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The age of high tech is haunted by an image from the last century that developed in the three decades between the patenting of the cinematographe and its turn toward sound: the dancing machine, paradox of the ease of mechanization and its tortures, embodiment of the motor and the automaton, image of fusion and fragmentation. An excavation of this image, in the historical context of maximum productivity and mechanical reproducibility, reveals its development in European Modernism--Modernism drawn to dancers of American, African, and Asian origins, to Taylorism as well as to Primitivism, to cinema and to myth. This book traces the abstraction and anonymity of the bodies making machines dance, in the codes of modernisms graphic and choreographic, and in the streamlined gestures of industry, avant-garde art, and entertainment. What surfaces is dances centrality to machine aesthetics and to its alternatives, as well as to the early elaboration of the machine that would become the ultimate guarantor of modern dances de-mechanization, the motion picture camera.
A history of dances pathologization may startle readers who find in dance performance grace, discipline, geometry, poetry, and the bodys transcendence of itself. Exploring dances historical links to the medical and scientific connotations of a pathology, this book asks what has subtended the idealization of dance in the West. It investigates the nineteenth-century response, in the intersections of dance, literature, and medicine, to the complex and long-standing connections between illness, madness, poetry, and performance. In the nineteenth century, medicine becomes a major cultural index to measure the bodys meanings. As a particularly performative form of madness, nineteenth-c...
In 1866, when the ballet La Source debuted, the public at the Paris Opera might have been content to dream about the setting in the verdant Caucasus, exotic Circassians, veiled Georgians, and powerful Khans. In the ballet's two plotlines, an ecological narrative of the death of the Source and the withering of the green world, and the competing interests of Muslim characters at war, this book finds not so much a timeless Orientalist fantasy as a timely commentary on colonial policy, institutional biopower, and human hybridity. In 1866, the daily and specialized humorist press showed a particular interest in the ballet's botany as shorthand for sex, as part of ongoing debates about libertine s...
A dazzling memoir of chronic illness that explores the fraught intersection between pain, language, and gender, by a debut author. Emily Wells spent her childhood dancing through intense pain she assumed was normal for a ballerina pushing her body to its limits. For years, no doctor could tell Wells what was wrong with her, or they told her it was all in her head. In A Matter of Appearance, Wells traces her journey as she tries to understand and define the chronic pain she has lived with all her life. She draws on the critical works of Freud, Sontag, and others to explore the intersection between gender, pain, and language, and she traces a direct line from the “hysteria patients” at the...
First book to focus on Americanism and its consideration of French film and literature The book is organized around individual figures, texts, and films, making it easy to adopt for individual units in courses. The book is written in clear, accessible, and jargon-free language. The book brings a new and innovative transatlantic perspective to 1930s French culture. The books offers new perspectives on important figures that we thought we knew well. The book mixes cultural history with the analysis of individual films and novels in a way that is engaging to read.
Through the concept of “social choreography” Andrew Hewitt demonstrates how choreography has served not only as metaphor for modernity but also as a structuring blueprint for thinking about and shaping modern social organization. Bringing dance history and critical theory together, he shows that ideology needs to be understood as something embodied and practiced, not just as an abstract form of consciousness. Linking dance and the aesthetics of everyday movement—such as walking, stumbling, and laughter—to historical ideals of social order, he provides a powerful exposition of Marxist debates about the relation of ideology and aesthetics. Hewitt focuses on the period between the mid-n...
The practice of dance and the technologies of representation has excited artists since the advent of film. This book weaves together theory from art and dance as well as appropriate historical reference material to propose a new theory of screendance, one that frames it within the discourse of post-modern art practice.
This book shows how le hip hop reflects a republic of culture rather than a culture industry; a minority identity politics that takes shape as a movement poetics or figural language; and the public valorization of dance as a technique, meriting unemployment compensation and understood as a high-tech knowledge practice.
The presence of Blacks in a number of European societies has drawn increasing interest from scholars, policymakers, and the general public. This interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary collection penetrates the multifaceted Black presence in Europe, and, in so doing, complicates the notions of race, belonging, desire, and identities assumed and presumed in revealing portraits of Black experiences in a European context. In focusing on contemporary intellectual currents and themes, the contributors theorize and re-imagine a range of historical and contemporary issues related to the broader questions of blackness, diaspora, hegemony, transnationalism, and "Black Europe" itself as lived and perceived realities. Contributors are Allison Blakely, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Tina Campt, Fred Constant, Alessandra Di Maio, Philomena Essed, Terri Francis, Barnor Hesse, Darlene Clark Hine, Dienke Hondius, Eileen Julien, Trica Danielle Keaton, Kwame Nimako, Tiffany Ruby Patterson, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Stephen Small, Tyler Stovall, Alexander G. Weheliye, Gloria Wekker, and Michelle M. Wright.
Unfinished Business argues that U.S. deindustrialization cannot be separated from race, specifically from choreographed movements of African Americans that represent or resist normative or aberrant relationships to work and capital in transitional times.