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“Cultural Compradors and South Asian Drama – The Making of the Theatre of Empire”

Prof. Rashna Darius Nicholson
Department of English
University of Hong Kong

Abstract:
This presentation introduces one of the core arguments – cultural compradors – in Dr. Rashna D. Nicholson’s current book project The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage. The paper demonstrates how the Parsis, followers of Zoroastrianism and compradors in the colonial opium and cotton trade, facilitated the emergence and development of the ‘modern’ South Asian theatre in the second half of the nineteenth century. Colonialism, as has frequently been noted, was realized through not merely a coercive machinery of military, economic and political phenomena, but also cultural technologies of power and the comprador trader, the first burgher or bourgeois, herein played a decisive role. Yet several studies have also argued that compradorial complicity was not wholly unalloyed by demonstrating a considerable overlap between national and comprador elements that is, between early national industrialization and colonial capital. Doubly peripheral, belonging neither to the worlds translated from nor to the worlds translated to, Parsis as compradors negotiated zones of difference, inhabiting a grey area of constant ambiguity. The book traces how the Parsis not only domesticated the imperial project through acts of translation but also created sites for self-representation and subsequently for sedition and subversion through their critical role in the development of the vernacular public sphere.

Bio:
Rashna Darius Nicholson is an assistant professor in the Department of English at The University of Hong Kong. She holds a PhD (summa cum laude) in Theatre Studies from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her research and teaching specializations include nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty first century theatre history, historiography, and practice; postcolonial and world literature; and cultural development. Dr. Nicholson is the author of The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage: The Making of the Theatre of Empire (1853-1893), due to be published in 2021. She is currently working on two projects: the influence of the Rockefeller and Ford foundations on theatre in the Global South during and after the Cold War and the lost theatre buildings of Hong Kong.

Research Seminar
2024-01-10
26 March 2021 (Fri)
5:00pm
972 5772 4087
583805

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