Abstract: 

Between 2019 and 2021, vast swathes of Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent experienced one of the worst locust infestations in more than half a century. Traversing about twenty-five nations in the Global South, the locusts dramatized a geopolitical spectacle that intersects our present environmental exigencies with colonial pasts and transnational futures. My talk will focus on folkloric performances by Nath Jogis and Kalbelias – communities of ascetic-householders and nomadic performers from the Western desert and border state of Rajasthan, India, that has historically been the ground zero for locust infestations. Nath Jogis and Kalbelias serve as custodians of a rich nonhuman-centric performance repertoire, immense entomological knowledge, and deep mythical-material connections with the genealogies of ecological catastrophe. Bringing together colonial legacies of locust control, entomology-centered philosophies that have inspired performance studies scholarship, and contemporary interspecies performances in the Global South, I interrogate how performance can account for ecological change in the light of that which is pervasive, recurrent, and annihilative.

Bio: 

Rishika Mehrishi is assistant professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University’s Theater and Performance Studies department, MA from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and BA (honors) from Delhi University. Her research on more-than-human performances intersects multispecies ethnography, ecocriticism, anti-caste pedagogies and activism, and performances in/from the Global South.