Bharatanatyam as a Global Dance: some Issues in Research, Teaching,and Practice Avanthi Meduri e promise of critical liberation that postcolonial and transnational perspectives of- br by urging us to think the complex imbrication of the global in the local remains an unfiilfilled promise in South Asian dance scholarship. lwill elaborate this point by describing the globalthrust of Rukmini Devi's art and education movement, which could not be recuperated within the territorializing intellectual framework of Indian nationalism, and explain why she, in fact, manifests herself as a discursive failure in standard scholarly accounts of Bharatanatyam in the United States. T: Partl Bharatanatyam manifests itself as a world form today, quite like Ballet, albeit with a diHerent genealogy. It is researched in western academic institutions in the United Kingdom, Europe, the I.Jnited States, Canada, Australia, aswell as in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Malaysia. Practitioners and dance scholarsorganize international con- ferencesfocused on Bharatanatyam all over the world today, and the Dance Studies Program at Roehampton, supportedby a grant from the Ai.ts and Humanities Re- search Board (AHRB), has assumed a leadership role in providing a new, global profile for the dance.I But the globality of Bharatanatyam, intricately linked with the global discourses of colonial modernity is stir, in my opinion, not on the research and curricular agendas of dance departments in the United States. This initiative was deferred because the small AvandiiMeduri is Reader in the Dance Studies Programme at Roehampton Univer city, London, and Convener of the new MA/PGDip in South Asian Dance Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Performance Studies, New York University and held visiting teaching appointments at UCLA (1993--1996) and in the Department of Performance Studies, Northwestern University (1997--zooo). Trained since childhood in Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi, Meduri works in the field of dance education, women's the- atre and performance. She is a Ford Scholar and the Academic and Artistic Director of the newly founded Centre for Contemporary Cul- ture, New Delhi.