Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial by Ralina L. Joseph (review)

Ardizzone, Heidi

doi:10.1353/afa.2013.0105

Cited by 1 publication

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“…I begin by connecting critical mixed-race studies and critical dance studies, fields that are not often approached in tandem. Although CMRS scholars have extensively explored multiracial representation in literature (Ibrahim 2012;Elam 2011;Collins 2022), theater (Paulin 2012;Nyong'o 2009;Heinrich 2023), and visual arts (Kina and Dariotis 2013;Joseph 2013;Nishime 2014;Storti 2020), dance is absent from most of these analyses (Shaffer 2023). For dance scholars, studies of racial representation in dance have been a major concern, as have analyses of intercultural choreographic processes (Albright 1997;Chatterjea 2013;DeFrantz 2004;Desmond 1997;Dixon Gottschild 1998;Kwan 2021;Mitra 2015;Wong 2016, among others).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Choreographing Multiraciality: Mixed-Race Methods in North American Contemporary Dance

Shaffer

2023

Arts

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Multiracialism, or the concept of “mixed-race”, remains a key racial discourse within twenty-first-century North American societies. Scholarly and mainstream studies of multiracial people often highlight the function of speech in theorizing mixed-race experiences, where interviews or other first-person narratives resist racialized stereotypes and express complex multiracial identities. Yet these studies often overlook the body as a comparable analytical site, ignoring how the body’s mobilization—in dance, choreography, and everyday actions—might further nuance mixed-race subjecthood. My article emphasizes experimental dance and choreography as alternative methods for imagining multiracial subjects, where these body-based approaches reject both stereotypical depictions of multiracial people in mainstream media and “transparent” representations in interviews. Drawing on the concept of “opacity,” which describes unknowable, illegible difference, I propose that experimental dance enables the expression of “opaque” multiracial subjectivities. This article then offers a choreographic analysis of Glenn Potter-Takata’s Yonsei f*ck f*ck, an experimental dance that produces opacities for its performers, who are of mixed Japanese heritage. Through movement scores, stand-up comedy, and a re-created “late-night” talk show, the dance invites audiences to move beyond the desire to recognize, categorize, and “know” the mixed-race Asian American performer.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Choreographing Multiraciality: Mixed-Race Methods in North American Contemporary Dance

Shaffer

2023

Arts

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Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial by Ralina L. Joseph (review)

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

Choreographing Multiraciality: Mixed-Race Methods in North American Contemporary Dance

Choreographing Multiraciality: Mixed-Race Methods in North American Contemporary Dance

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