Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance: South-South Choreographies (New World Choreographies)

by Ananya Chatterjea

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This book argues that contemporary dance, imagined to have a global belonging, is vitiated by euro-white constructions of risk and currency that remain at its core. Differently, the book reimagines contemporary dance along a “South-South” axis, as a poly-centric, justice-oriented, aesthetic-temporal category, with intersectional understandings of difference as a central organizing principle. Placing alterity and heat, generated via multiple pathways, at its center, it foregrounds the work of South-South artists, who push against constructions of “tradition” and white-centered aesthetic imperatives, to reinvent their choreographic toolkit and respond to urgent questions of their times. In recasting the grounds for a different “global stage,” the argument widens its scope to indicate how dance-making both indexes current contextual inequities and broader relations of social, economic, political, and cultural power, and inaugurates future dimensions of justice.
Winner of the 2022 Oscar G. Brockett Prize for Dance Research


  • ISBN13 9783030439118
  • Publish Date 29 October 2020
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country CH
  • Imprint Springer Nature Switzerland AG
  • Edition 1st ed. 2020
  • Format Hardcover
  • Pages 289
  • Language English