Revolution at the Crossroads: Street Theater and the Politics of Radical Democracy in India and in Algeria.

Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with political street-theater genres, focusing on the contemporary production of the Jana Natya Manch (People’s Theatre Group, or JANAM) in India, and the work of Kateb Yacine and his theater group Action Culturelle des Travailleurs (Workers’ Cultural Action or ACT) in Algeria, between 1966-1975. Combining archival research in France and India with fieldwork conducted with JANAM, this project explores how leftist activists in each country have used street theater to both foster political solidarities and advocate for inclusive national communities.

I define political street theater as a public, outdoor, performance-genre that takes place at ground level, frequently in places where social or political transformation is envisioned. The proximity of spectators and theater facilitates audience feedback and participation in performances, making for a collective theater that models the types of inclusive communities advocated by the plays. The comparison of South Asian and Algerian performance permits a consideration of global discourses of political theater motivating JANAM’s and Kateb’s common concern for advocating rights of the disenfranchised and recuperating an egalitarian conception of national community. I use the term “vernacularization” to consider such commonalities while attending simultaneously to the distinct language ideologies and local performance practices shaping Kateb’s and JANAM’s work.

This project argues for the inclusion of political street theater into the post-colonial archive to both address a blind spot in postcolonial cultural studies and crucially, to underscore the modes of resistance and political solidarities that performance enables. Further, engaging with performance theories addressing relationships between text and performance, I suggest that street theater uncovers and then challenges the textual biases and concomitant logic of representation of the post-colonial archive. Through its frequent adaptation of high/elite textual sources, street theater challenges the primacy of texts as determining political and social realities to alert us to the political possibilities of embodied actions and local performance traditions.