front cover of Gesture and Power
Gesture and Power
Religion, Nationalism, and Everyday Performance in Congo
Yolanda Covington-Ward
Duke University Press, 2016
In Gesture and Power Yolanda Covington-Ward examines the everyday embodied practices and performances of the BisiKongo people of the Lower Congo to show how their gestures, dances, and spirituality are critical in mobilizing social and political action. Conceiving of the body as the center of analysis, a catalyst for social action, and as a conduit for the social construction of reality, Covington-Ward focuses on specific flash points in the last ninety years of Congo's troubled history, when embodied performance was used to stake political claims, foster dissent, and enforce power. In the 1920s Simon Kimbangu started a Christian prophetic movement based on spirit-induced trembling, which swept through the Lower Congo, subverting Belgian colonial authority. Following independence, dictator Mobutu Sese Seko required citizens to dance and sing nationalist songs daily as a means of maintaining political control. More recently, embodied performance has again stoked reform, as nationalist groups such as Bundu dia Kongo advocate for a return to precolonial religious practices and non-Western gestures such as traditional greetings. In exploring these embodied expressions of Congolese agency, Covington-Ward provides a framework for understanding how embodied practices transmit social values, identities, and cultural history throughout Africa and the diaspora.
 
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front cover of Global Bollywood
Global Bollywood
Travels of Hindi Song and Dance
Sangita Gopal
University of Minnesota Press, 2008

Bollywood movies and their signature song-and-dance spectacles are an aesthetic familiar to people around the world, and Bollywood music now provides the rhythm for ads marketing goods such as computers and a beat for remixes and underground bands. These musical numbers have inspired scenes in Western films such as Vanity Fair and Moulin Rouge.

 

Global Bollywood shows how this currency in popular culture and among diasporic communities marks only the latest phase of the genre’s world travels. This interdisciplinary collection describes the many roots and routes of the Bollywood song-and-dance spectacle. Examining the reception of Bollywood music in places as diverse as Indonesia and Israel, the essays offer a stimulating redefinition of globalization, highlighting the cultural influence of Hindi film music from its origins early in the twentieth century to today.

Contributors: Walter Armbrust, Oxford U; Anustup Basu, U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, Colorado College; Edward K. Chan, Kennesaw State U; Bettina David, Hamburg U; Rajinder Dudrah, U of Manchester; Shanti Kumar, U of Texas, Austin; Monika Mehta, Binghamton U; Anna Morcom, Royal Holloway College; Ronie Parciack, Tel Aviv U; Biswarup Sen, U of Oregon; Sangita Shrestova; Richard Zumkhawala-Cook, Shippensburg U.

Sangita Gopal is assistant professor of English at the University of Oregon. Sujata Moorti is professor of women’s and gender studies at Middlebury College.

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front cover of Global Tarantella
Global Tarantella
Reinventing Southern Italian Folk Music and Dances
Incoronata Inserra
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Tarantella, a genre of Southern Italian folk music and dance, is an international phenomenon--seen and heard in popular festivals, performed across the Italian diaspora, even adapted for New Age spiritual practices. The boom in popularity has diversified tarantella in practice while setting it within a host of new, unexpected contexts. Incoronata Inserra ventures into the history, global circulation, and recontextualization of this fascinating genre. Examining tarantella's changing image and role among Italians and Italian Americans, Inserra illuminates how factors like tourism, translation, and world music venues have shifted the ethics of place embedded in the tarantella cultural tradition. Once rural, religious, and rooted, tarantella now thrives in settings urban, secular, migrant, and ethnic. Inserra reveals how the genre's changing dynamics contribute to reimagining Southern Italian identity. At the same time, they translate tarantella into a different kind of performance that serves new social and cultural groups and purposes. Indeed, as Inserra shows, tarantella's global growth promotes a reassessment of gender relations in the Italian South and helps create space for Italian and Italian-American women to reclaim gendered aspects of the genre.
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front cover of Graceful Resistance
Graceful Resistance
How Capoeiristas Use Their Art for Activism and Community Engagement
Lauren Miller Griffith
University of Illinois Press, 2023

Capoeira began as a martial art developed by enslaved Afro-Brazilians. Today, the practice incorporates song, dance, acrobatics, and theatrical improvisation—and leads many participants into activism.

Lauren Miller Griffith’s extensive participant observation with multiple capoeira groups informs her ethnography of capoeiristas--both individuals and groups--in the United States. Griffith follows practitioners beyond their physical training into social justice activities that illuminate capoeira’s strong connection to resistance and subversion. As both individuals and communities of capoeiristas, participants march against racial discrimination, celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, organize professional clothing drives for job seekers, and pursue economic and environmental justice in their neighborhoods. For these people, capoeira becomes a type of serious leisure that contributes to personal growth, a sense of belonging, and an overall sense of self, while also imposing duties and obligations.

An innovative look at capoeira in America, Graceful Resistance reveals how the practicing of an art can catalyze action and transform communities.

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front cover of A Guru’s Journey
A Guru’s Journey
Pandit Chitresh Das and Indian Classical Dance in Diaspora
Sarah Morelli
University of Illinois Press, 2019
An important modern exponent of Asian dance, Pandit Chitresh Das brought kathak to the United States in 1970. The North Indian classical dance has since become an important art form within the greater Indian diaspora. Yet its adoption outside of India raises questions about what happens to artistic practices when we separate them from their broader cultural contexts.

A Guru's Journey provides an ethnographic study of the dance form in the San Francisco Bay Area community formed by Das. Sarah Morelli, a kathak dancer and one of Das's former students, investigates issues in teaching, learning, and performance that developed around Das during his time in the United States. In modifying kathak's form and teaching for Western students, Das negotiates questions of Indianness and non-Indianness, gender, identity, and race. Morelli lays out these issues for readers with the goal of deepening their knowledge of kathak aesthetics, technique, and theory. She also shares the intricacies of footwork, facial expression in storytelling, and other aspects of kathak while tying them to the cultural issues that inform the dance.

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