Performing Politics: State Power, Ethnicity, and Gender in Sri Lanka

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Notes

Reed's fieldwork overlapped with not only the period of conflict between Tamil separatists and the Sri Lankan state, but also the uprising of the Sinhala antigovernment organization, the JVP.

In my research in Sri Lanka, Jaffna residents told me of situations where dance was almost literally on the frontlines of conflict: the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE or Tamil Tigers) sponsored dance performances that included revolutionary choreographies when they held control of the Jaffna peninsula. The performers included LTTE cadres as well as civilian performers.

1. See Purnima Shah, “National Dance Festivals in India: Public Culture, Social Memory and Identity.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 2000.

2. For another examination of nonelite perspectives on a reclaimed dance form, see Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming) as well as the performance work of Soneji, Hari Krishnan, and Srividya Natarajan.

3. See Janet O'shea, “Roots/Routes of Dance Studies,” in The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, ed. Alexandra Carter and Janet O'shea (London: Routledge, 2010).

4. Examples include Francesca Castaldi, Choreographies of African Identities: Negritude, Dance, and the National Ballet of Senegal (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Sally Ness, Body, Movement, and Culture: Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Cynthia Novack, Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Marta Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).