Archives in drag
Performing nachaniya towards a queer theory of indenture
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7315656 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Suzanne C Persard (0000-0002-5215-3717, University of South Florida, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 2 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2022-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Indentureship and its Legacies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2634-1999 • E-ISSN: 2634-2006 |
| Publisher | Pluto Journals (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.1.0015 |
| OpenAlex | W4385472926 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
Archives in drag: Performing nachaniya towards a queer theory of indenture’ takes as its object the figure of the Indo-Jamaican nachaniya dancer as a paradigm for re-thinking queer theories of indenture. Nachaniya is a highly stylized Indo-Jamaican folk dance featuring a heterosexual male dancing in drag. The performance, which can be traced to the nineteenth century, is still common within present-day Indo-Jamaican communities and the diaspora. Nachaniya therefore presents both parts of a queer historical and living archive. By using an archival photograph from the 1960s of a nachaniya dancer as a point of entry, I consider the ways in which this genre of Indo-Jamaican folk performance demonstrates gender non-normativity as deeply embedded within the indentured archive. Since nachaniya is also read as not necessarily queer but ‘cultural’, I am interested in the tensions between a refusal to categorize the performance as a kind of drag while simultaneously elevating its ‘cultural’ status and the slippage between ‘queer’ and ‘culture’. I consider the figure of the nachaniya dancer as what Anjali Arondekar has termed a site of ‘ordinary surplus’ rather than a site of queer exception. Through a reading of this queer archival photograph, I consider destabilizing narratives of loss or absence that saturate approaches to the queer archive of indenture to suggest that nachaniya is a useful paradigm for theorizing the nexus at which Indo-Jamaican archives and queers of indenture have been theorized as ‘nothing to see
Aesthetics · Art · Dance · Diaspora · Literature · Nothing · Performativity · Political science · Popularity · Queer · Queer theory · Reading (process · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Law · Music History and Culture · Philosophy
Island Bodies
Without a Trace
Critically Queer
Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad 1917–1947
With Respect to Sex
Archive Fever
Global Circuits
(Re)tracing queerness
Decolonizing Transgender in India
The diasporic imaginary
The Brown Photo Album
In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts
Historical Representations, Performance Spaces, and Kinship Themes in Indian-Caribbean Popular Song Texts
Voyages across Indenture
East Indian Music in the West Indies
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |