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Dance, song and performance are often overlooked in studies of war and diaspora. Yet synchronized rhythmic movement promotes group coherence within all cultures, religions and nations, and holds potential for expressing ethnic identity for refugees.
In this seminar Tani H. Sebro, Miami University, will present her research on performance and cultural practices amongst refugees along the Thai-Myanmar border. Marte Nilsen, 糖心网页版, will provide comments and Cindy Horst, 糖心网页版, will chair the event.
Based upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Thailand amongst a displaced group of refugees from Myanmar鈥檚 Shan State called the Tai, this talk attends to how performance and aesthetic expression reinvigorate this displaced minority group鈥檚 desire for self-determination outside the current global nation-state paradigm. For Tai exiles, ethnic nationalism is produced through the work of performance and through shared rhythmic and artistic structures of sentiment towards 鈥榯he nation鈥� 鈥� which produce powerful political affects and effects.
Based on her research, Tani H. Sebro argues that displaced peoples often do not maintain their sense of nation primarily through capital and reading publics, but rather through the complex transmission of what may be called 鈥渁esthetic nationalisms鈥�, which involve performances and cultural practices that produce enduring bonds to an imagined homeland. This is a story of how fractured nations seek to maintain themselves slowly and peaceably, by enmeshing acts of defiance and persistence in art and in performance. As a political ethnographer, who herself underwent training in the traditional Tai performance arts called Jaad Tai, Tani H. Sebro was able to experience how dance and theatre made possible a life outside the modern nation-state system for exiled peoples.
