Description
Book SynopsisWork links dance and the aesthetics of everyday movement to ideas about social order.
Trade Review“
Social Choreography is an intelligent, precisely argued new take on longstanding issues regarding the relationship of ideologies and aesthetics, one which invigorates those debates through its encounter with the visual and kinesthetic materiality of dance forms.”—Jane Desmond, editor of
Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance“A work of stunning originality and relentless intelligence,
Social Choreography restores the performing body to its central place in the narrative of aesthetic modernism and its vexed relationship to politics. Taking his examples from the history of dance, popular as well as elite, and the discourses surrounding it in Europe and America, Andrew Hewitt conducts a master class in non-reductive ideology critique.”—Martin Jay, author of
Songs of Experience: Modern European and American Variations on a Universal Theme“Innovative and groundbreaking,
Social Choreography is a major contribution to intellectual history and in particular to the history of social theory. It is also a very important contribution to aesthetics where the reemergence of dance significantly reorders the hierarchy of the arts and of the tradition of theorizing the arts.”—Fredric Jameson, Duke University
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Social Choreography and the Aesthetic Continuum 1
1. The Body of Marsyas: Aesthetic Socialism and the Physiology of the Sublime 37
2. Stumbling and Legibility: Gesture and the Dialectic of Tact 78
3. "America Makes Me Sick!": Nationalism, Race, Gender, and Hysteria 117
4. The Scandalous Male Icon: Nijinsky and the Queering of Symbolist Aesthetics 156
5. From Women to Girl: Mass Culture and Gender Panic 177
Notes 213
Index 249
