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Journal ArticleDOI

Choreographing Decolonization: Pedagogical Confrontations at the Intersection of Traditional Dance and Liberal Arts in Higher Education in India.

15 May 2020-Research in Dance Education (Routledge)-Vol. 21, Iss: 2, pp 122-134
TL;DR: When the traditional (dance) and the modern (university) intersect within the Liberal Arts, the pedagogical dynamics produced opens possible pathways to approach decolonization as an ongoing praxic process as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: When the traditional (dance) and the modern (university) intersect within the Liberal Arts, the pedagogical dynamics produced opens possible pathways to approach decolonization as an ongoing praxic...
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article , the authors identify some accessible and culturally relevant teaching practices that may help a dance educator establish connections between students' personal experiences and their classroom content in K-12 spaces.
Abstract: ABSTRACT Dancers in India come from a background that focuses on performance and are trained to teach the way they were taught. When such dancers join a K-12 space as dance educators, they need to find new ways of teaching dance and movement. The teaching strategies employed in a dance studio, institute, or under a guru vary immensely from the strategies employed in a school. This article is a beginning into identifying some accessible and culturally relevant teaching practices that may help a dance educator establish connections between students’ personal experiences and their classroom content in K-12 spaces. This is being written at a time when the country is witnessing a paradigm shift in its education system leading to an increase in demand for dance educators in the K-12 spaces because of India’s 2020 “The New Education Policy.” The hope is that this article empowers future dance educators to find and document their experiences.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors briefly outlines the history and development of the methodology of narrative inquiry and draws attention to the need for careful delineation of terms and assumptions, and issues of social significance, purpose and ethics are also outlined.
Abstract: The paper briefly outlines the history and development of the methodology of narrative inquiry. It draws attention to the need for careful delineation of terms and assumptions. A Deweyan view of experience is central to narrative inquiry methodology and is used to frame a metaphorical three-dimensional narrative inquiry space. An illustration from a recent narrative inquiry into curriculum making is used to show what narrative inquirers do. Issues of social significance, purpose and ethics are also outlined.

693 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The lifestyle of the sadir dancers of the early twentieth century was extensively researched by Amrit Srinivasan (1979-81) and documented in her ethnographic dissertation at Cambridge University 1984 and in subsequent articles as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: As Bharatanatyam dancers across the world talk about what they do through listservs, websites, and performance publicity—in academia's world dance courses and amidst international cultural diplomats—I keep re-encountering the Orientalist representation of a “pan Indian transhistorical” devadāsī. Her history is a linear deterioration of aesthetic quality and personal agency, from temple to courts and from courts to streets and to (deserved) abandonment from where the dancer and the dance must be rescued (see Hanna 1993; Banerji 1983).The lifestyle of the sadir dancers of the early twentieth century was extensively researched by Amrit Srinivasan (1979–81) and documented in her ethnographic dissertation at Cambridge University 1984 and in subsequent articles.2 The devadāsī was selected for her talent. She was highly trained in dance, texts, and music, and she performed temple rituals. Her freedom from household responsibilities (grhastya) was made possible by the largesse of a patron, and bhakti theology legitimized “both the housewife and god's wife as parallel life-possibilities” both for women and for those men who could afford to support both kinds of liaisons. Temples frequently reimbursed devadāsī-s with bourses and land donations.Dancers today persist in maintaining that dancers had no “technique” since they danced only for God, that they knew nothing of music or theory, performed in a vulgar manner, and that contemporary dancers are much more beautiful, intelligent, and better trained.

32 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2000
TL;DR: The authors argue that teaching is no more than a "who wins loses" style game against its own destined errancy, and that cultural competence is learned by those ambitious to enter the discourse of the masters, even if to destabilize it.
Abstract: Derrida’s copious teaching notes, published these days almost as is, remind us that teaching is no more than a ‘who wins loses’ style game against its own destined errancy.1 A teacher will say, everyone knows this. I am not sure. Aristotle’s class notes, Hegel’s class notes, Saussure’s class notes seem to have frozen into orthodoxies of various kinds. ‘Culture’ is learned without teachers, even as it is taught by parents and elders, of both genders, in different ways. ‘Cultural Studies’ is a terrible misnomer, now that it has been around long enough for people to have forgotten that it was originally a study of the politics of those who claim dominant culture. ‘Civilizational competence’ is learned by those ambitious to enter the discourse of the masters, even if to destabilize it. The institutionalization of Cultural Studies has something like a relationship with the missed crossings between errant tendencies. This essay runs after them, necessarily in vain.

20 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the complexity of the relationship between the local and the global can be understood only in terms of historical conditions operating in specific contexts, and that the indigenization of global culture opens up the possibility of alternative experiences of modernity, which do not fall under the rubric of American culture but instead refer to other geocultural identities.
Abstract: Discussions about globalization tend to fall somewhere between two poles. One invokes the paranoia of what Appadurai (1996) refers to as a McDonaldization of the world, in which local practices, identities, and economies give way to the homogenizing mandates of capitalism. The other rejoices over the emergence of so-called hybrid cultural forms, interpreted as signs of the resilience of non-Western societies, as harbingers of the dawn of some new age of multicultural understanding, or as proof of the political power of consumers (Garcia Canclini 1995). Both views often underestimate the complexity of the relationship between the local and the global, and lose from view the fact that this relationship can be understood only in terms of historical conditions operating in specific contexts. While capitalism plunders the world, littering its path with Tommy Hilfiger, Pizza Hut, and the ever-popular sitcom Friends, there are many examples of the ways in which local populations do not passively consume what is thrown at them, but actively reinterpret and selectively combine elements of mass-mediated culture within preexisting frameworks and markets (Diawara 1998; Feld 1988; Martinez 1999). Moreover, the indigenization of global culture opens up the possibility of alternative experiences of modernity, which do not fall under the rubric of American culture but instead refer to other geocultural identities (Ching 2000).

18 citations