Dancing the World Smaller

Dancing the World Smaller examines international dance performances in New York City in the 1940s as sites in which dance artists and audiences contested what it meant to practice globalism in mid-twentieth-century America. Debates over globalism in dance proxied larger cultural struggles over how to realize diversity while honoring difference.

Rebekah J. Kowal is Professor of Dance at The University of Iowa and author of How to Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in Postwar America and co-editor with Randy Martin and Gerald Siegmund of The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics. She is currently serving as co-executive editor of Dance Research Journal.

Introduction: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America
Chapter 1: Staging Integration: Around the World with Dance and Song at the American Museum of Natural History
Chapter 2: Staging Ethnologic Dance: La Meri, Whiteness, and the Problems of Cross-Ethnic Embodiment
Chapter 3: Staging Diaspora: Asadata Dafora and Black Cultural Diplomacy
Chapter 4: Staging Multiculturalism/Staging Containment: Paradoxes of Mid-Century Globalism
Index