Ameera Nimjee - Political Worldmaking as Strategic Creativity
The chapter is the fourth in a book project titled: Strategic Creativities: Choreographing Indian Contemporary Dance. The book argues that contemporary dancers’ aesthetic decisions are entangled with economic ones that they perform on and off the dance floor to remain laboring as workers in the performing arts. Chapter 4, “Political Worldmaking,” is centered on the work of New Delhi-based Mandeep Raikhy, an Indian contemporary dancer who has had a hand in producing work as a choreographer, dancer, curator, and director of well-known contemporary forums in India like Gati and its longtime festival Ignite. With case studies in his most currently touring work Hallucinations of an Artifact, the grassroots performance series The Secular Project, and a work-in-progress with Pakistani media artist Asad Ali Zulfiqar, the chapter demonstrates that staging political dissent is at the heart of Raikhy’s work through the creative strategy of choreographic worldmaking. Drawing from literatures in queer worldmaking, the chapter provides a method for close-reading Raikhy’s choreography, where he builds a kinesthetic vocabulary iteratively to wash over and be absorbed into audience members, inviting them into alternative political worlds. Political worldmaking is the strategic creativity presented here, where the granularity of alternative world-building sustains Raikhy’s choreographic durée. The chapter zooms in on the smallest movements of the body to demonstrate an iterative choreographic worldmaking, while also zooming out to analyze how this worldmaking is a creative strategy for Raikhy to stage political dissent in dance. The chapter cites ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Raikhy, which took place in New Delhi, Hamburg, and online in 2024.
Workshop papers will be available ten days in advance of the workshops. Please write to us for a copy of the paper. The papers will not be presented during the session to maximize time for discussion; they should please be read in advance. Please help us protect works-in-progress by not distributing these draft papers, or passwords. If you know others who would like to attend the workshop or would like access to a specific draft, please feel free to write to us: Nitika Khaitan (nitika.khaitan@yale.edu) and Palvasha Shahab (palvasha.shahab@yale.edu).
Speakers
Ameera Nimjee (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Music. Her primary research is on the study of citizenship, race, and gender in transnational South Asian performance cultures. Ameera is currently at work on two larger projects: on creativity in South Asian contemporary dance economies and performance traditions that have accompanied the migration of Muslims through South Asia, East Africa, and North America. Her work has been published in the journals Ethnologies and Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and has been funded by fellowships and prizes from the American Council of Learned Studies, Society for Ethnomusicology, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Ameera has also contributed book chapters to various edited volumes on the topics of kathak dance, Bollywood fitness, and South Asian American weddings. She holds a PhD and MA in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago and University of Toronto, respectively, and a BMus also from the University of Toronto. Ameera performs often as a kathak dancer, and remains a member of Toronto-based Chhandam Dance Company under the continued tutelage of her teacher Joanna de Souza. She joins Yale from the University of Puget Sound, where she was Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology in the School of Music and in Asian Studies.
- Humanity