Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"This book is a
tour de force, a
grand jeté, a series of sustained arabesques introducing a new and exciting way of thinking through the relation between aesthetic and political forms in twentieth-century American culture." -- Virginia Jackson * University of California-Irvine *
"
Don’t Act, Just Dance is an exceptional study of cold war culture. Americanists will find indispensable Kodat's brilliant meta-political analyses of works by George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, Stanley Kubrick, and Marianne Moore. I cannot recommend this book too highly." -- Harilaos Stecopoulos * author of Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898-1976 *
"An important manifesto for dance as a subject of serious scholarly attention in academic disciplines beyond dance history and dance studies … the book's final case studies are brilliant comparative meditations on the complex, multilayered relationship between Cold War art and politics." * Dance Chronicle *
Table of ContentsPreface
Part I Rethinking Cold War Culture
1 Combat Cultural
2 History: From the WPA to the NEA (through the CIA)
3 Theory: Adorno and Rancière (Abstraction, Modernism, Gender, Sexuality)
4 Dancing: “Don’t Act, Just Dance”
Part II Rereading Cold War Culture
5 Figures in the Carpet: Balanchine, Cunningham, “Persia”
6 Spartacus
7 From Art as Diplomacy to Diplomacy as Art: The Red Detachment of Nixon in China
Notes
Bibliography
Index
