The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics ed. by Rebekah Kowal, Randy Martin, and Gerald Siegmund (review)

At 656 pages wide and 31 authors deep, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics collection contains a veritable who's who of US, UK, and EU dance scholarship. It also importantly documents the weight of the loss to the field of coeditor Randy Martin, whose materialist investigations of dance and politics influence the volume's contributions in powerful and explicit ways. Through the dedicated energies of Martin's fellow coeditors Rebekah Kowal and Gerald Siegmund, the volume updates an editorial burden assumed by earlier collections¹ and field progenitors: interpreting dance's irreconcilable relationship to politics, a tension that the volume's contributors do not promise to reconcile. But what the text does, and with great urgency, is to revise and update longstanding debates on dance's politics of representation while also flagging hierarchical issues internal to dance research as areas for future investigation.

In contrast to extant anthologies, in this work dance functions as both a liability and a resource for the study of bodies and power across the critical arts and humanities. Contributors offer nuanced readings of politically oriented dances, analyze political enactments using dance methods, and critique oppressive norms of practice, policy, and production internal to dance scholarship. Highly memorable essays critique issues that hold dance back as an inclusive and global area of study and offer historically informed accounts of silences that undergird intellectual and artistic research in dance, such as the enduring subordination of non-Western epistemologies as a condition of dance's disciplinary ascendancy in the United States and Western Europe. This reflexive turn in critical dance studies has been long coming. It marks an arrival point and documents a discernable willingness among dance scholars and practitioners to put dance's disciplinary hierarchies and exclusions to the test.

In the volume's introduction, Martin, Kowal, and Siegmund acknowledge the conjectural "and" situated between the terms "dance" and "politics" in the book's title as an undefinable tension that forms the book's central problematic. Contributions are split into two parts, with a palpable degree of overlap across the five sections. Authors in Part 1 ("Dancing Structures") consider the structural constraints of dance's political economy (section 1) and the politics of choreography (section 2), embodiment (section 3), and history (section 4), respectively. The essays in the second half ("Dancing Interventions") refresh running debates on dance's political resignification (5), and renegotiation (6) in turn. I will refer readers to the volume introduction for the coeditors' thoughts on Martin's theoretical influence and use this space to unpack each essay's contributions and limitations for readers invested in dance's political entanglements, broadly construed.

Section 1, "Dance's Political Economy," introduces five essays that consider dance's politics of transmission, commodification, and organization across an array of institutional contexts. Continuing her long-standing tango with questions of cultural assimilation, appropriation, and ownership (1997, 1999), Jane Desmond's opening essay "Tracking the Political Economy of Dance" follows dance performances on Broadway, the Hawaiian tourist industry, and African American concert dance to reveal how specific artists are deauthorized and reauthorized as dances traverse mainstream, transnational, and nonprofit dance venues. Desmond's account of the interventionist production politics of the late "Baba" Chuck Davis, in particular, takes a critical leap forward for dance studies by highlighting Davis's nonprofit organizational practices, an underexa-mined area of dance study.

Susan Leigh Foster's "Dance and/as Competition in the Privately Owned US Studio" intertwines her prior work on the politics of US dance training (1997, 2010) with her later work on power and empathy (2011) to connect competitive commercial dance training and performance to the neoliberal commodification and circulation of affective labor under late capitalism. In addition to offering a valuable pocket history of the ascension of competition dance studios as a cottage industry...