Dancing Back to Multiple Traditions

Abstract

1 See the links in the Works Cited; all clips are three to five minutes in duration and readily available on YouTube and Vimeo. The 'Bismil' clip is a slightly abridged version of the scene in the film. As an anonymous reviewer of this paper noted, the links have vastly different viewing numbers. I am, however, not concerned with making an argument about these specific clips and their popularity or range of dissemination but listing them to provide access to the performances discussed in this article. 2 Fredric Jameson, in his stocktaking of the agenda of cultural studies, reminds us of its origin in dissatisfaction with "the more traditional opposition between the contemporary concerns of students of mass or popular culture and the tendentiously backward-gazing perspective of literary critics (even when the canonized works are 'modern' and relatively recent in time)" (1993, 19).