Women in Asian Performance offers a vital re-assessment of women's contributions to Asian performance traditions, focusing for the first time on their specific historical, cultural and performative contexts. Arya Madhavan brings together leading scholars from across the globe to make an exciting intervention into current debates around femininity and female representation on stage. This collection looks afresh at the often centuries-old aesthetic theories and acting conventions that have informed ideas of gender in Asian performance. It is divided into three parts: erasure – the history of the presence and absence of female bodies on Asian stages; intervention – the politics of female intervention into patriarchal performance genres; reconstruction – the strategies and methods adopted by women in redefining their performance practice. Establishing a radical, culturally specific approach to addressing female performance-making, Women in Asian Performance is a must-read for scholars and students across Asian Studies and Performance Studies.

Contributed articles.

The book argues that there is no monolithic homosexuality; there are only homosexualities, that is, there are as many reasons for being gay as there are gays. Some people are born gay, some have gayness thrust upon them, and some do, indeed, achieve to great gayness. Representation of homosexuality/homoeroticism, as it is understood today, is thus a western import. The act and public/social discourses on same-sex love are still illegal; it is, according to many, against the Indian ‘tradition’; and a sense of ‘history’ is seriously problematic when we dig out for a past tradition of homoerotic love and desire. Hoshang Merchant, through an examination of texts, films, poetry, attempts to analyse and crack the codes of sexual (mis)conduct in contemporary India, giving short histories of the fate of several gay writers and explaining the difficulties of ‘coming out’.

This work discusses why so many western theatre workers have come to India and what they were looking for. It identifies Indian theatre as a site of reappraisal and renewal both in India and in the world of performance.

Who's Who in Contemporary World Theatre is a lively and accessible biographical guide to the key figures in contemporary drama. All who enjoy the theatre will find their pleasure enhanced and their knowledge extended by this fascinating work of reference. Its distinctive blend of information, analysis and anecdote makes for entertaining and enlightening reading. Hugely influential innovators, household names, and a whole host of less familiar, international figures - all have their lives and careers illuminated by the clear and succinct entries. All professions associated with the theatre are represented here - actors and directors, playwrights and designers. By virtue of the broad range of its coverage, Who's Who in Contemporary World Theatre offers a unique insight into the rich diversity of international drama today.

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance centers on an insular community of Smarta Brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India who are required to don stri-vesam (woman’s guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. Impersonation is not simply a gender performance circumscribed to the Kuchipudi stage, but a practice of power that enables the construction of hegemonic Brahmin masculinity in everyday village life. However, the power of the Brahmin male body in stri-vesam is highly contingent, particularly on account of the expansion of Kuchipudi in the latter half of the twentieth century from a localized village performance to a transnational Indian dance form. This book analyzes the practice of impersonation across a series of boundaries—village to urban, Brahmin to non-Brahmin, hegemonic to non-normative—to explore the artifice of Brahmin masculinity in contemporary South Indian dance.

There have been several researched studies of Marathi Theatre, there have been valuable monographs on single dramatists and many insightful articles in Marathi journals. However, comprehensive surveys of specifically political theatre are scarce.

Post-millennial Marathi cinema is a dynamic and expanding practice that is celebrated as a “new-wave” but has not received much critical engagement. This book presents the first comprehensive inquiry of contemporary films and examines their textual, industrial, and cultural intersections to understand what constitutes the “new-ness” of Marathi cinema. Establishing the vernacular particularity of Marathi cinema, the book argues that newage films are actively engaged in a reflexive intellectual and social critique as a mark of new filmmaking in India. In the diversity of genres and topics handled by Marathi filmmakers since 2004 this study identifies four broad affective topographies for analysis – an imagery of nostalgia underpinning the narrative strategies of Marathi films, the articulation of social aspiration as a theme as well as a societal dialectic, an experiential reflexivity in the representation of Dalit and marginal narratives, and a mediatic network of border-crossings through transnational influences on films. Contemporary Marathi Cinema: Space, Marginality, and Aspiration offers a critical dialogue on broad issues of film policy, multiplex economics, genre forms, queer politics, and neoliberal contexts. It will be indispensable to students and researchers of Indian cinemas, regional filmmaking, media, cultural studies, popular culture and performance, literature, and South Asian studies, and will also be of interest to filmmakers and cinephiles.

The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism is the first wide-ranging anthology of theatre theory and dramatic criticism by women writers. Reproducing key primary documents contextualized by short essays, the collection situates women’s writing within, and also reframes the field’s male-defined and male-dominated traditions. Its collection of documents demonstrates women’s consistent and wide-ranging engagement with writing about theatre and performance and offers a more expansive understanding of the forms and locations of such theoretical and critical writing, dealing with materials that often lie outside established production and publication venues. This alternative tradition of theatre writing that emerges allows contemporary readers to form new ways of conceptualizing the field, bringing to the fore a long-neglected, vibrant, intelligent, deeply informed, and expanded canon that generates a new era of scholarship, learning, and artistry. The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatrical Theory and Dramatic Criticism is an important intervention into the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies, Literary Studies, and Cultural History, while adding new dimensions to Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

This book presents a lucid, comprehensive, and entertaining narrative of culture and society in late 19th- and early 20th-century Maharashtra through a perceptive study of its theatre and cinema. An intellectual tour de force, it will be invaluable to scholars and researchers of modern Indian history, theatre and film studies, cultural studies, sociology, gender studies as well as the interested general reader.