A critique of flow–the belief that dancers’ task is to deliver an unmediated fluidity of movement, coming from the “master’s” imaginary, passing through the body of the dancer, kinesthetically, out into the world. An idea of flow that goes back to Friedrich Schiller’s 1793 project of an aesthetic state. Schiller’s vision includes an analogical parallel… Read More


This collection of essays centers around the question of “how a body ‘knows’,” from many perspectives coming from many disciplines, fusing traditional with experimentally interdisciplinary forms of scholarship. They chose dance as the locus of inquiry, explaining that it is to those for whom dance is central to questions of cultural discourse—”dancers, choreographers, pedagogues, critics,… Read More


A colonial regime of truth works by establishing a system of equivalences (meaning = text; history = document) and antagonisms (self not = other; body not = mind), erasing and deeming invaluable those forms of knowledge and meaning making processes coming from embodied practices and performance. In this text, Taylor takes us through the spaces… Read More


How does the body do the work of the archive? How does it transmit knowledge? Can it? Can it express an ontoepistemological order or sociopolitical reality? Firstly, I want to engage with texts that center the body as a repository of a given ontoepistemology, cultural memory, or as a mnemonic device, in the Performance Studies… Read More


Foucault’s Archive For F, all utterances happen within a system of what can and cannot be said: the archive is what differentially organizes these utterances within a constituting system, which, at the same time, is constituted by the utterances as they get categorized—archived—as unique events or statements (rather than… rather than not?). The archive doesn’t… Read More


In this book, Jennifer Morgan seeks to reckon with slavery—its historicity, its afterlives, and notably, its archival silences—from the standpoint of the captive, specifically, from the lived experiences of enslaved women. From the first African who the Portuguese took as captive in 1441 from Senegambian Rio de Oro, who was a woman, to Dorothy, a… Read More


Whereas, as many postcolonialists have argued, encounters between the English and Africans/natives in the 18th and 19th century expressed a total (ontological?) othering of difference as codified by physical traits, customs, societal practices, language, etc., Hall’s analysis of the early narratives of these encounters shows that the central site of difference is gender. These 16th/17th… Read More


Much of Hall’s analytical work is rooted in the exploration of the material consequences of the black/white binarism that permeates the language, thought, and aesthetic constructions of Early Modern England. She maintains that the moralization of this chiaroscuro theme, and its use in the creation of gendered and class difference, remain key processes in the… Read More


Cox & Crawley: As textual and discursive analyses presuppose a separation between nature and culture in the manner of Kant (Cox)—the aesthetic object separated from the knowing/judging subject: aesthetic sensibilities forged by means of a disembodiment which itself is a condition of emergence for the kind of thought processes valorized in this post-Enlightenment episteme (Crawley)—a… Read More