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From antiquarian references to early modern corporealities, in her book Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (2018), 1 theater and performance studies scholar Kélina Gotman probes the archives to expound how colonial, medical, and ethnographic discourses cultivate the materialization and dissemination of the choreomania concept. Through a process she calls “translatio,” Gotman examines popular journalistic, medical, historical, and socio-cultural repositories in order to contextualize the ways in which various spontaneous and disorderly bodily movements, occurring in public spaces, are politicized and imagined as threatening (to the social order). Using conceptual frames such as the rhizomatic (Deleuze) 2 and the genealogical (Foucault), 3 the author gives rise to an emergent series of critical readings on the epidemic disease. She remaps the historiography of choreomania and presents seminal embodied “choreotopology” in addition to contested “chorezones.” By centering on the importance of socially sanctioned movements as well as the fitness (control, sexuality, and beauty) of bodies on public display, Choreomania exuviates the pernicious orthodoxies that hinder advancement on issues of disability.
It is of significance that Gotman positions her study at the borderline of dance, which enables a comprehensive survey of dance, unchoreographed movements, as well as textual representations of performance (what Murray-Román termed “performance events as ekphrases 4”). Using this framework, in chapter eleven titled “Monstrous Grace,” Gotman discusses issues of “Blackness and Gestural Modernity” from the 1920s to the 1940s; more precisely, how new animal jagged dances, jazz, and the Charleston gave lieu to a “white brand of hysteria” 5 that constructed jagged bodily movements as savage and primitive. Perceived as diseased and “monstrous,” 6 these “alien bodies of modernity” were subsequently othered and inscribed in what cultural studies scholar Paul Gilroy called a “politics of transfiguration” 7 (partially transcending modernity by constructing both an imaginary antimodern past and a postmodern yet-to-come). Through canonical historiography of the time, Gotman observes by what means the “alter kinetic aesthetics” 8 (of such embodied language or movements) are dislocated and reappropriated (rearticulated) within reductive Africanist fantasies and racialized biologics. Hence, the Blackness of “Modern Choreomanias” becomes synonymous with disability, disease, unsoundness, madness, and disorder (illustrating Freud’s “return to the repressed”). 9
“Blackness and Gestural Modernity” relates to my scholarship on bodily pain and transgressive kinaesthetics. Through a process I term...