Activations of the Threshold

Abstract

The early practices and theorizations of interculturalism have been critiqued extensively for their Eurocentric bias, with intercultural practices shown as reproducing existing hierarchies. In the last decade there have been important theoretical efforts to revisit the questions raised by interculturalism beyond the contours of its definition and practice of the 1980s and 1990s. While they highlight the liminal/threshold quality of these practices, stressing a utopian dimension, the present paper explores the potentiality of interculturality/intraculturality as activation of an experience of what Bernhard Waldenfels has termed ‘radical alienness’. Rather than reifying the boundaries of the ‘other’ or imagining a utopia, the experience of radical alienness offers an experience that reveals ordering processes and their limits, and a possible experience beyond that order. I specifically investigate auteur film-maker G. Aravindan’s engagement with the modern circus in the historic context of the fading away of circus as a popular art form in India. Thampu (The Circus Tent, 1978) is a ‘docu-fiction’, using both performers of the Great Chithra Circus and actors. Using a non-linear and episodic structure that foregrounds duration, Thampu places the affective experience offered by an itinerant circus coming to a village in relation to the varied rhythms and experiences in the village. I investigate how in the film, rhythms are conceived as activating space-times that define experience, with special attention to performance and music as sites of activations. I argue that approaching experience through rhythm, the film attempts to stage the complex simultaneous connections and separations between varied experiences in the space-time of the village, bringing into orbit a threshold experience of the radical alien that allows one to experience a deep sense of alienation, pleasure and labour.