Inehåller bibliografiska referenser och index

Public Impersonators: Gender, Caste, and Social Ontology in the Marathi Vernacular Moment / Christian Lee Novetzke -- Racial Impressions, Capital Characters: Dave Carson Brownfaces the Empire / Kellen Hoxworth -- Remembering the Hunterwali's Whip: The Ghosts of Fearless Nadia and Her Many Guises / Rosie Thomas -- In Gandhi's Guise / Chaya Chandrasekhar, Janice Glowski, and Sumathi Ramaswamy -- Playing the Yogi: The Making of Swami Baba Ramdev / Shehzad Nadeem -- The Freedom to Dance: Performance and Impersonation in Lagan / Aniruddha Dutta -- Mediatizing "Fake" Khwaja Siras: The Limits of Impersonation / Claire Pamment -- "We Are Better than the Women": Understanding the Popularity of Female Artists in Kerala / Shilpa Menon -- Cosplay, Fandom, and the Fashioning of Identities at Comic Con India / Sailaja Krishnamurti -- Possessed Impersonation: Divine Mimesis in Malabar / Rich Freeman -- Divine Embodiment in the Theatre of Ramlila / Pamela Lothspeich -- Resisting Brahminical Patriarchy in Kuchipudi Dance: The Story of Haleem Khan / Harshita Mruthinti Kamath

Through an exploration of subjects such as Gandhi impersonators, performance artists, and ritual participants, Mimetic Desires makes an intervention toward understanding the phenomenon of impersonation and guising in South Asia and the world. This volume defines impersonation as the temporary assumption of an identity or guise in social and aesthetic performance that is perceived as not one’s own, and guising as sartorial and kinetic play more generally. Interrogating the legitimacy of the purported dialectic between the “real/original” and “fake/dupe,” Mimetic Desires refutes the ordering of identity along the lines of a binary or dichotomy that presupposes the myth of an original identity. By peeling back the layers of performative masks to reveal the process of the masquerade itself, we can see that those with the most social capital are often those with the most power and opportunities to impersonate “up” and “down” social hierarchies. The book’s twelve chapters disclose sites and processes of sociopolitical power facilitated by normative markers of social status relating to race, ethnicity, gender, caste, class, and religion―and how those markers can be manipulated to express and enhance individual and group power. The first comprehensive study to focus on impersonation in South Asia, Mimetic Desires expands on previous scholarship on impersonation and guising in vernacular theatre, dance, public processions, and religious rituals. It is particularly in conversation with the robust scholarship on gender performance in South Asia’s theatrical and dance forms. Mimetic Desires explores some of the contexts and forms of impersonation in South Asia, with its remarkable array of performing arts, to gain insight into the very human and quotidian practices of impersonation and guising