Love-Worlds: Performance of Love as Decolonial Worldmaking in India and in Indigenous Theatre on Northern Turtle Island
Abstract
This dissertation is a study of theatrical performances of love as anti-colonial resistance in India and on Turtle Island. I study how, both in India and on Turtle Island, colonial forces have suppressed and manipulated women and queer and Two-Spirit people’s love—practices of kinship, self-recognition, sexuality, and desire. I explore how performance artists and activists redeploy love as a decolonizing force. Learning from Indigenous scholars and artists’ articulation of love, I propose a concept called loveformance to read performances of love as active creations of decolonial worlds. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines interviews with artists, autoethnography, close readings of dramatic texts, and critical readings of performance, I explore multiple forms of performative public assembly, including protests, marches, and theatrical productions, as ways of creating worlds that defy colonial heteropatriarchy. Drawing from Kashmiri and Adivasi scholars from India as well as Indigenous artists and scholars from Turtle Island, this dissertation makes a case for examining the Indian state, especially the Hindu nationalist state, using settler colonialism as an interpretive framework. The first chapter studies the political aesthetics of the February 14th Women’s Memorial Marches that commemorate Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women on Turtle Island, and protests in India on Valentine’s Day that resist moral policing of women and violence against inter-caste and inter-religious love. The second chapter explores love as a mode of resistance against recognition by the state and as a practice of self-recognition by reading Rebecca Belmore’s Vigil, Marie Clement’s The Unnatural and Accidental Women, and a theatrical adaptation of Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Draupadi” by Kalakshetra Manipur. The last two chapters of the dissertation focus on ways in which performances of love refuse colonial heteropatriarchy through queer and Two-Spirit eroticism, and through relationships with other-than-human worlds. Here, I study Kim Senklip Harvey’s Kamloopa, Girish Karnad’s Nagamandala, Mandeep Raikhy’s Queen-size, and Tipi Confessions, produced by Kim TallBear, Tracy Bear, and Kirsten Lindquist. Ultimately, this dissertation aims to uncover political and aesthetic patterns, knowledges, and strategies within decolonization efforts, as well as new technologies and forms of colonial oppression that are made evident when theatrical performances of love in these two contexts are studied together.