This collection of essays on circus histories and theories focusing on the Global South and its transnational contexts is significant because circus studies has largely focused on the Global North. Many Latin American, African, and Asian regions have circus histories dating back to the nineteenth century. Many of them have biographies, autobiographies, and histories of this spectacular world written in their own regional languages, which are not available in English or any other global languages. This volume on the histories and contemporary developments of the circus includes transnational and regional circus histories that connect the Global South to the rest of the world. The authors have crafted the essays using wide-ranging archival materials from regional languages, extensive ethnographic research, and conceptual frameworks of connected contexts.
Contents
List of Figures;
Acknowledgements;
Introduction: Circus Bodies That Matter - Nisha P R;
Part I: The Body Politics
1. Flying Devils and Female Fakirs: India on Display at Betram Mills
Circus in Interwar Britain - Sabine Hanke;
2. Circus, Histories, and International Relations: China's Acrobatic
Diplomacy in North America from the Cold War to Neoliberal Globalization -
Tracy Ying Zhang;
Part II: Contemporary and Social Circuses, and Transnationalisms
3. Imagining Mexico: Transnationalism and the Reproduction of Cultural
Identity in Contemporary Circus - Roy Gomez Cruz;
4. Just across the Ocean: African Transnationals in Indian Arenas - Nisha
P R;
5. Ethiopian Social Circus: Performance, Politics and Dreams - Leah Olwen
Llewellyn;
6. Transforming the Ordinary: Social Circus as Inclusion in the Cities of
Brazil and Latin America - Alice Demattos Guimaraes;
Part III: Bondage and Bonding;
7. Kinds of Kins: Enacting Human Care and Affection Towards Circus Animals
in India - Eleonore Rimbault;
8. Staging Representations of Africans at America's World's Fairs, Wild
West Shows, and Circuses Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Robert W.
Rydell Part IV: Tenting and Touring
9. 'The World's Grandest, Largest, Best, Amusement Institution':
Spectatorship, Community Formation, and Conflict at the American Tenting
Circus, 1825-1956 - Janet M. Davis;
10. A Strongman Takes on the Circus: Eugen Sandow's 1904 1905 Tour of
Asia - Carey A. Watt;
11. Circus in Form: Nineteenth Century Economic Opportunism and Touring
Colonial Asia and India - Peta Tait;
Comprehensive Bibliography;
Notes on Contributors; Index
Nisha P R is a historian and the author of Jumbos and Jumping Devils: A Social History of Indian Circus. She has been a Fulbright fellow at Yale University, Mellon-SSRC fellow at University of the Witwatersrand, Research Fellow at Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study and International Institute for Asian Studies.
