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BUTTING OUT: READING RESISTIVE CHOREOGRAPHIES THROUGH WORKS BY JAWOLE WILLA JO ZOLLAR AND CHANDRALEKHA. By Ananya Chatterjea. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004; pp. xv + 377. $70.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.
Few manuscripts connect theory to practice in as provocative and productive a manner as this volume. Chatterjea ties together many strands of theory-including critical race, postcolonial, aesthetic, materialist, and feminist-into a disarmingly personal and potent knot, destined to shift paradigms surrounding performance and its reception. Writing to tether readings of particular dances to a history of ideas, the author hopes to "suggest that racial and cultural difference are matters neither personal nor ontological, but of construction" that "need to be understood through critical engagement" (xiii). Far more than an exploration of the choreography of its two outstanding artist subjects, this remarkable volume shakes the very foundations of dance studies as an area of inquiry.
Chatterjea moors her troubling of complex theoretical waters with readings of dances by two women who both direct internationally known companies and are choreographers who have "radicalized the cultural production in their communities, weaving the aesthetic and the political in powerful signification" (xiii). According to the author, Zollar and Chandralekha engage "a politics of defiant hope" (42) in their work, a commitment that demands simultaneous consideration "without attempting a 'cross-cultural' study in the mode of liberal relativism": one that speaks instead to "emerging notions of global resistances to white and Western dominance and the urgent energies gathering around possibilities of alliances along lines of progressive politics and color and across national borders" (171). Indeed, "resistive identification" becomes a strategy of the volume as a whole, as a methodology...