Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English (original) (raw)

in English offers an innovative reading of several texts by Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Vikram Chandra. The volume joins the comparative scholarship on the above named authors-which has focused on the effects of globalization (Jay), or the global market place (Huggan; Dwivedi and Lau), questions of modernity (Wiemann), issues of genre (Ganapathy-Dore)-by foregrounding the role of myth and storytelling and the ways they negotiate between the Indian tradition of the epic and the "requirements" of the contemporary novel (3). The author focuses on performance and performativity, two key categories for understanding this body of work, and discusses them from both the perspective of the long durée time of Indian theatre and also from the standpoint of various Western conceptualizations. According to Draga Alexandru, "performativity of language" together with "performative identity" are fundamental aspects for understanding how "the boundaries of the self placed … in changing cultural in-betweenness are negotiated in Indian fiction in English" (5-6). She defines performance as "embodied meaning production," which is highly dynamic and functions as "the basis of establishing connections between the text and its contexts and audiences" (8). "Performativity," on the other hand, provides Draga Alexandru with her starting hypothesis, namely that "there is a degree of performativity in all fiction, since, besides telling stories, fiction triggers the realities of those stories into being" (9). From here, the book proceeds to interweave REVIEW OF MARIA-SABINA DRAGA ALEXANDRU, PERFORMANCE AND PERFORMATIVITY