The Visual and Material Culture of Dance in South Asia

A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2025 | Viewed by 372

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Religion, Haverford College, Haverford, PA 19041, USA
Interests: South Asian visual and material culture; architecture; colonialism

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Guest Editor
Department of Art History and Architectural Studies, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA 01075, USA
Interests: South Asian visual arts; global modernities; photography and film history; performance studies

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Arts, “The Visual and Material Culture of Dance in South Asia”, explores the intersections of dance performance, aesthetics, and embodiment in the visual arts and material culture from medieval and early modern times to the present. We are interested in experiments and intersections across media from a thematical and formal perspective. How do images of dancing bodies (paintings, photographs, drawings, prints, sculpture), props, musical instruments, textiles, jewellery, set design, posters and programs, and video footage function to complicate movement and performance, choreography, pedagogy, and the perceptions and politics of positioning particular dance traditions? How does the flow of materials, technologies, and ideas shape South Asian diasporic identities? Essays that explore the ways that the circulation of visual and material culture have produced, reshaped, and resisted ideologies that center around beauty, class, cosmopolitanism, and freedom in South Asian and diasporic communities. For this Special Issue, projects may include scholarly essays as well as more creative modes of writing and presentation.

Dr. Pika Ghosh
Prof. Dr. Ajay J. Sinha
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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Keywords

  • media
  • movement
  • sound
  • touch
  • ephemerality
  • embodiment
  • phenomenology

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Published Papers

This special issue is now open for submission.
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