sweating saris: Indian dance as transnational labor

Priya Srinivasan, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2012, 238pp.,

ISBN: 978-1-4399-0430-5

, $29.95 (Pbk)

In Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor , Priya Srinivasan provides a critical investigation of the intersections of Indian dance, gendered labour, immigration law and citizenship from a feminist perspective. This book is an ethno-historical investigation of Indian women dancers and male performers who travelled to the United States at significant times in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Srinivasan puts these historical journeys in the context of the substantial transformations of dance in India and the corrosive, anti-Asian sentiment that dominated American immigration policies throughout the period under investigation. The transnational journeys not only framed the identities of the performers and dancers involved, but also eventually shaped the immigration and citizenship laws.

Srinivasan views Indian dance in the United States not only as a spectacle or as emblematic of Indian culture, but also as labour, and redefines dancers as immigrant labourers. Through a genealogical reading of Indian dance in the United States, she attempts to unveil the subjugated Indian dancers as they had been rendered invisible in Indian and US dance history and scholarship. She mines the fragmented archives dating back to the 1880s, including microfilms and lithographs...