Circus, Capital and the Global South: A History of the Present

The Lecture

This talk will map the various dimensions of the significant flow of acrobats from East African countries to South Asian circuses. The key questions would be the various trajectories of inequality, labour, livelihood and dignity that have set in motion this voyage and the globalised and homogenised forms of ethnicity, exhibition and race that shape this emergent itinerant performance domain. This exploration, I hope, will contribute to understanding the Indian Ocean region as a space of governance, mobility and experience from the perspective of the Global South.

The Speaker

Dr Nisha Poyyaprath Rayaroth is a historian from South India and a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies. Her book, ‘Jumbos and Jumping Devils: A Social History of Indian Circus’, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. She has formerly been a Fulbright fellow at Yale University, USA, a Mellon-SSRC fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and a SASNET fellow at Lund University, Sweden.

Registration (required)

Please register using the web form on this page by 5 February to reserve a seat and lunch.