Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor
"The immense detail, the careful deployment of scholarly and personal narrative, and the dexterity of weaving history and ethnography together in Sweating Saris results in a beautiful and critical piece of scholarship for those interested in Asian American embodied practices. Srinivasan's adept interdisciplinary study is an essential read for those exploring transnational embodied practices across historical periods and ideologies. Its most important contribution, perhaps, is its framing of Bharata Natyam and other dance forms not as staged events subject to the gaze of spectators, but rather as continuous forms of physical, intellectual, interpretive, and performative labor that contribute to the honing of (personal, national, and cultural) identity, both in the public domain and within practitioners' bodies." The Journal of Asian Studies, August 2012