When: Wednesday, October 2, 2013 4:30 PM
Where:
Luce Hall (LUCE), Room 203
34 Hillhouse Ave., New Haven, CT 06511
Speaker/Performer: Kedar Kulkarni, Yale University
Description: In this talk, I examine the periodization of Marathi drama, and reevaluate the way we talk about performance in colonial Bombay. As an ephemeral genre, theatre cannot be analyzed simply from existent archival materials and read as a literary or historical text, but needs to be understood against the grain of the archive. The archive’s overwhelming focus on the disreputable aspects of the theatre needs to be deconstructed for two primary reasons: it betrays its class and caste affiliations, but more importantly, it devalues performance as a meaning-making process in society, in favor of literary or historiographic meaning making. Instead, I speak about the broad popular appeal of Marathi itinerant theatre, and the ways in which performance ushered in an era of mass and “secular” culture.