Modernism, Dance, and Diaspora

How do dancers, poets, and novelists use the resources of their genres to imagine new forms of embodiment and belonging? This graduate seminar brings together recent work in the fields of modernism, dance, and diaspora studies to explore the relationship between theories of movement, space, and dwelling in the literature and drama of global modernity. We will study representations of modern dance in literary works, as well as performances by modern dancers and choreographers, to consider the reciprocity and continuity of forms long associated with expressivity and social change. At the same time, we will chart how such texts become invested in strategic withholding and inexpression, or what performance scholar Tina Post has called “deadpan” aesthetics. Can there be a kind of revelation in concealment—or, conversely, a concealment in the guise of outward projection? At the level of form, how might we understand phenomena that seem to cross disciplinary lines, such as choreographic narration, kinaesthetic empathy, self-talk as social dress rehearsal, or theatrically-populated interior monologue? And how might these insights be brought to bear on the embodied and psychic experience of diaspora, that conundrum of enforced movement that can so often feel like stuckness-in-place? Weekly readings will include a work of literature and/or dance, critical social theory, and recent literary criticism. In addition to offering students a broad introduction to critical approaches in modernism, performance and Black studies, the course has the larger aim of demonstrating innovative methods at the intersection of these disciplines. Primary authors will include Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zelda Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Mina Loy, Zadie Smith, and James Joyce alongside the performances of Serge Diaghilev, Josephine Baker, Pearl Primus, Ruth Page, Katherine Dunham and Bill T. Jones. Secondary criticism will include works by Toni Morrison, Martin Heidegger, Michel de Certeau, Gaston Bachelard, Anne Anlin Cheng, Katherine McKittrick and Sianne Ngai.