Journal of Performance Practice Across the Indian Ocean World

The Journal of Performance Practice Across the Indian Ocean World is an interdisciplinary initiative dedicated to fostering research, dialogue, and scholarly exchange on performance practices throughout the vast and culturally diverse region of the Indian Ocean World. The journal responds to a growing need for academic platforms that recognize and investigate the unique forms of embodied knowledge, expression, and creativity that emerge from this historically rich and complex region.

The Indian Ocean World encompasses a wide network of societies, languages, religions, and political histories that have been shaped by centuries of migration, trade, colonization, and resistance. This journal takes performance—broadly defined to include theatrical, musical, ritual, oral, bodily, and everyday expressive forms—as both a lens and a method for examining how individuals and communities navigate their identities, experiences, and social realities across this space.

By providing a venue for critical and creative scholarship, the journal represents a significant advancement in the field of performance studies. It emphasizes the importance of embodied cultural practices as sources of knowledge, resistance, and transformation. The project also positions performance not merely as artistic output but as a vital mode of inquiry through which the cultural, political, and spiritual dimensions of life in the Indian Ocean World are negotiated and reimagined.

One of the journal’s core aims is to challenge the dominant Western-centric frameworks of performance studies by centering perspectives, practices, and scholarship emerging from the Global South. It draws attention to the sophisticated and often radical performance traditions that arise from regions facing ongoing challenges related to colonial legacies, censorship, nationalism, migration, and social stratification. These practices are not simply reflections of cultural heritage but are living, adaptive responses to contemporary conditions, offering insights into resistance, memory, and identity in motion.

Through its commitment to inclusivity and intellectual exchange, the Journal of Performance Practice Across the Indian Ocean World aspires to serve as a bilateral exemplar—bridging artistic and academic communities across geographical, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries. It creates a space for comparative and connected studies, highlighting how performance evolves within and across multiple contexts shaped by shared histories and divergent futures.

In doing so, the journal not only fills a critical gap in scholarly discourse but also reorients the field of performance studies to more fully acknowledge and engage with the epistemologies and creative legacies of the Indian Ocean World. It affirms that the knowledge generated through these performance practices is as vital, innovative, and transformative as that which emerges from traditionally dominant academic centers.

Project Researchers