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Motivated by a growing need to address questions of transnationalism, female mobility, and citizenship, this book offers an in-depth study of selective texts of Audre Lorde (Barbadian-American), Edwidge Danticat (Haitian-American), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupean-American) and Grace Nichols (Guyanese-British). The book examines transnational migration or movement not only in terms of physical journeys, but it also employs the trope of migration as resistance, as dissent. Examining the pervasive circulation of bodies, this book challenges the pathologization ascribed to black female sexuality/body, subverting its assumed definition as diseased, passive, and docile. Investigating how black female identities and sexualities circulate globally, it focuses on issues of embodiment, how women's bodies are read and seen; how bodies “perform” and are performed upon; how they challenge hierarchical constructs and disrupt normative standards. Furthermore, it depicts how female subjects not only discursively engender a parallel “migration” that disrupts and debunks hierarchical structures, but how they also engender a politics of resistance and subversion of mainstream/dominant discourse, a detour from normative categorizations and ideologies, a migration from and challenge of single, fixed, heteronormative, heterosexual definitions of self. In essence, it examines the politics and economics of migratory movements, re-examining and reconfiguring the definition of citizenship to reflect transnational movements and subjectivities, and the shifting definitions of home. The book's engagement with critical race theory, adds another layer to its uniqueness by engaging “disability” studies, albeit peripherally, as it challenges the construct of disease, wellness and able-bodiedness as configured by Western medical science.

Driven by exacting methods and hard data, this volume reveals gender dynamics within the dance world in the twenty-first century. It provides concrete evidence about how gender impacts the daily lives of dancers, choreographers, directors, educators, and students through surveys, interviews, analyses of data from institutional sources, and action research studies. Dancers, dance artists, and dance scholars from the United States, Australia, and Canada discuss equity in three areas: concert dance, the studio, and higher education. The chapters provide evidence of bias, stereotyping, and other behaviors that are often invisible to those involved, as well as to audiences. The contributors answer incisive questions about the role of gender in various aspects of the field, including physical expression and body image, classroom experiences and pedagogy, and performance and funding opportunities. The findings reveal how inequitable practices combined with societal pressures can create environments that hinder health, happiness, and success. At the same time, they highlight the individuals working to eliminate discrimination and open up new possibilities for expression and achievement in studios, choreography, performance venues, and institutions of higher education. The dance community can strive to eliminate discrimination, but first it must understand the status quo for gender in the dance world.

Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir explores a black female dancer’s personal journey over four decades across three continents and numerous countries. The author situates herself in the 1960s Black Arts Movement in the S.F. Bay Area, the dynamics of being a black woman dancing in Europe in the late 1960s, and dancing professionally in New York City in the early 1970s, while participating in racial inroads into important arts venues like Lincoln Center. She recounts friendships and collaborations with major artistic figures like Katherine Dunham, Ntozake Shange, Rod Rodgers, Diane McIntyre, Donald McKayle, Dr. Kwabena Nketia, and many others. She explores dancing in Ghana for almost a year, the inspiration for her return to the Oakland Bay Area in the late 1970s to help create the city’s black dance scene while being an adjunct dance lecturer at Stanford University. She also considers how her arts activism helped to engender more cultural equity in the arts nationally. She remembers the 1980s national multicultural arts movement and regional community dance activism, including her own national dance initiative, Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century. Finally, she ponders her self-reinvention in her 50s into a noted black studies and hip-hop scholar in academia.

Finding Balanchine’s Lost Ballets: Exploring the Early Choreography of a Master allows the reader to learn about one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists in a way that has not before been possible. Balanchine’s Russian ballets did not survive in the repertory, but this book demonstrates how some of these lost works need not be relegated to the pages of history but can and should be reconstructed, giving us a vision of our past as artists, scholars, and audiences. The book details the work of setting Balanchine’s first group ballet, Funeral March (Choreography by George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust), on the dancers of the Grand Rapids Ballet. It follows this project from archival studies to studio research with the dancers to a final performance. Through careful research on Balanchine’s earliest ballets, traditional research is brought from the archive into the studio, and finally, onto the stage. This visceral approach enables dance history to be studied in its most natural state, kinesthetically, through movement, allowing us to explore, examine, and above all, experience the earliest works of this master.

Key to the New World is the first comprehensive English-language history of early colonial Cuba published in the last 100 years. It is divided into eight chapters that cover a range of topics since the island’s geological formation up to 1700, including geography; the indigenous inhabitants; first encounters between Europeans and Amerindians (otherwise known as the discovery of the New World); the conquest and colonization of Cuba; demographic realities such as race, gender, and social structure; cultural developments such as transculturation; piracy and other forms of aggression; slavery; and sugar production.

In the years since his death in 1993, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar has become a globally recognized symbol of crime, wealth, power, and masculinity. In this long-overdue exploration of Escobar’s impact on popular culture, Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky shows how his legacy inspired the development of narcoculture—television, music, literature, and fashion representing the drug-trafficking lifestyle—in Colombia and around the world. Pobutsky looks at the ways the “Escobar brand” surfaces in bars, restaurants, and clothing lines; in Colombia’s tourist industry; and in telenovelas, documentaries, and narco memoirs about his life, which in turn have generated popular interest in other drug traffickers such as Griselda Blanco and Miami’s “cocaine cowboys.” Pobutsky illustrates how the Colombian state strives to erase his memory while Escobar’s notoriety only continues to increase in popular culture through the transnational media. She argues that the image of Escobar is inextricably linked to Colombia’s internal tensions in the areas of cocaine politics, gender relations, class divisions, and political corruption and that his “brand” perpetuates the country’s reputation as a center of organized crime, to the dismay of the Colombian people. This book is a fascinating study of how the world perceives Colombia and how Colombia’s citizens understand their nation’s past and present.

Polygyny explores the practice of multiple-wife marriage among African American Muslims who follow the leadership of Imam W. D. Mohammed. The dominant voices in this work are those of my female informants--some who welcome polygyny, some who oppose it, others who acquiesce to it, and still others who locate their negotiating power within the practice. This book examines husband sharing as one remedy for and a demographic challenge to the absence of marriageable African American men and/or the high number of female-led households. A core feature of this work is the attention devoted to Qur’anic interpretation that posits husband sharing as a cultural struggle that good Muslim women endure for the maintenance of community life. The book promotes the exercise of agency among women and explores the contradictions and paradoxes that abound for those who share their husbands. It recognizes the pluralities of polygyny as practiced in the United States and invites readers to acknowledge realities and choices experienced by individuals who are often loathed because of them. Polygyny expands debates about the regulation and recognition of consenting adult relationships beyond questions related to same-sex marriage. It further draws attention to other ways multiple-wife marriage, coupled with a certain cultural and religious consciousness, can constrain and/or liberate women.

This volume traces the socioeconomic and environmental changes taking place in the Gran Chaco, a vast and richly biodiverse ecoregion at the intersection of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay. Representing a wide range of contemporary anthropological scholarship that has not been available in English until now, Reimagining the Gran Chaco illuminates how the region’s many Indigenous groups are negotiating these transformations in their own terms. The essays in this volume explore how the region has become a complex arena of political, cultural, and economic contestation between actors that include the state, environmental groups and NGOs, and private businesses and how local actors are reconfiguring their subjectivities and political agency in response. With its multinational perspective, and its examination of major themes including missionization, millenarian movements, the Chaco war, industrial enclaves, extractivism, political mobilization, and the struggle for rights, this volume brings greater visibility to an underrepresented, complex region.

A Revolution in Movement is the first book to illuminate how collaborations between dancers and painters shaped Mexico’s postrevolutionary cultural identity. K. Mitchell Snow traces this relationship throughout nearly half a century of developments in Mexican dance—the emulation of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the 1920s, the adoption of U.S.-style modern dance in the 1940s, and the creation of ballet-inspired folk dance in the 1960s. Snow describes the appearances in Mexico by Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova and Spanish concert dancer Tortóla Valencia, who helped motivate Mexico to express its own national identity through dance. He discusses the work of muralists and other visual artists in tandem with Mexico’s theatrical dance world, including Diego Rivera’s collaborations with ballet composer Carlos Chávez; Carlos Mérida’s leadership of the National School of Dance; José Clemente Orozco’s involvement in the creation of the Ballet de la Ciudad de México; and Miguel Covarrubias, who led the “golden age” of Mexican modern dance. Snow draws from a rich trove of historical newspaper accounts and other contemporary documents to show how these collaborations produced an image of modern Mexico that would prove popular both locally and internationally and continues to endure today.

In recent years, site-specific dance has grown in popularity. In the wake of groundbreaking work by choreographers who left traditional performance spaces for other venues, more and more performances are cropping up, on skyscrapers, in alleyways, on trains, on the decks of aircraft carriers, and in myriad other unexpected locations worldwide. In this anthology of site-specific dance, the editors explore the work that choreographers create for non-traditional performance spaces and the thinking behind their creative choices. Combining interviews with and essays by practitioners of site dance, they look at the challenges and rewards of embracing alternative spaces. Examination of the work of artists such as Meredith Monk, Joanna Haigood, Stephan Koplowitz, Heidi Duckler, Ann Carlson, and Eiko Otake provides insights into why choreographers leave the theater to embrace the challenges of unconventional venues. The book also includes more than 80 photographs of site-specific performances, revealing how the arts, and movement in particular, can become part of and speak to our everyday lives.

Through a revolutionary ethnographic approach that foregrounds storytelling and performance as alternative means of knowledge, this book explores shared ritual traditions between the Anlo-Ewe people of West Africa and their descendants, the Arará of Cuba, who were brought to the island in the transatlantic slave trade. The volume draws on two decades of research in four communities: Dzodze, Ghana; Adjodogou, Togo; and Perico and Agramonte, Cuba. In the ceremonies, oral narratives, and daily lives of individuals at each fieldsite, the authors not only identify shared attributes in religious expression across continents but also reveal lasting emotional, spiritual, and personal impacts in the communities whose ancestors were ripped from their homeland and enslaved. The authors layer historiographic data, interviews, and fieldnotes with artistic modes such as true fiction, memoir, and choreographed narrative, challenging the conventional nature of scholarship with insights gained from sensorial experience. Including reflections on the making of an art installation based on this research project, the volume challenges readers to imagine the potential of approaching fieldwork as artists. The authors argue that creative methods can convey truths deeper than facts, pointing to new possibilities for collaboration between scientists and artists with relevance to any discipline.

Martha Ullman West illustrates how American ballet developed over the course of the twentieth century from an aesthetic originating in the courts of Europe into a stylistically diverse expression of a democratic culture. West places at center stage two artists who were instrumental to this story: Todd Bolender and Janet Reed. Lifelong friends, Bolender (1914–2006) and Reed (1916–2000) were part of a generation of dancers who navigated the Great Depression, World War II, and the vibrant cultural scene of postwar New York City. They danced in the works of choreographers Lew and Willam Christensen, Eugene Loring, Agnes de Mille, Catherine Littlefield, Ruthanna Boris, and others who West argues were just as responsible for the direction of American ballet as the legendary George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. The stories of Bolender, Reed, and their contemporaries also demonstrate that the flowering of American ballet was not simply a New York phenomenon. West includes little-known details about how Bolender and Reed laid the foundations for Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet in the 1970s and how Bolender transformed the Kansas City Ballet into a highly respected professional company soon after. Passionate in their desire to dance and create dances, Bolender and Reed committed their lives to passing along their hard-won knowledge, training, and work. This book celebrates two unsung trailblazers who were pivotal to the establishment of ballet in America from one coast to the other.

Who Owns Haiti addresses a provocative and complex question, one arguably at the heart of Haitian studies and Haiti’s history. This edited volume calls into question the role of external actors in Haiti’s sovereign affairs, while highlighting the ways in which Haitians continually enact their own independence and sovereignty. Chapters consider Haiti’s sovereign roots and the contemporary encroachment on them by international actors, as well as the corresponding response, acquiescence, or resistance by Haitian institutions, including ‘sovereignty from below’ as wielded by grassroots organizations and religious ritual. Contributing authors consider how external actors and institutions have interacted historically with Haitian elites and government actors. Importantly, the volume examines parallel responses from historically marginalized urban and rural populations. The volume takes up issues long at the heart of Haitian studies and argues that otherwise disparate discussions of ownership and independence are in fact central to historical and contemporary considerations of Haiti and Haitians.