‘South Asian’ Diaspora Theatre in Sydney: Cultural Politics of the Proscenium and Transforming the Mise-En-Scène

Journal of Intercultural Studies. 2024. Vol. 45. No. 2. P. 190–207.

Roy Chowdhury A., Khan A. A.

The Nautanki Theater Company (Nautanki) has been actively performing drama in Sydney since 2012, and it has been organizing the South Asian Theater Festival since 2016. We study their discourses, cultural politics, and practices; conduct an ethnographic observation of performances; and interview performers, organizers, and survey audiences of the 2019 theater festival in-depth. We contend that by hosting performances and events, Nautanki creates a space for amicable, intercultural dwellings in which collective identity is forged through cross-cultural dialogue, deliberation, embodied aesthetics, and bottom-up intercultural ethics that shift state-promoted top-down multicultural ideas and policies. Nautanki also instils a sense of longing for cultural novelty, authenticity, and participation, and creates a hybrid cultural 'South Asian' community identity, in Sydney.

Keywords: sociology of culture, Australia, theatre studies, Integration, immigration and national minority policies in Sweden/Denmark and Australia/New Zealand. Pu blic sector reform and the quality of government in New Zealand/Sweden and Cameroon/Colombia., theatre, acculturation of immigrants, South Asian Studies (History, Politics and Culture), Diaspora Studies, Cultural Studies, Comparative Cultural Studies, South Asia

Publication based on the results of: The risks of social turbulence and the integrative potential of Russian society (2024)