Description

Late-twentieth century Indian-language writing includes the largest /multilingual/ clustering of chronologically and qualitatively “modernist” works outside the circuits of anglophone or europhone textuality and performance. The entire formation has remained peripheral in the “new modernist studies,” however, because of the serious problems of linguistic and cultural access. This talk considers some of the general conditions of cultural and literary rupture and experimentation that shaped modernism as a dominant aesthetic of the 1945-75 period in more than a dozen active literary languages. In more particular terms, it takes up antitheatricalism as a modernist topos that first emerges in the late-nineteenth century, and has defined the distinctive urban theatre culture of post-independence India.

Professor Dharwadker joined the University of Wisconsin faculty in Fall 2001. She is currently Associate Professor in the Departments of Theatre and Drama and English. Her principal research and teaching interests are in modern Indian and postcolonial theatre, comparative modern drama and theatre theory, and Restoration and eighteenth-century British theatre. In 2006, she received the Joe A. Callaway Prize for Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India Since 1947 (judged the best book on drama or theatre published in 2004-05), and the H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship from the UW Graduate School and Alumni Research Foundation for outstanding scholarship in the Humanities. Professor Dharwadker’s essays and articles have appeared in a range of journals and collections, including PMLA, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, English Postcoloniality, Studies in English Literature, Studies in Philology, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Theatre Research International, South Central Review, Theatre India, and The Blackwell Companion to Restoration Drama. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Folger Library, and the Newberry Library, among others. Professor Dharwadker has also lectured widely at institutions in the U.S. and abroad, including the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, the University of Georgia, Texas A&M University, Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the Indian Institute of Technology. Her current project is an edited collection of modern Indian theatre theory and criticism, titled A Poetics of Modernity: Indian Theatre Theory, 1860-Present, and scheduled for completion in 2010.