Archives in drag

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.1.0015
• Pages: 15-36
• Published date: 08 July 2022
• Date: 08 July 2022
• Author: Suzanne C. Persard
• Subject Matter: nachaniya ,Indo-Jamaican,queer archives,drag,folk performance

Journal of Indentureship 2.1 June 2022

Archives in drag

Performing nachaniya towards a queer

theory of indenture

SuzanneC. Persard

SuzanneC. Persard is assistant professor of Women’s and Gender

Studies at the University of South Florida, USA.

ABSTRACT

‘Archives in drag: Performing nachaniya towards a queer theory of

indenture’ takes as its object the gure of the Indo-Jamaican nachani-

ya dancer as a paradigm for re-thinking queer theories of indenture.

Nachaniya is a highly stylized Indo-Jamaican folk dance featuring a

heterosexual male dancing in drag. The performance, which can be

traced to the nineteenth century, is still common within present-day

Indo-Jamaican communities and the diaspora. Nachaniya therefore

presents both parts of a queer historical and living archive. By using

an archival photograph from the 1960s of a nachaniya dancer as

a point of entry, I consider the ways in which this genre of Indo-

Jamaican folk performance demonstrates gender non-normativity

as deeply embedded within the indentured archive. Since nachaniya

is also read as not necessarily queer but ‘cultural’, I am interested in

the tensions between a refusal to categorize the performance as a

kind of drag while simultaneously elevating its ‘cultural’ status and

the slippage between ‘queer’ and ‘culture’. I consider the gure of

the nachaniya dancer as what Anjali Arondekar has termed a site of

‘ordinary surplus’ rather than a site of queer exception. Through a

reading of this queer archival photograph, I consider destabilizing

narratives of loss or absence that saturate approaches to the queer

archive of indenture to suggest that nachaniya is a useful paradigm

for theorizing the nexus at which Indo-Jamaican archives and queers

of indenture have been theorized as ‘nothing to see’.

KEYWORDS

nachaniya, Indo-Jamaican, queer archives, drag, folk performance

DOI:10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.1.0015

16 SUZANNEC. PERSARD

Journal of Indentureship 2.1 June 2022

Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica

INTRODUCTION

In a photograph from the 1960s, a group of musicians appear in

black and white. Men pose with the harmonium, tabla and sarangi,

evoking the familiar assemblage of the Indo-Caribbean instru-

mentals in ritual singing of satsang. At the bottom of the

photograph, a male dancer also poses – crouched in the front row

of the photo, his hand gently resting on his cheek and a shawl cov-

ers his head. His dancing frock is draped across him. The eyes of

this nachaniya dancer are lowered or closed – or perhaps he has

just looked down from the camera for a moment. His body, among

the musicians, is an archive in plain sight. In this article, I read this

archival photograph as being at the intersection of ‘queer’ and

‘cultural’ to consider how the nachaniya tradition of Indo-Jamaican

folk performance demonstrates gender non-normativity as deeply