Decolonizing the Concept of Indian Classical Dance

Bio: Anurima Banerji is an associate professor at the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. Her research principally concerns critical historizations of dance in India and its relationship to governmentality. She is author of the monograph Dancing Odissi: Paratopic Performances of Gender and State, awarded the 2020 de la Torre Bueno Prize by the Dance Studies Association, and co-editor of How to Do Politics with Art (2017) with Violaine Roussel as well as the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance (2025) with Prarthana Purkayastha. Her writings have appeared in the journals like About Performance and Contemporary Theatre Review, and the edited volumes Coming to Know, Planes of Composition, Performance Cultures as Epistemic Cultures, and the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, among others. Currently she is writing a book titled The Impossibility of Indian Classical Dance.