Uncommitted Crimes by Tara Atluri

Author:Tara Atluri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inanna Publications
Published: 2018-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.2: Rajni Perera, Natarajasana, Yoginis Series, 2013, mixed media on paper, 48" x 48".

Banet-Weiser discusses the sale of yoga through images of white celebrities, part of a “body-beautiful” branding scheme in which the spiritual ethos of yoga and the bodies of racialized South Asians are made invisible. As the author states, “Asian spirituality is positioned, through media representation and individual practice alike, through celebrities showing off their henna tattoos or through yoga as a means for all of us to find ourselves, as an aid for dominant white Americans to gain spiritual insight and an individual sense of morality” (197). While affluent white people in the Americas use yoga to aid their neocolonial souls, connecting to a ridiculous ethos of “moral shopping” for store-bought spirituality, there is little moral recourse in addressing the everyday violence of systemic racism. Perera’s Yoginis, in depicting Brown and Black figures in sensual and warrior-like poses challenges an economy of yoga that has become disturbingly tied to white middle-class pretensions. Similarly, Perera’s use of naked Brown and Black feminine forms is also an affront to religious nationalist depictions of the sacred, in which female sexuality is often repressed and aesthetically censored. Banet-Weiser quotes Jane Iwamura’s insights on the relationship between white authorial forms of patriarchy and yogic branding:

The particular way in which Americans write themselves into the story is not a benign, non-ideological act, but rather constructs a modernized cultural patriarchy in which Anglo-Americans re-imagine themselves as the protectors, innovators, and guardians of Asian religions and culture and wrest the authority to define these traditions from others. (qtd. in Banet-Weiser 197)

The authority and entitlement of white capitalist patriarchs who conjure “authentic” images of saleable exotica through yoga, and simultaneously construct hegemonic images of a white upper class “body-beautiful” image has particular implications for the representation and racialization of femininities. Within dominant sexist narratives of diasporic communities it is often male elites who act as community authorities, constructing ideas of timeless culture that script racialized women into the reductive roles of women, wives, and daughters subject to patriarchal violence under the guise of “culture.” In fetishizing ideas of Asian spirituality, the Brown woman’s body as a passionate sexual and political agent is also invisible in the white capitalist imaginary. Perera’s paintings fiercely defy depictions of docile, submissive Brown women owned as property of imagined communities and made invisible in a panorama of white yogic branding. Perera’s aesthetics conjure up images of ancient depictions of dark-skinned women as goddesses found in early representations of the Hindu Goddess Kali, a Black figure who is often represented as an embodiment of Shakti, female power.

The aesthetics of the “Indian,” the “South Asian,” and the “Hindu” are ambiguously played with in Perera’s series, as yogic imagery and other South Asian spiritual iconography is used while the figures in the artist’s paintings are racially and culturally ambiguous. In the painting Natarajasana, the braids of the Brown and Black women depicted as flexible and vital warriors and goddesses conjure up images of the long braided hair of women in South Asia, and of Indigenous women.

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