This lecture is part of Theater 221: Introduction to Performance Studies, an interdisciplinary graduate seminar offered by the PhD program in Theater and Performance Studies and the Center for Performance Studies at UCLA.

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Macgowan Hall 2310C

Jisha Menon teaches courses at the intersection of postcolonial theory, globalization, and performance studies. She received her M.A. in English Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and her Ph.D in Drama from Stanford University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of religion and secularity, gender and nationalism, cosmopolitanism and globalization. Her book, Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge UP, 2013), considers the affective and performative dimensions of nation-making. The book recuperates the idea of “mimesis” to think about political history and the crisis of its aesthetic representation, while also paying attention to the mimetic relationality that undergirds the encounter between India and Pakistan. She is coeditor of Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (PalgraveMacmillan Press, 2009) that explores the coimbrication of violence, performance, and modernity in a variety of geopolitical spaces. She is also at work on a second project, Pedestrian Acts: Performing the City in Neoliberal India, which considers new narrations of selfhood that are produced at the intersection of neoliberal state, global market and consumer fantasy. She has published essays on the Indian partition, diasporic feminist theatre, political violence in South Asia, transnational queer theory, and neoliberal urbanism.

Sponsor(s): Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA