Rachmi Diyah Larasati
9 Pleasant St SE
Minneapolis,
MN
55455
My current research primarily examines aesthetic practices in response to political violence and their impact on human life. I grounded my theorizing of cultural and political roots and praxis in decolonial knowledge. I have developed cartographies of relationality. This interdisciplinary approach examines not only how narrative political violence is gendered and racialized in everyday life, but also the continuation of the condition as post-colonial state failure, a “capitalist script” with Fascism and Authoritarianism that govern the nation in the Global South, and transnational extractive interests, their relationality to the metropole as a form of Empire. I also utilize choreographies to explore how artistic responses and the study of violence—the act of witnessing and creation through aesthetic modalities —can be assessed. I extend my engagement further, including the laboratory of aesthetic pedagogy in villages. I also re-evaluate the nature of writing as praxis and choreography as ways of knowing, particularly in the context of authoritarianism's use of war machinery, in which surveillance and punishment are in operation.
In my first book, I analyze how dance and political violence, particularly the genocide in Indonesia, create and collaborate with neoliberal responses to cultural production. The book was translated into Indonesian in 2023.
Currently, my book project and choreography center on sound as a geopolitical concept and a critique of the extractive machinery, signaling the cartography of noise which encompasses not only punishment as warnings but also gendered and racialized livelihood possibilities as biopolitics. In this research, forest life and temporality of border and transnational mechanisms as the new form of modern empire entangle with Post- Colonial betrayal. I dedicate this book to retrace the song, sound, and arts world surrounding Indonesian farmers, plantation workers, and to retrace the reappearance of song and text in global cities, where the song was banned and used as a measure of agrarian uprising and political dissent during the Indonesian genocide with a specific theme on gender (s), land reform, and nobility Aesthetics. The arts project entitled 'genjer' is an exhibition that explores the "beauty" of unwanted leaves and food as signals of spatial blossoming through a performance and arts exhibit. This project is an exploration of forbidden song and mother stories, with a focus on the resonance of verdant forests and the interplay of natural ecological sounds and noises from the recording industry to the extractive industry, to creative imagination in Diaspora life.
In my current scholarship, through the lens of transnational feminism, I reroute the scope of my work on the effects of the politics of the "global" to examine fragmentation of the "local" aesthetic engagement with the contemporary paradigms of international law arising from the specific political and ethical concerns of the Neoliberal. Here, I explore the ways in which questions of aesthetic consumption (the rights and obligations to practice, preserve, and protect arts as “intangible“ aesthetic “property“) negate, reproduce, and potentially reformulate and renegotiate within unequal relationality in the formation of Empire. Focusing on the aesthetic, coloniality and the specific site that captures the idea of sound displacement through machines of dispossession. This research bridges my interests to look at communities of color in the US and former colonized spaces which cartography of anti colonial reformulate. Through the study of value, retrace the image of sound, I call attention to, the particular political economies of aesthetics driven by how "post colonial" state and settler operate in spaces to engage and reorient the intimacy of Decolonial aesthetics.
I write in both academic and literary prose. I dance and choreograph, and I am interested in expanding my research site, modality, within arts spaces.
Educational Background
- Post Doctoral: Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, 2005-2006
- PhD: Dance History & Theory, University of California Riverside, 2006
- MA: Dance, University of California at Los Angeles, 2000
- Non-degree Objective: Intercultural Performance and Exchange Program, UCLA/World Arts & Cultures, 1998
- MA summa cum laude: Dance & Performing Arts Studies, Gadjah Mada University, 1997
- BA: Dance Studies & Anthropology, Institut Seni Indonesia (Indonesian Institute of the Arts), 1991
Specialties
- Performing Arts in Global Politics & Culture
- Dancing Body, Tourism & Citizenship
- Genocide Narrative/Massacre Cultural Reconstruction
- Study of Archive, Empire and Aesthetics
- Politics of Human Rights and Creative Arts
- Study of transnational Politics, Alliances (Bandung Movement and Global South)
- Post Colonial Theories
- Creative Projects in Post-Conflict/War Zones (Asia)
- Feminism in Muslim societies (Southeast Asia)