Description
In recent decades, dance has become a vehicle for querying assumptions about what it means to be embodied, in turn illuminating intersections among the political, the social, the aesthetical, and the phenomenological. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics edited by internationally lauded scholars Rebekah Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and the late Randy Martin presents a compendium of newly-commissioned chapters that address the interdisciplinary and global scope of dance theory - its political philosophy, social movements, and approaches to bodily difference such as disability, postcolonial, and critical race and queer studies. In six sections 30 of the most prestigious dance scholars in the US and Europe track the political economy of dance and analyze the political dimensions of choreography, of writing history, and of embodied phenomena in general. Employing years of intimate knowledge of dance and its cultural phenomenology, scholars urge readers to re-think dominant cultural codes, their usages, and the meaning they produce and theorize ways dance may help to re-signify and to re-negotiate established cultural practices and their inherent power relations. This handbook poses ever-present questions about dance politics-which aspects or effects of a dance can be considered political? What possibilities and understandings of politics are disclosed through dance? How does a particular dance articulate or undermine forces of authority? How might dance relate to emancipation or bondage of the body? Where and how can dance articulate social movements, represent or challenge political institutions, or offer insight into habits of labor and leisure? The handbook opens its critical terms in two directions. First, it offers an elaborated understanding of how dance achieves its politics. Second, it illustrates how notions of the political are themselves expanded when viewed from the perspective of dance, thus addressing both the relationship between the politics in dance and the politics of dance. Using the most sophisticated theoretical frameworks and engaging with the problematics that come from philosophy, social science, history, and the humanities, chapters explore the affinities, affiliations, concepts, and critiques that are inherent in the act of dance, and questions about matters political that dance makes legible.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics - Rebekah J. Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and Randy MartinPart I: Dancing StructuresSection I. The Political Economy of Dance2. Tracking the Political Economy of Dance - Jane Desmond3. Dance and/as Competition in the U.S. Privately Owned Studio - Susan Foster4. Racing in Place: A Meta-Memoir on Dance,Politics, and Practice - Brenda Dixon Gottschild5. Epiphanic Moments: Dancing Politics - Cynthia Oliver6. Performing Collectively, Performing Collectivity - Kai van EikelsSection II. The Politics of Choreography7. Urban Choreographies. Artistic Interventions and the Politics of Urban Space - Gabriele Klein8. The Politics of Speculative Imagination inContemporary Choreography - Andre Lepecki9. Toward a Choreo-Political Theory of Articulation - Mark Franko10. Rehearsing In-Difference: The Politics of Aesthetics inthe Performances of Pina Bausch and Jérôme Bel - Gerald Siegmund11. Problem as a Choreographic and Philosophical Kind ofThought - Bojana CvejicSection III. The Politics of Embodiment12. The Politics of Perception - Ann Cooper Albright13. The Politics of Speaking About the Body - Ramsay Burt14. Dancing Disabled: Phenomenology and EmbodiedPolitics - Petra Kuppers15. Of Corporeal Re-writings, Translations, and thePolitics of Difference in Dancing - Ananya Chatterjea16. Planning for Death's Surprise: Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham - Peggy PhelanPart 2: Dancing InterventionsSection IV. The Politics of Histories17. Dancing D-Day - Felicia McCarren18. China in the Throes of Modernization: Intercultural Exchange,Hybridity, and ArtsCross - Alexandra Kolb19. Between the Cultural Center and the Villa: Dance,Neoliberalism & Silent Borders in Buenos Aires - Victoria Fortuna20. Modern Dance in the Third Reich, Redux - Susan Manning21. The Micropolitics of Exchange: Rethinking Exile and Othernessafter the Nation - Kate ElswitSection V. The Politics of Re-Signification22. Black Swan, White Nose - Hannah Schwadron23. Brown in Black and White: José Limón Dances The Emperor Jones - James Moreno24. SWITCH: Queer Social Dance, Political Leadership,and Black Popular Culture - Thomas DeFrantz25. Politics of Fake It! Janez Jansa interviewed by Janez Jansa - Janez JansaSection VI. The Politics of Re-Negotiation26. Identity Politics and Political Will: Jeni LeGonLiving in a Great Big Way - Nadine George-Graves27. Dancing in the Here and Now: IndigenousPresence and the Contemporary Choreography of EmilyJohnson/Catalyst and DANCING EARTH - Jacqueline Shea Murphy28. Dance and Eastern Europe: Contemporary Dance in the Time of Transition - Bojana Kunst29. Domesticating Dance: South Asian Filmic BodiesNegotiating New Moves in Neoliberalism - Priya Srinivasan30. Is it OK to Dance on Graves? Modernism and SocialistRealism Revisited - Jens Giersdorf
