Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia ed. by Katherine Mezur and Emily Wilcox

Abstract

Reviewed by: Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia ed. by Katherine Mezur and Emily Wilcox Fangfei Miao CORPOREAL POLITICS: DANCING EAST ASIA. Edited by Katherine Mezur and Emily Wilcox. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2020; pp 355. Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia is the first English-language anthology that focuses on dance and performance histories in East Asia. The editors Katherine Mezur and Emily Wilcox situate the anthology in the intersection of East Asian studies and dance studies and define East Asia as "a [geographic] place, a transnational community, and a political idea" that is under constant scholarly debate (Wilcox 2020, 7). Using "corporeal politics" as the overarching methodology, this book endeavors to exhibit the rich potential of dancing bodies in generating new knowledge for area studies. The diverse backgrounds of the contributors promote an interdisciplinary, transnational, and cross-cultural research of dance. However, several paradoxical features of the volume complicates its purported goals and reinforces hegemonies that it seeks to dismantle. Led by scholars of the global minority and produced from within the Euro-American academic setting, the anthology risks racializing the cultural Other in East Asia. Thus instead of demonstrating a way forward, the anthology stokes the question of how to include research of East Asian dance in the English-language academic world. The methodology of "corporeal politics" focuses on "offering politicized readings of dancing bodies" and "taking dance as an art that makes the politics of bodies visible, palpable, and transformable" (Wilcox 2020, 12). The editors adopt this methodology to uncover five body politics shared by dance performance in China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and North Korea and structure the book accordingly in five parts: Contested Genealogies, Decolonizing Migration, Militarization and Empire, Socialist Aesthetics, and Collective Technologies. The contributors examine historically influential or previously overlooked dance figures, milestone or unnoticed dance works, performance events in pedestrian contexts, history of a dance style, and transcultural encounters of dancing bodies. Based on archival and ethnographic works, the chapters investigate body in performance as the site for political intervention, where nationalism, racism, gender politics, and questions of "the modern" entangle with one another. The last two decades have witnessed increasing scholarly attention to performing bodies in East Asian studies. Dance has, however, continued to be under-represented within this conversation. Corporeal Politics fills this void, albeit by repeating some of the missteps reminiscent of area studies' forays into Asia. It is worthwhile to remind ourselves that area studies emerged in the aid of American expansionism and speaks directly to the US's political and economic concerns. Several scholars have questioned the innate limitations of area studies that centers whiteness and privileges Euro-America (Masao and Harootunian 2002; Yapp 2021). This anthology seems to uncritically overlook these limitations. "Corporeal politics" as an analytical tool centers Euro-American perspectives. The critical apparatus approaches the performing bodies of the non-Western Other solely for political meanings to make these bodies fully knowable in the West. In other words, the volume seems more concerned about facilitating Western comprehension of the Asian Other. Nevertheless, Corporeal Politics showcases a stretching tension between two facets of East Asia: its relations to the West and its internal interactions. For the East-West relation, the volume defies a postcolonial framework that tends to read dance in former colonies as either submissive to colonial maneuver or completely resistive to imperialism, but instead demonstrates a more complex interaction between East Asia and the "advanced" West. In Catherine Yeh's chapter, the West functions as a source for artistic inspirations that can stimulate domestic cultural transformation. Yeh argues that the transcultural encounter with modern dance during Qi Ru-shan's visit to Europe in the 1920s inspired him to innovate Peking Opera by inserting more dances to it. Together with Chinese Peking Opera master Mei Lan-Fang, Qi designed new choreographies of Chinese conventional dance inspired by the modern dance he saw to "dancify" Peking Opera as a method of modernization. Comparatively, for Okju Son, the West galvanized new self-identification and encouraged dance production based on East Asian traditions in opposition to the Western counterparts. Son suggests that the performance opportunities in Germany stimulated Park Yeong-in, a Korean-Japanese...