Call for Proposals
GPS: Global Performance Studies
Special Issue: “Caste, Corporeality, and Performance”
Editors: Anusha Kedhar (University of California Riverside, USA) and Brahma Prakash (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)
View this call online: https://gps.psi-web.org/announcement/view/17
We are pleased to invite submissions for consideration in a special issue of GPS: Global Performance Studies on “Caste, Corporeality, and Performance.”
Following the artistic and critical conversations initiated during the Caste and Corporeality Conference held at the University of California Riverside from April 12–May 24, 2024, this special issue seeks to bring together the study of caste, which has historically been the remit of the social sciences, with the study of corporeality and performance, which emerges out of the arts and humanities, to think about the ways in which caste is performed, reproduced, and resisted through the body. While caste has been theorized primarily through an economic, social, and political lens, there has been a recent shift towards thinking about caste and the body/embodiment (Saha 2020; Siddharth and Fadescha 2022), caste and touch (Jawaare 2019; Sarukkai 2009), caste and the senses/affect (Kanjilal 2024; Lee 2017 and 2021), caste and social performance (Bhoi and Gorringe 2023; Guru and Sarukkai 2020; Narayan 2021), and caste and dance/theatre (Kamath 2019; Kedhar 2025; Krishnan, Soneji, and Pillai 2024; Mitra 2025; Paik 2022; Pillai 2020; Prakash 2019; Putcha 2023). This special issue on caste, corporeality, and performance builds on this emerging discourse to ask what the analytic of caste can reveal about performance and what the analytic of performance can reveal about the corporeality of caste.
A 3000-year-old system with origins in the Indian subcontinent, caste is an exclusionary social hierarchy system rooted in Hindu scriptural texts. The caste system ranks society into four castes—brahmins, or the priestly caste; kshatriyas, or warriors and soldiers; vaishyas, or merchants and businesspeople; and shudras, or manual laborers—with hundreds of sub-castes within each of these groups. At the very bottom is a fifth group that includes Dalits, previously called “untouchables,” who are relegated to some of the most dehumanizing and dangerous forms of labor, including manual scavenging and corpse-burning. They are considered avarna, or without caste or outcaste. As Indian social reformer Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar rightly stated in 1936, the caste system is not just a division of labor but a division of laborers (2014). This system continues today despite being outlawed by the Indian Constitution.
The connection between caste and the body can be found in the very earliest Hindu scriptures. In the Rig Veda (1500–1200 BCE), where caste (varna) is first mentioned, the creation story states that brahmins were born from the head of the Purusha Sukta (“Cosmic Being”), kshatriyas from the chest, vaishyas from the legs, and shudras from the feet. This creation story not only mapped caste onto the body, but also established a hierarchy between the mind and the body, privileging those who engaged in intellectual and spiritual work (i.e., the work of the mind) over those who provided manual labor in the (battle) field (i.e., the work of the body).
In addition to labor, caste is also performed through social choreographies, including purity/pollution practices such as endogamy (intra-caste marriage), food traditions (vegetarian vs. non-vegetarian), social exclusion (untouchability), religious rituals (thread ceremonies), and a range of other ritualised performances. These performative acts are meant to mark, distinguish, and segregate bodies by caste, functioning as an order and command in a caste society. The body is also where correct caste performance is disciplined. When caste-based boundaries are transgressed, violence is enacted on those bodies through maiming, lynching, assault, rape, and even murder to enforce the caste order. Though caste-privileged communities are not subject to caste violence in the same ways as Dalits or caste-oppressed communities, they are not exempt from the embodied experiences of caste. According to Dalit feminist author and activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan (2023), “caste supremacy lives deep in their [upper caste] bodies,” surfacing, for example, in feelings of disgust at the sight or smell of meat (Kikon 2021; Kanjilal 2024) or in practices of not touching “lower” caste bodies (Jaaware 2019; Sarukkai 2009).
If caste is performed bodily through labor, social choreography, habitus, and affect, then performance can also be a means of annihilating or, at least, healing from the trauma of caste. As Soundararajan notes in The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing and Abolition (2022), “[t]he economic-political project of annihilating caste often doesn’t look at how we have to annihilate it from our bodies and our hearts, our intimate relationships, and our sexual practices” (100). “The annihilation of caste,” she continues, “happens with Dalits owning pleasure in our bodies, experiencing life as sensuous, loving beings” (142). The body, in other words, can be a site of refuge and liberation from caste even as it is marked by caste.
In this special issue, we examine how caste is reproduced through the body, performance, and the logic of repetition as well as how subaltern bodies resist dominant caste narratives through gesture, choreography, and collective action. While we build on decolonial approaches to performance, this special issue also understands the dangerous co-optation of decolonial approaches by the far-right in India and the diaspora. These counter-insurgency tactics undermine the rootedness of caste hierarchy and oppression in Indian society under the contested claims that caste was simply a colonial construct. In light of this abuse and misappropriation of the decolonial, this issue aims to foreground conceptual frameworks from dance/performance studies and radical anti-caste traditions to show how decolonization must also demand the de-brahmanization of cultural and epistemological fields.
We welcome submissions that engage with corporeality and performance through an anti-caste lens, including (but not limited to) the following:
- How does the body perform caste?
- How is caste reproduced in/through the body and performance?
- How does caste operate as an embodied ideology?
- What are the choreographic logics of caste?
- Where does caste live in the body?
- How does caste become part of one’s bodily habitus?
- How can performance undo caste or offer alternative re-imaginings?
- How might the body be a site of refuge or liberation from caste?
- What does looking at caste from a performance/choreographic lens reveal about the essence and experience of caste?
- What does looking at performance from a caste lens reveal about performance and power?
GPS: Global Performance Studies is a peer-reviewed, Open Access academic journal. We provide a platform for scholars and artists engaged in a broad range of performance studies, including contemporary performance practices; theory, politics, social and cultural contexts of and as performance; performance and visual arts and media; and practices of resilience and care for everyday life. We emphasize a global perspective on these themes and practices, and aim to support under-represented narratives and epistemologies that trouble and contest the discipline of performance studies.
As an online platform, GPS aims to create and utilize digital methods of publishing as a method for supporting diverse and situated knowledges that intervene within centralized or universalizing academic discourses. We are also interested in modes of scholarship that engage productively with the relationship between form and content, and we support submissions of performance (recordings of performances, dance films, etc.) and other artistic works (creative writing, photography, etc.) accompanied by critical reflections; audio and text-based interviews; as well as academic articles that take a more conventional text form (6,000–9,000 words), written in English and prepared according to GPS author guidelines. If you have questions about submission type, please contact the co-editors of this special issue, Anusha Kedhar (anusha.kedhar@ucr.edu) and Brahma Prakash (prakash.brahma@gmail.com).
Proposals should be a maximum of 500 words and include the preferred format (video, audio, text, etc.). Submissions must be original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere. GPS follows a double-blind peer review process.
Proposals: 20 September 2026 – send by email to gps-proposals@psi-web.org
Notice of acceptance: 16 October 2026. Note: Acceptance of proposal does not guarantee publication, as all articles must be peer-reviewed.
First drafts for editorial review: 15 December 2026
Editors’ feedback: 31 January 2027
Second drafts for peer-review: 1 March 2027
Revisions after peer-review (if needed): 15 June 2027
Final drafts after editorial feedback: 15 August 2027
Publication: September 2027 (approximately)
Further details regarding formatting and submission procedures are available at: https://gps.psi-web.org/about/submissions
Bibliography
Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramjo. 2014. Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition. Verso.
Bhoi, Dhaneswar, and Hugo Gorringe. 2023. “Introduction.” In Caste in Everyday Life: Experience and Affect in Everyday Society, edited by Dhaneswar Bhoi and Hugo Gorringe. Palgrave MacMillan.
Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarukkai. 2019. Experience, Caste, and The Everyday Social. Oxford University Press.
Jaaware, Aniket. 2018. Practicing Caste: On Touching and Not Touching. Fordham University Press.
Kamath, Harshita Mruthinti. 2019. Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance. University of California Press.
Kanjilal, Sucharita. 2024. “The digital life of caste: Affect, synesthesia and the social body online.” Feminist Media Studies 24 (5): 1112–1127.
Kedhar, Anusha. 2025. “Occupying the Space of the Erotic: Gender, Sexuality and Caste in Bhararatanatyam Padam Performance.” In The Oxford Handbook on Indian Dance, edited by Anurima Banerji and Prarthana Purkayastha. Oxford University Press.
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Mitra, Royona. 2025. Unmaking Contact: Choreographing South Asian Touch. Oxford University Press.
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Soneji, Davesh. 2012. Unfinished Gestures: Devadāsīs, Memory, and Modernity in South India. University of Chicago Press.
Soundararajan, Thenmozhi. 2022. The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition. North Atlantic Books.
Soundararajan, Thenmozhi. 2023. “ Dalit American activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan discusses caste and its implications in her book.” Elle India, Feb 22. https://elle.in/thenmozhi-soundararajan-trauma-of-caste/.
Theron Schmidt