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On november 12, 2004, george washington university's biggest auditorium was filled to capacity with a sold-out crowd of thousands all eagerly awaiting an intercollegiate dance competition.1 Local teams (Johns Hopkins, University of Maryland, and so forth) were joined by teams that had traveled from farther away to compete, such as Case Western Reserve, Rutgers, Columbia, Penn State, and Cornell. At stake was far more than school pride. The winner and runner-up were to receive thousands of dollars in cash prizes. The emcees stoked the enthusiasm of the crowd by reading offthe names of the nine competing schools, and the audience members rewarded their efforts with wild cheers for their preferred teams. Fans competed to drown out the other groups by raucously chanting the names of their schools; some spectators even waved signs and banners. Unthinkable just a decade before, the raucous event that had packed the American college's auditorium was a Gujarati folk dance competition called Raas Chaos.
The Raas Chaos competition, like other similar competitions held across the United States (e.g., Dandia Dhamaka, Dandia on Fire, Garba With Attitude, Raas Rodeo, Raas Royalty),2 pits teams against each other based on their performances of a new dance form that I call collegiate American Garba-raas. Garba-raas links two related sets of movement: Garba is associated with fluid stepping movements, often performed in wide circles; in Raas, dancers hit their own two-feet-long sticks (dandias) on others' dandias to keep the beat. Although Garba-raas is ostensibly part and parcel of Gujarati heritage, the globalization of traditional media through the highways and byways of transnational migration has led to contested cultural meaning, ambivalences and anxieties about identity, and the creation of new forms of cosmopolitanisms, modernities, and traditions that defy any simple attempt at categorization.3 Furthermore, the reification of home by both the "native/self" and the "stranger/other" is accomplished in a myriad of ways, and the frame of Garba-raas is just one of multiple windows through which to view the complexity of exercises in "the invention of tradition," "flexible citizenship," "long-distance nationalism," "nostalgia without memory," and "preserving and perverting" tradition, as they each pertain to South Asian immigrants.4 Collegiate American Garba-raas, as a dance form, is a cultural text used by its interlocutors for negotiating and embodying cultural and...