AHA Session 41
Thursday, January 4, 2024: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Franciscan D (Hilton Union Square, Ballroom)
Chair:
Anshu Malhotra, University of California, Santa Barbara
Papers:
Session Abstract
This interactive panel illuminates the importance of female performers in shifting and pluralist imaginings of Punjab, a geographical region in present-day northwest India, and in Pakistan, but also imagined as “homeland” in multiple Punjabi diasporas, in cartographic disruptions of spatial fixity. The panel focuses on women performers in domestic and public spaces, but also highlights gendered imaginings of femininity that transmit and circulate among Punjabis in multiple locations, historically and contemporarily. Punjabis have experienced both violent disruptions of their regional affiliations, as also self-willed peripatetic relocations. In changing contexts of life-worlds, how is cultural and ecological affect transmitted and transmuted, experienced and shared by Punjabis as locality and globality collide and reconstitute Punjabis’ subjectivities. In the intimate locus of domesticity, in the aftermath of violent partings encompassed in the charged term Partition, or in the musical globality that reimagines Punjabiyat, this panel examines gendered Punjabiness in multivalent ways. The panel discusses women performers, but also how femaleness is imagined and performed. It does so by studying quotidian, popular and elite forms of Punjabi storytelling and performance – domestic tales, autobiographical writings, as well as classical, folk, and popular music – in reshaping gender and community in local, national, and diasporic contexts. Panelists challenge terracentric frameworks of place by examining “hydropoetics,” or the ubiquitous riverine and oceanic metaphors that inform performances about Punjab.
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