Choreographing Asian America by Yutian Wong. 2010. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. x + 280 pp. notes, bibliography, index. $27.95 paper.

Abstract

choreographers or events to ausdruckstanz, which informed a certain moment of nation building, enables the reader to see changes in scale. Whereas Keefe showcases individuals, Hardt shifts to masses and the communities that chal- lenge national formation and the processes of mechanization associated with capital. Many of the other pieces provide thick descriptions of movement vocabularies that construct masculinities in different contexts. In the contributions by dancers Fred Strickler and Rennie Harris, artists and teachers of differ- ent generations respectively from the Midwest and East Coast of the U.S., dance seems to have insinuated opposing masculinities within the communities in which each came of age. Such accounts of the diverse means by which movement registers and enacts larger social anxieties attendant to constructions of masculi- nity recur throughout the book. From Jennifer Fisher’s and Jill Nunes Jensen’s respective explorations of the hyperbolic imagination and expression of gendered relationships in classical ballet to Stephen Johnson’s essay on transvestite acts in Juba’s minstrel shows, this collection encourages both thinking through the body as scripted through matrices of gender but also the body as a sight of negotiation, perhaps even resistance, to the norms that obtain in a given time and place or through highly codified forms of corporeal expression. Here Juba’s self- conscious play of gender might become the sur- prising antecedent to the choreography of Alonzo King. To be clear, my pairing of these two pieces does not gesture toward some ima- gined racial link but rather to an awareness of the constraints regulating people’s expressive capacities at distinct moments in time. For me, the collection produces its most substantive arguments in relation to how mas- culinity physically manifests under and as differ- ent regimes of power (e.g., Namus Zokhrabov’s recounting of the politics within the Azerbaijan State Dance Ensemble). The invention of traditions, the propping up of national and international discourses on particular demon- strations of masculine power, the assertion of moving men as an exercise in modernity— these are the elements of the book that promise to advance dance and masculinity studies together. Along this line, the “legacies of coloni- alism” section furthers the steps begun by some of the earlier contributions. The emphasis here on overlapping disciplinary mechanisms that inform the perception of moving bodies articu- lates why bodies matter in particular configur- ations, spaces, and times (Anthony Shay’s essay, for example, includes a wide overview of these issues). The labor of dancers harnessed to imperialist and nationalist ideals, often sim- ultaneously, is worth exploring because the pro- cesses of empire and nation-state formation have long been analyzed in gendered terms. But the work here insists that these sorts of ana- lyses must not only function at the level of dis- cursive abstraction. Enactments of power can be the subtle acts of bodies moving independently or together; perhaps this is the principal reason to study when men dance. However, the Introduction emphasizes pho- bia; When Men Dance is situated as a response to strategies that have marginalized dancing males. In this vein, the project seems not so distant from that of institutions such as The Gold School (a dance education venue in Massachusetts), which recently premiered its anti-bullying piece “accept ME.” Perhaps the field of dance studies requires this intervention. The editors seem to think so, for the Appendix reveals questions posed to generate discussion of stereotypes faced in the course of men’s dancing careers. Because the brief narratives continually return the reader to the potential difficulties in choosing to be a male dancer, the volume as a whole shades a bit too much toward the therapeutic, at least for me. On the other hand, a nice bit of therapy for $29.95 is a good deal, and the reader will certainly learn something along the way. Sean Metzger Duke University Choreographing Asian America Choreographing Asian America by Yutian Wong. 2010. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. x + 280 pp. notes, bibliography, index. $27.95 paper. doi:10.1017/S0149767711000453 “Can you name an Asian American choreogra- pher?” (1)—so begins Yutian Wong’s ground- breaking study, Choreographing Asian America. This book carefully and critically fills the silence that would presumably follow this question. I suggest silence because the two sites the DRJ 44/1 • SUMMER 2012