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      Archives in drag : Performing nachaniya towards a queer theory of indenture

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            Abstract

            ‘Archives in drag: Performing nachaniya towards a queer theory of indenture’ takes as its object the figure of the Indo-Jamaican nachaniya dancer as a paradigm for re-thinking queer theories of indenture. Nachaniya is a highly stylized Indo-Jamaican folk dance featuring a heterosexual male dancing in drag. The performance, which can be traced to the nineteenth century, is still common within present-day Indo-Jamaican communities and the diaspora. Nachaniya therefore presents both parts of a queer historical and living archive. By using an archival photograph from the 1960s of a nachaniya dancer as a point of entry, I consider the ways in which this genre of Indo-Jamaican folk performance demonstrates gender non-normativity as deeply embedded within the indentured archive. Since nachaniya is also read as not necessarily queer but ‘cultural’, I am interested in the tensions between a refusal to categorize the performance as a kind of drag while simultaneously elevating its ‘cultural’ status and the slippage between ‘queer’ and ‘culture’. I consider the figure of the nachaniya dancer as what Anjali Arondekar has termed a site of ‘ordinary surplus’ rather than a site of queer exception. Through a reading of this queer archival photograph, I consider destabilizing narratives of loss or absence that saturate approaches to the queer archive of indenture to suggest that nachaniya is a useful paradigm for theorizing the nexus at which Indo-Jamaican archives and queers of indenture have been theorized as ‘nothing to see’.

            Content

            Author and article information

            Journal
            10.13169/jofstudindentleg
            Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies
            JIL
            Pluto Journals
            2634-2006
            08 July 2022
            2022
            : 2
            : 1
            : 15-36
            Article
            10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.1.0015
            b93caf04-7c3f-4008-b19b-57092a6f9ab8

            All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

            History
            Page count
            Pages: 22
            Categories
            Articles

            Literary studies,Arts,Social & Behavioral Sciences,History
            folk performance,Indo-Jamaican, nachaniya ,drag,queer archives

            References

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