Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (review)

Ananya Chatterjea offers the first sustained historical reading of the corpus of choreographic works created from the 1960s to the present by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, of Urban Bush Women (United States), and Chandralekha, her eponymous group (India). Chatterjea's analysis is firmly embedded within feminist and postcolonial frameworks and is notable for its radical departure from a conventional approach to dance history. She refuses to privilege the "auteur" and avoids the hagiography route, even as she assembles her narrative around the contributions of these dancers to the world of movement, while also rejecting the notion that a national or racial sensibility should overdetermine her comparative analysis. Bringing together two artists who have little in common on the surface, she elucidates how the politics of exoticization tend to inform the mainstream Western reception of their work. Yet her insights are nuanced; instead of resorting to a strategy of underscoring pure difference, or trying to find an essence of Indian or American dance that transcends a specific temporality, she usefully traces the ways in which both artists were inspired by particular political moments; their choreographies cannot be read as universal in nature, but as richly and contextually bound. Chatterjea's project offers a key model for conceiving of comparative narratives on dance.