In the first of a four-part lecture series at the University of Kent, Rustom Bharucha will look back at critical points of departure in his intercultural journey over the last four decades. He will highlight and re-examine some of the key moments that have compelled him to highlight the creative possibilities of the intercultural against its continuing Eurocentric constraints in relation to equity, inclusion, and social justice.
What has changed over the years? Thinking beyond the already existing critiques of intercultural performance, the lecture will engage with the necessity of confronting new manifestations of racism, social bigotry and intolerance in an increasingly fractious world of political and sectarian conflicts. Juxtaposing recent attempts to redefine intercultural policy against the closures and ghettoization of multiculturalism, the lecture will also confront the rhetoric surrounding ‘diversity’ and ‘social inclusion’. Instead of playing into the pieties of political correctness or succumbing to strategic silences in order to circumvent controversy, how may we arrive at a more robust form of cultural pluralism rooted in a dialogical respect for differences?
This lecture will argue that we cannot give up on interculturalism but we need to rethink it within – and against – the intensifying nationalisms of our times.
University of Kent: Leverhulme Visiting Professor Lecture series - Key Dates
– 9 May: Interculturalism and its Discontents: Historicizing the Problems of Intercultural Performance and Theory Today
– 23 May: Intracultural Encounters through Performance: Intersecting the Local, the Regional and the Rural
– Date TBC Autumn 2024: Re-envisioning Interculturality through Decolonial Options: A search for a new ethics of performance
– Date TBC Autumn 2024: Toward a Nonhuman and Interspecies Transformation of the Intercultural: a planetary perspective
RUSTOM BHARUCHA is a writer, director and dramaturg based in Kolkata, India. An internationally recognized scholar in the field of intercultural theory and performance, he was recently appointed as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
Trained as a dramaturg at the Yale School of Drama, he has published a number of books over the years, including Theatre and the World (1993), The Question of Faith (1993),Chandralekha: Woman/Dance/Resistance (1995), In the Name of the Secular (1999), The Politics of Cultural Practice (2000), Rajasthan: An Oral History (2003), Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin (2006) and, more recently, Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments (2021), co-edited with Paula Richman, and The Second Wave: Reflections on the Pandemic through Photography, Performance and Public Culture (2022).
Between 2010-2012, Prof. Bharucha was a Fellow at the International Research Centre/Interweaving Performance Cultures in Berlin where he researched his book on Terror and Performance (2014). Later he worked as a Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies in the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
A former advisor of the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development in the Netherlands, he has served as a consultant for the Arts Council in Ireland in 2008 on cultural diversity in the arts, as well as for Ford Foundation in 2009 on its interdisciplinary and multicultural Artography project in the United States.
Between 2007-2009 he also worked as the Project Director of Arna-Jharna: The Desert Museum of Rajasthan devoted to the study of traditional knowledge systems. Between 2010-2011 he was the Festival Director of the Ramayana Festival at the Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Research in Puducherry, India. He will be based at the University of Kent as a Leverhulme Visiting Professor in the School of the Arts between April to October 2024.
