The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics
Publication
, Journal Article
Wilbur, S
Published in: Dance Research Journal
At 656 pages wide and 31 authors deep, collection contains a veritable who's who of US, UK, and EU dance scholarship. It also importantly documents the weight of the loss to the field of coeditor Randy Martin, whose materialist investigations of dance and politics influence the volume's contributions in powerful and explicit ways. Through the dedicated energies of Martin's fellow coeditors Rebekah Kowal and Gerald Siegmund, the volume updates an editorial burden assumed by earlier collections and field progenitors: interpreting dance's irreconcilable relationship to politics, a tension that the volume's contributors do not promise to reconcile. But what the text does, and with great urgency, is to revise and update long-standing debates on dance's politics of representation while also flagging hierarchical issues internal to dance research as areas for future investigation.