Overview

When political protest is read as epidemic madness, religious ecstasy as nervous disease, and angular dance moves as dark and uncouth, the 'disorder' being described is choreomania. At once a catchall term to denote spontaneous gestures and the unruly movements of crowds, 'choreomania' emerged in the nineteenth century at a time of heightened class conflict, nationalist policy, and colonial rule. In this book, author K�lina Gotman examines these choreographies of unrest, rethinking the modern formation of the choreomania concept as it moved across scientific and social scientific disciplines. Reading archives describing dramatic misformations-of bodies and body politics-she shows how prejudices against expressivity unravel, in turn revealing widespread anxieties about demonstrative agitation. This history of the fitful body complements stories of nineteenth-century discipline and regimentation. As she notes, constraints on movement imply constraints on political power and agency. In each chapter, Gotman confronts the many ways choreomania works as an extension of discourses shaping colonialist orientalism, which alternately depict riotous bodies as dangerously infected others, and as curious bacchanalian remains. Through her research, Gotman also shows how beneath the radar of this colonial discourse, men and women gathered together to repossess on their terms the gestures of social revolt.

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9780190840457

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Reviews

"""A conceptual tour-de-force! Gotman effectively mobilizes Foucault, Said, Foster, Agamben, and Gilroy to assemble a discursive history of choreomania. Progressive, 21st-century thinking that incorporates critical race theory, feminist theory, and the crucial critique of modern scientific approaches to movement. A triumph for dance studies that reflects an always-changing world-in-motion, ever-activated by shifting political circumstances."" -- Thomas F. DeFrantz, Professor of Dance, African and African American Studies, and Theatre Studies, Duke University Offering an astute history of ideas about dance that charts both fears and desires about bodies in movement, Gotman crafts a truly insightful way of thinking, which is to say moving, across and among the archives and the fields in which dance is practiced and given to remain, deployed and never quite contained. Throughout Gotman s keen analyses, 19th-century choreomania is read not only in relationship to but also as the best and the worst of modern biopolitics. -- Rebecca Schneider, Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Brown University"

A conceptual tour-de-force! Gotman effectively mobilizes Foucault, Said, Foster, Agamben, and Gilroy to assemble a discursive history of choreomania. Progressive, 21st-century thinking that incorporates critical race theory, feminist theory, and the crucial critique of modern scientific approaches to movement. A triumph for dance studies that reflects an always-changing world-in-motion, ever-activated by shifting political circumstances. -- Thomas F. DeFrantz, Professor of Dance, African and African American Studies, and Theatre Studies, Duke University Offering an astute history of ideas about dance that charts both fears and desires about bodies in movement, Gotman crafts a truly insightful way of thinking, which is to say moving, across and among the archives and the fields in which dance is practiced and given to remain, deployed and never quite contained. Throughout Gotman s keen analyses, 19th-century choreomania is read not only in relationship to but also as the best and the worst of modern biopolitics. -- Rebecca Schneider, Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Brown University

Author Information

K�lina Gotman is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at King's College London. She is translator among others of F�lix Guattari's The Anti-Oedipus Papers (2006) and collaborates widely on dance and theatre productions in Europe and North America.

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