Unmaking Contact

Innovative, provocative, and insightful, Unmaking Contact explores the liberatory and oppressive potentials of physical, intersubjective interaction in contemporary South Asian and diaspora choreography. Fluidly written and skillfully argued, this book considers contact as both literal and metaphorical connection, examining choreographers' use of touch as it navigates concerns of caste, gender, faith, sexuality, and more-than-human relations. As the first study of its kind to address touch and contact in South Asian choreographies, this book mobilizes South Asian epistemologies, aesthetics and critical theory in the interest of unsettling casteism and other oppressive hierarchies. * Janet O'Shea, Author of Risk, Failure, Play: What Dance Reveals about Martial Arts Training * Unmaking Contact delves into a field that one dares not touch, while touch remains central to dance and caste-based South Asian society and culture. The book's strength lies in the path of uncertainty it takes, making us realise that one cannot talk about South Asian dance without talking about caste. With an in-depth analyses of the works of South Asian dance artists, Mitra opens up for us a contested field of dance and touch that will make and unmake the futures of South Asian dance/studies. * Brahma Prakash, Author of Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India *