Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power

Corporealitiesvivifies the study of bodies through a consideration of bodily reality, not as natural or absolute given but as tangible and substantial category of cultural experience. The essays in this volume summon up bodies engaged in practices as diverse as pageantry, physical education, festivals and exhibitions, tourism, social and theatrical dance, and post-colonial and psychoanalytic encounters. They bring these bodies to life, quivering with all the political, gendered, social, racial, sexual, and aesthetic resonances of which bodily motion is capable. Dancing wends its way through this volume as subject matter and as theoretical framework for understanding embodiment. Dancing also prompts these essays to grapple with the body's ephemerality, the non-substantial history of its habits and accomplishments, and to persevere in the task of translating its movement into words, bodily phrasing into syntactical structure, movement qulaity into metaphor, and choreography intotheory. These essays work to resurrect bodies in all their fulsome cultural significance, but they also move bodies across disciplinary boundaries so as to enable a rethinking of previously stable categories of knowledge. As they examine the body's participation in the production of narrative, the construction of collectivity, the articulation of the unconscious, the generation of post-coloniality, and the economies of gender and expression, they contour new relations between history and memory, aesthetics and politics. These epistemic relations inspire unconventional formulations of human agency that promise to move us past current modes of academic and political stasis.