What’s in a dance? Dalkhai: from a religious community ritual, to a pro-scenium performance

An educational international project, initiated by a Romanian organisation, comprising folk dances from around the world, has challenged me to go deeper into understanding one of the most popular dance forms of Western Odisha, Dalkhai. Traditionally a religion-based folk dance connected to the agrarian culture of local Adivasi communities, it has been gradually developed into a cultural pattern of Odisha, Eastern India. Considering folklore as intangible cultural heritage of humanity, according to UNESCO definition, I explore the expression of this ritual-dance, in connection to the Adivasi culture, as Dalkhai is considered the goddess of fertility, initially worshipped by the tribal people/Adivasi like Mirdha, Kondha, Kuda, Gond, Binjhal, etc., but also in its recent metamorphosis into a proscenium representation. The Dalkhai dance is becoming visible and recognised at state, national and even international form of dance, while in the Adivasis communities it is noted that the ritual becomes less and less performed. Consulting the UNESCO definitions and documents on Intangible Cultural Heritage is useful for understanding how to approach a choric ritual, involving a tradition, music and dance, enhancing the importance of safeguarding cultural diversity while confronting cultural globalization. Its approach, in accordance with ‘universal cultural rights’, emancipatory politics concerning world culture and multiculturalism, opposes the disappearances and destruction of local traditions, indigenous practices. Heritage concerns the whole community, conferring an identity feeling, and supporting the transmission to the next generations, sustainable development, often involving economic stakes, becoming essential for developing the territories (Chevalier, 2000).

Faces places: Countermapping art, subalternities and counterpublics

This article is a critical reflection on our forays in the curatorial practice and exposition in March 2018 for a map art exhibit called Faces Places: Mapping Embodiments held at the University of the Philippines campus in Diliman. The exhibit was an exposition of different and alternative forms of mapping through the works of three Filipino artists: Mideo Cruz, Cian Dayrit and Mark Salvatus. We analysed their interventions in making visible the progressive geographies inherent in the everyday lifeworlds of Filipinos. Drawing from Nancy Fraser’s subaltern counterpublics, we argue that their artistic outputs are forms of counter-mapping vignettes that allow the possibility to illuminate the voices and habitus of the sifted and the excluded as new cartographical interventions intended for critical reflection and pedagogy. The art maps and countermaps of the artists evoked different responses that broadened and expanded understanding beyond what maps are, which allowed us to further interrogate the power structures that define world order through time. The production of new knowledges was derived not only from analysing the textual and symbolic aspects of the artistic countermaps but also with the processual aspect of art-making as emancipatory politics.

Emancipatory politics at its limits? An introduction

Emancipatory politics and the very idea of emancipation have come under pressure. Feminist and post-colonial critiques, the appropriation of emancipatory ideals by right-wing populists and the crises triggered by the transgression of planetary boundaries all expose emancipatory paradoxes and raise questions about the further suitability of emancipation as a regulative ideal guiding any socio-ecological transformation of contemporary consumer societies. With this article, which introduces a Special Issue entitled The Dialectic of Emancipation - Transgressing Boundaries and Boundaries of Transgression, we are working toward a research agenda that acknowledges the current impasse of emancipatory politics and explores its ambivalences and further potentials. Following an outline of the emancipatory paradox and a review of how emancipatory movements have continuously contested – and redrawn – restrictive boundaries, we scan sedimented understandings of the two key terms, emancipation and dialectic, feeding into the concept that we are suggesting as an analytical lens for investigating the current impasse and future prospects of emancipatory politics: the dialectic of emancipation. We preview how the contributors to this Special Issue make use of these terms as they are engaging with this research agenda and conclude by reflecting on the dangers and pitfalls associated with the concept dialectic of emancipation.

Liberation and limitation: Emancipatory politics, socio-ecological transformation and the grammar of the autocratic-authoritarian turn

Despite decades of emancipatory mobilization, there is no realistic prospect for any profound socio-ecological transformation of contemporary consumer societies. Instead, social inequality and ecological destruction are on the rise and an autocratic-authoritarian turn is reshaping even the most established liberal democracies. In explaining these phenomena, the struggle for autonomy and emancipation is an important parameter that has not received sufficient attention so far. This article investigates these phenomena through the lens of the dialectic of emancipation – a concept that I have suggested elsewhere and that I here further elaborate, placing particular emphasis on the relationship between the rule-transgressing and the rule-setting capacities of the emancipatory project. The article specifies constitutive dimensions of the emancipatory project, explores their ongoing reinterpretation and reconfiguration and thus explains how the emancipatory logic itself has come to obstruct the socio-ecological transformation and to nurture new forms of authoritarian governance.

Contesting Stereotypes through Self-Representation? A Review of the Romani Exhibition Stands at the 2019 Frankfurt Book Fair

Romani literature was exhibited at the Frankfurt Book Fair at specific stands and events for the first time in 2019. This article reviews the presented literature and authors and discusses advantages and disadvantages of establishing the category “Romani literature” within the context of the Frankfurt Book Fair. It argues that the category provides a new platform for Romani authors as well as for Romani identity politics and was set up with the aim to fight existing racism against Roma. Making oneself visible as a diverse minority at such an event can help to break up stereotypes and constitutes a success after centuries of underrepresentation. At the same time, the article uncovers the danger of feeding into essentialism through the label “Romani literature” and reflects on the limitations of emancipatory politics when participating in a predominantly commercial event.

Connecting Identity

This chapter analyses the aesthetic codes and political values associated with indigenous Jamaican reggae rhythms and Rastafarian culture and identity in and around Columbus. The author examines the way in which the appropriation of Rastafarian culture through reggae music can express a possibility of hope for the movement’s liberating and emancipatory politics. The chapter describes how Rastafarian culture emerged as a black socio-political movement in Jamaica to become a contemporary cultural phenomenon popularly associated with the genre of reggae music.

“Broken Bits of Color in the Dirt”

This essay examines the numerous critical claims of “timeliness” around the recently recovered novel Romance in Marseille as well as Claude McKay’s own numerous commitments and challenges as they emerge therein: the multiple and enduring afterlives of slavery, the Bolshevik Revolution and the burgeoning of its stiflingly bureaucratic Thermidor under Stalin, the various theoretical and programmatic complications that issues of race and gender posed for international socialism alongside the promises and disappointments of emancipatory politics writ large. However, in attempting to adjudicate such problematics of difference, McKay also provides the outlines of a dialectical “Black Intersectional International,” thereby gesturing toward a “commonism” of the quayside.