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Reviewed by:
  • Worlding Dance
  • Avanthi Meduri
Worlding Dance. edited by Susan Leigh Foster. 2009. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 209 pp., cover illustration, notes, works cited, index. £50.00 cloth.

Worlding Dance, edited by Susan Leigh Foster, and featuring eight admirable essays thoughtfully crafted and elaborated in accessible style, will undoubtedly become a key text in world dance courses taught across the globe. Eight scholars come together and are featured as a "collective" in this book. Five of the eight, Lena Hammergren, Yutian Wong, Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Priya Srinivasan, and Ananya Chaterrjea, focus their attention on specific world dance forms and discuss these within socio-historical and socio-political frameworks. Anthea Kraut, Susan Foster, and Marta Elena Savigliano adopt a more general perspective. They investigate large themes relating to copyright laws, the institutionalization of the term "choreography" in modern dance practices, and "world dance" traditions, teasing out their implications for the development of dance studies more broadly and specifically in the age of globalization.

Foster introduces the book with vision and clarity. She situates the compilation within the immigrant history of the global city of Los Angeles and the history of the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, which sponsored the collective and facilitated their ruminations on world forms. Foster explains that at UCLA, the title World Arts evolved out of an earlier nomenclature "Ethnic Arts," which in turn grew out of, and was allied with, curricular [End Page 109] interests in Folk Arts. Both strands of specialization were retained in the Dance Department at UCLA in the 1960s. The Dance Department, in turn, became the Department of World Arts and Cultures in the 1990s.

Foster acknowledges that the substitution of "world" for "ethnic" at UCLA has "worked euphemistically to gloss over the colonial legacy of racialized and class based hierachization of the arts" (1-3). I noted this while teaching at UCLA in the 1990s, and marked the glossing over as representing a problematic new beginning for "ethnic" dance forms such as Bharatanatyam, taught as part as of the ethnic arts curriculum at UCLA since the 1960s. In the last chapter of my dissertation, I elaborated on this problematic by discussing the making of the World Dance Mural displayed spectacularly on the entrance walls of the new Department of World Arts and Cultures.

Many of the chapters in Worlding Dance use the ethnic/world relabeling to challenge the ideological foundations of the two overlapping nomenclatures. Conceived broadly within a global modernity and dance migration perspective, the chapters explore exclusionary politics and processes of collection, classification, naming, and labeling, and track their impact on the life of international artists and the specific world dance traditions they embody and transmit.

All eight chapters work self-consciously with the knotted quality of history writing that historian Dipesh Chakravorty has described as Granthi. A Hindu term, "Granthi references all manner of jointed articulation such as those that compose the skeleton" (9). Using this complex concept-metaphor, scholars work through the knotted histories of their specific dance examples, move in multiple directions, and explore new ways of writing/thinking/choreographing dance history as "contradictory, plural and heterogeneous" (10). All authors work at the intersection of history and theory, discourse, and practice, and articulate new narrative styles and tactics to discuss their diverse case studies.

Yutian Wong and Lena Hammergren investigate Asian dance histories by using the concept of the mobile, international traveling artist living and working simultaneously out of local and global worlds. Wong argues that Michio Ito's international fame in Europe and America was based on his status as an exceptional Japanese artist, able to transcend national boundaries. In her own words, "Exceptionalized, the international artist is conceptualized as an individual who is simultaneously exotic in his/her worldliness and familiar in his/her exoticness. . . . internationality is evidenced by the perceived ability to transcend national boundaries, while maintaining a reified point of origin" (150). Wong explores this ambivalence, inherent in the construction of the international artist, and shows how this double narrative falls apart at the moment of Ito's deportation, when he is spectacularly written out of Asian American dance history.

Lena Hammergren provides a different elaboration of the international...

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