Choreomania: Dance and Disorder

Description

When political protest is read as epidemic madness, religious ecstasy as nervous disease, and angular dance moves as dark and uncouth, the 'disorder' being described is choreomania. At once a catchall term to denote spontaneous gestures and the unruly movements of crowds, 'choreomania' emerged in the nineteenth century at a time of heightened class conflict, nationalist policy, and colonial rule. In this book, author Kélina Gotman examines these choreographies of unrest, rethinking the modern formation of the choreomania concept as it moved across scientific and social scientific disciplines. Reading archives describing dramatic misformations-of bodies and body politics-she shows how prejudices against expressivity unravel, in turn revealing widespread anxieties about demonstrative agitation. This history of the fitful body complements stories of nineteenth-century discipline and regimentation. As she notes, constraints on movement imply constraints on political power and agency. In each chapter, Gotman confronts the many ways choreomania works as an extension of discourses shaping colonialist orientalism, which alternately depict riotous bodies as dangerously infected others, and as curious bacchanalian remains. Through her research, Gotman also shows how beneath the radar of this colonial discourse, men and women gathered together to repossess on their terms the gestures of social revolt. Cover Series Choreomania Copyright Dedication Contents List of Illustrations Series Editor Foreword Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Choreomania, Another Orientalism Part I: Excavating Dance in the Archive 1 Obscuritas Antiquitatis: Institutions, Affiliations, Marginalia 2 Madness after Foucault: Medieval Bacchanals 3  Translatio: St. Vitus’s Dance, Demonism, and the Early Modern 4 The Convulsionaries: Antics on the French Revolutionary Stage 5 Mobiles, Mobs, and Monads: Nineteenth-​Century Crowd Forms 6 Médecine Rétrospective: Hysteria’s Archival Drag Part II: Colonial and Postcolonial Stages: Scenes of Ferment in the Field 7 ‘Sicily Implies Asia and Africa’: Tarantellas and Comparative Method 8 Ecstasy-​Belonging in Madagascar and Brazil  9 Ghost Dancing: Excess, Waste, and the American West 10 ‘The Gift of Seeing Resemblances’: Cargo Cults in the Antipodes 11 Monstrous Grace: Blackness and the New Dance ‘Crazes’ Coda: Moving Fields, Modernity, and the Bacchic Chorus Bibliography Index