Reading Against the Orientalist Grain
Subtitle: Performance and Politics Entwined with a Buddhist Strain
Edition: Ist
Publisher: Anderson India
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Kolkata
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 357
ISBN-13: 9788190671903
Subjects: Performance
Description: Reading Against the Orientalist Grain: Performance and Politics Entwined with a Buddhist Strain is exploratory and self-questioning, crystallized around the post-colonial location of the author. From this location, the phrase ‘against the grain’ connotes a bit of wry humour. The grain in wood, if planed in the wrong direction, will tear rather than lie smoothly. And that precisely is the intention of this volume. Recognizing 'politics' as a pervasive struggle for power and the ‘political’ as that which seeks to expose, subvert or enhance transactions of power, this volume is unashamedly political on two fronts: Orientalism’s ‘natural’ tendency for dealing with the ‘Orient’ and the hegemony of culture mobilized in ‘benign’ and ‘exotic’ ‘Oriental’ performances.

Reading Against the Orientalist Grain, as a study of performances, intends to read, i.e., to make sense of, to construct meaning out of eight performances. These are Caryā Nṛtya and Indra Jātrā from Nepal, Pangtoed Cham from Sikkim, Lhamo from Tibet, Paro Tsechu from Bhutan, Devol Maduva from Sri Lanka, Yoke Thay from Burma and Bauddha Kīrtan from Bangladesh. These performances are entwined with one common thread — Buddhism — more specifically, Theravāda and Vajrayāna Buddhism. The volume is the product of and an attempt to communicate the author’s experience of Buddhism as transience — ironically, in the past tense of these pages — against the Orientalist grain. It seeks to examine how various representations of ‘Buddhist’ performances, as networks of signs where the signified is infinitely delayed, are constructed and to what effects and consequences these representations are mobilized.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: Deciphering Barthesian Myths in the Nepalese Festival of Indra Jātrā; title: Caryā Nŗtya in Nepal: When ‘Becoming the Character’ in Asian Performance is Nonduality in ‘Quintessence of Void’; title: Tibetan Folk Opera: (De/Re) Articulations in Cultural Politics; title: When a People do not Need to Remember: Witnessing the Death of Pangtoed ’Cham in Sikkim; title: The Interface of ‘Standing For’ and ‘Acting For’ in Bhutan: Power Struggle, Myths and Strands of History Embedded in the Paro Tsechu; title: The Ritual of Devol Maduva: Problematizing Dharma in the Ethnic Conflicts of Sri Lanka; title: ‘Yoke Thay’ in Burma:  The Dance of an Ontological Paradox as a Trope of Human Condition; title: Halfway ‘Becoming’ on the Interface of Tŗşņā and Desire: Examining Bauddha Kīrtan as a Minor Performance in Bangladesh; title: Gazing at - Not (Con/Oc)cluding - the Discursive Subject; title: Works Cited; title: Index