Critical Race Theory, Gender, American Modern Dance and Copyright

Download or read book Critical Race Theory, Gender, American Modern Dance and Copyright written by Caroline Joan Picart and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I begin by examining the conditions of possibility within which a white and nonwhite aesthetic in relation to American dance may be characterized, not to totalize these analytic categories, but as a rough heuristic in order to do a genealogy of how one particular white aesthetic - Balanchine's vision of ballet - becomes enshrined as the paradigmatic case for full copyright protection. But more significantly, the central argument of this thesis is that the effort to win federal copyright protection for dance choreography in the United States was a simultaneously racialized and gendered contest. Copyright and choreography, particularly as tied with whiteness, have a refractory history. Unlike Loïe Fuller and Martha Graham, also both pioneers of American modern dance, George Balanchine, a Russian émigré (and his estate), succeeded in gaining and maintaining full control of his choreographic creations. A hyperwhitened aesthetic and Balanchine's authority as a white male ballet-master\U+2014\ both manifestations of whiteness as status property\U+2014\were crucial to that success. Additionally, gender imbricates with race in this cultural imagination of a white versus a non-white dance aesthetic, much as postcolonial imaginings of a primitivist and exotic other (in the case of Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham, though differently), refracted through the prisms of stardom and image-making, connect to form a complex narrative. Finally, the thesis also includes an analysis of how Baker and Dunham, despite their international celebrity, did not have full access to the same kind of status property their white female predecessors and contemporaries, Fuller and Graham, had.