ABSTRACT
What Indian Ocean geographies emerge if we attend to performance – dance and music – as corporeal, mediated, and participatory? This chapter explores an intersecting set of movements through Abyssinia (Ethiopia), Hadramawt (Yemen), and the eastern Deccan (Southern India) over the longue duree. Starting from African elites, performance, and visual media in the seventeenth century Deccan and moving to contemporary marfa – celebratory band music and dance – in Hyderabad and digital media, the chapter asks how people locate themselves in and through the gestures, rhythms, spaces, and participatory logics of popular dance and music in the Indian Ocean world. At the messy interstices of African diasporic, Yemeni, and South Indian folk-popular dynamics, marfa’s moves (gestural, rhythmic, and geo-digital) anchor urban spaces of Hyderabad and online as Indian Ocean sites. Within the slippages of multiple histories of circulation and belonging, young people define translocal imaginaries – mapping shifting ‘performative geographies’ beyond national boundaries and dominant considerations of labor or geopolitics.
