the South Indian nautch?: toward a cultural history of salon dance in Madras
- Subterfuges of "respectable" citizenship: marriage and masculinity in the discourse of devadāsā reform
- Historical traces and unfinished subjectivity: remembering devadāsā dance at Viralimalai
- Performing untenable pasts: aesthetics and selfhood in coastal Andhra Pradesh
- Coda: gesturing to devadāsā pasts in today's Chennai.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Local Notes:
- Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Samuel P. Orlando Fund.
- ISBN:
- 9780226768090
- 0226768090
- 9780226768106
- 0226768104
- OCLC:
- 711050876
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