Reading Rest as Resistance

Abstract

What can we learn from articulations of rest as resistance emerging from the Global South? By deliberately constructing and staging practices of rest, how do artists extract and distinguish it from the domain of the mundane and the everyday. This article considers the work of three artists/collectives in India who advocate radical conceptions of rest and leisure: dancer and pedagogue Navtej Singh Johar and his articulation of sukh (rest/contentment), dancer and choreographer Shabari Rao’s Still Standing series, a participatory work that explores stillness as an embodied experience, and visual artist’s Priyanka D'Souza's work under the artist duo, Resting Museum, with Shreyasi Pathak on rest, illness and disability.

The article situates these conceptual and performative iterations of rest within overlapping social, cultural and economic contexts. Johar and Rao both have backgrounds in Indian classical dance, which emphasizes the cultivation of a virtuosic aesthetic through repetition. They also respond to the urban contexts they work in, where the body is increasingly co-opted into mechanized and techno-surveilled forms of homogeneity. D’Souza draws attention to the ableist connotations of productivity in her work, drawing on her own experience of disability.

What affective resonance does productivity as stability, as mundane certainty, hold for postcolonial contexts? I place the work of these three artists against the frame of India as an emerging economy, whose narrative is that of a country in progress, work-ing towards an eventual future as an ‘advanced economy’. In this narrative, the ‘mundane’ takes on an aspirational quality. What does it take to fragment the relationship between rest and productivity in this context, where rest is not merely a reward for action and progress, but an independent way of being and doing in its own right?

Notes

1 The term ‘emerging economy’ comes from ‘emerging markets’, coined by the World Bank economist Antoine van Agtmael to describe economies that are in transition from being developing to developed markets. It grounds a classification of countries by gross domestic product (GDP) in economic indicators as opposed to terms like ‘developing country’ or ‘developed country’, which have no standard indicators and have gradually been phased out by organizations like the World Bank for the sociopolitical hierarchies these terms suggest.

2 The ‘Global South’ as a term has social, political and historical bearings. It first showed up as a reference to economically disadvantaged nation states and emerging economies, as a post-Cold War alternative to the term ‘Third World’. It also gestures to countries or people who are negatively impacted by capitalism, or by colonization (Garland Mahler 2017).