ABSTRACT
This chapter is an interview conversation with performance studies scholar Swati Arora who shares her thoughts on transnational and decolonial feminisms and epistemes. The conversation draws on Swati’s research on urban performance cultures, her activist engagements with “Decolonize the University” movement, and her experiences from her intertwined academic and political trajectory, informed by embodied experiences of inhabiting a multiplicity of different geopolitical locations in the Global South (Delhi and Cape Town) and the Global North (Amsterdam and London). Interweaving Swati’s highly charged descriptions of activist practices and performances with her in-depth theoretical reflections, the interview digs into the ways in which her transnational trajectory and overlapping situatednesses have made her cognizant of epistemic differences, erasures, and the urgent need for deploying the tricksterous feminist practice of translations as a point of departure for pluriversal dialogues, and a conscious move away from monologic universality. In the interview, Swati shares insights from her forthcoming book on urban art and performance in Delhi, a manifesto she wrote to decentre Theatre and Performance Studies, and her research on a feminist performance Walk by the Indian performer and playwright Maya Rao, which engaged with translation as an act of transnational solidarity in highly complex ways.
