Rebekah Kowal's book, Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America (2019), was published at a time when few could have predicted the global turmoil which was about to unfold. As the pandemic spread, Americans also had to (re)assess the way they saw themselves (or not) as interconnected citizens of the world, to face a new wave of reckoning over racial injustice, while the already pernicious political discourse on the threatening “otherness” and “foreignness” reached another disquieting level.
While there was no way of foreseeing the book's multilayered discourses and the analyses’ tangency with the immediate present and the redefinition of US internationalism, Kowal demonstrates masterfully that international dance staged in New York City during the middle of the twentieth century had a crucial role in creating the discourse of American globalism. But, as Kowal convincingly argues, the staging of the international dancing that “made the world smaller” through its embodiment and promotion of diversity, was complicated by the centrifugal forces and “dueling impulses” existing in the United States when this cultural phenomenon took place. Emerging as the leaders of the democratic world, Americans “struggled over whether and/or how to become a heterogeneous and inclusive nation” (8). On one hand, they embraced the generous globalist principles, on the other, “the vestiges of nativist and racist American cultural legacies” continued to feed their fraught relationship with multiculturalism and diversity (8).
Based on extended research, elegantly and keenly written, with pictures that enrich the story (and made one smile, seeing a goat on the American Museum of Natural History stage as part of the Swiss Dance's Group's performance [47]) the book is in the Oxford Studies in Dance Theory series, edited by Mark Franko. Kowal expands the series's interpretation of contemporary and historical dance through the lens of critical theory and cultural critique, and also adds a new dimension to the author's previous scholarly contributions, including How to Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in Postwar America (Reference Kowal2012) and her work as co-editor of the The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics (Reference Kowal, Siegmund and Martin2017).
One of the most striking qualities is the book's qualitative richness, with impressive scholarship, and the author's courage to position her work at the intersection of numerous exciting research areas: dance studies (with emphasis on ethnic and modern dance), cultural studies, Black history, immigration and postcolonial history, and national and international Cold War history. Involving so many research fields in this multifaceted study of ethnic dance on New York's stages might have been a difficult task for a less established scholar. But not for Kowal, whose analysis of the topic from an array of cross-sectional angles offers a refined complexity and innovative perspectives on dance as “a medium for cross-cultural mediation and interculturalism” (166).
A sophisticated comprehensibility emerges from the stories within the story, in which compelling arguments are constantly connected to their context, contributing to the book's value. Using the ideological and political aspects of globalism, American internationalism is reframed through the perspective of “ethnic dance.” Shedding light on the personas and legacies of dance practitioners such as La Meri, Asadata Dafora, and Rom Gopal, who performed on New York City stages with their dancers, students, and collaborators, Kowal complicates her analysis with new perspectives on international dance's “appropriation, ethnicity, and exoticization” (7) which contributed to the development of American modern dance.
The chapters stand on their own as powerful dance histories, but as they are skillfully interconnected, each chapter expands, enriches, and strengthens the arguments of the others. As the accounts of international dance on New York stages evolve from one event to another, the reader becomes more immersed, while the main argument becomes more compelling and astute. Opening with discussion of the 1948 Golden Jubilee Celebration and its “globalist project,” the International Dance Festival, the stage is set for analysis of the next chapters. Leitmotifs are offered of further investigation of the American pendulum between globalism and containment. Kowal convincingly demonstrates that, as American internationalism was a Janus with two faces, the results were also mixed.
The chapter “Staging Integration: Around the World with Dance and Song at the American Museum of Natural History, 1943–1952” focuses on the “native dance program” at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The 44 countries represented in 125 performances to 160,000 spectators brought together “a panorama of many lands and many people” (35). Kowal situates the program's significance and outcomes in the context of the period's rising tensions related to immigrants and the nation's physical and imaginary borders. As American ideas of globalism were opposed by those of containment, the program's generous ideas could not overcome renewed fears of the “foreigner” and associated universalism. But the events made “cultural and aesthetics inroads in the mid-century US dance practice,” and by “luring people to travel from their armchair” (60), also prompted Americans to look outward, to juxtapose, compare, and contrast their own culture with the wider world while renegotiating the cultural tensions of cultural containment and otherness.
“Staging Ethnological Dance: La Meri, Whiteness, and the Problems of Cross-Ethnic Embodiment” shifts the analysis from myriad bodies performing ethnic diversity to La Meri's “cross-ethnic body,” performing as a dancing travelogue in front of American audiences (73). Born Russell Meriwether Hughes, La Meri performed her “transnational works” (102) in the AMNH program. She was a dance traveler, the founder with Ruth St. Denis of the School of Natya, and the author of books on “ethnic dance.” Reviving her activity and persona sensitively, Kowal demonstrates how, while simultaneously performing diversity and containment, La Meri's white body's archiving and embodying of international dance contributed to the “watching and understanding” of otherness (103). But acting as a corporeal intercultural mediator between the East and West, La Meri was also a perpetrator of Western cultural values. While her white body's embodiment of cultural otherness was given the benefit of the doubt by critics and audiences, ironically, dancers such as Pearl Primus, Katherine Dunham, and Anna Sokolow faced critical skepticism regarding the authenticity of their works.
Adroitly positioned in the context of 1940s developments such as Pan-Africanist politics and the “the mobilization of black peoples in mid-century America” (121), the rich analysis in the chapter “Staging Diaspora: Asadata Dafora and Black Cultural Diplomacy” strikes a deep chord of sensitivities with the racial injustice in the United States today. The chapter discusses the African dance festivals produced at Carnegie Hall by the African Academy of Arts and Research (AAAR) in 1943, 1945, and 1946—directed by the Sierra Leonean-born Dafora—in the context of the anti-colonial movements in Africa and of the civil rights movement in the United States (152). Alluding to Franko's theory of metakinesis and revealing the Black dancing bodies’ major role in the making of American culture, Kowal demonstrates that Dafora's bridging of African and American experiences spoke about Africa's cultural abundance. Dafora's stagings challenged the audience's “cross-cultural curiosity” and racial understanding of Black identities, which also “made the world smaller” (142–145). Finally, the chapter furthers the not (yet) enough-studied early history of the civil rights movement, which was complicated by the Cold War scares, including the federal targeting of Black activists. In focusing on First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune's involvement in the African dance festival in 1943, Kowal also contributes to the history of American women in politics. Believing that “prejudice springs from ignorance,” and that arts can bring people of different races together (152), Roosevelt and Bethune contributed as patrons, promoters, sponsors, and speakers to making the event through which “Africa and America met” a success (132).
Closing the circle of historicizing and theorizing dance's power to build connections, the last chapter returns to the 1948 International Dance Festival, which introduced the book. Organized in the “global city” of New York, the home of the United Nations and the new capital of the diplomatic and artistic world, the festival was expected to be a success. Juxtaposing critics’ biased responses with “the court of public opinion” (173), only three of the fourteen groups who were invited participated (the Paris Opera Ballet, Ram Gopal and Dancers from India, and the American Charles Weidman). Kowal argues that the festival was not a success, revealing the difficulties of connecting spaces and people through dance when the terms of bridging remained Western-centric.
While the presence in the Paris Opera Ballet's troupe of the “choreographically stunted” (174) and politically stained Serge Lifar explains some of the negative atmosphere vis-à-vis the French guests, their lack of success was due to complex reasons, including the antiforeignness and homophobic attitudes of that time. However, as exponent of a world now in the shadow of the American superpower, the French dance had to be denied approval to help the emergence of the “homegrown” neoclassical dance as representative of American ingenuity, moral authority, and “prowess and promise” (174).
The analysis of dance as part of a cultural process, able to dismantle the past in the favor of a “very instant” American present, continued in the context of Gopal's performances (174). Analysis of Gopal's negotiation of his bodily representation of India, as well as criticism from both Western and Eastern audiences, enriches earlier interrogation of boundaries and challenges of appropriation in ethnic dance. The discussion of complexity of the “in-out” bodily and emotional experience of the performers engaged in bridging different cultures is also salutary. For instance, Ram Gopal simultaneously self-identified with the Indian cultural movement and the “resuscitation” of Indian dance (177), but he believed in interculturalism, and he felt that his appreciation of the Western culture completed for him “the circle of East and West” (178). Political dimensions of Gopal's performances in America are further considered in relation to his presentation as a cultural diplomat of the Indian government in the context of the anti-colonialist movement and the reconstruction of national identity after 1947.
The sagacious choice of discussing last the Midwestern dancer Charles Weidman's one-night appearance in the International Dance Festival has a symphonic quality of a finale, encompassing the book's main themes and arguments. The organizers’ invitation to Weidman to represent America at the International Dance Festival and his success (considered by critics the “brightest spot” of the event [189]) were not because he was “primus inter pares” of the vibrant American modern dance scene. Au contraire, Kowal argues, they were due to the “anti-elitist accessibility” (195) of his dances “drawn from the fabric of America” (149) being also perceived as embodiments of the American masculinity despite Weidman's bisexuality. Positioning Weidman's reception vis-à-vis his two discursive foils—Lifar, labelled by one critic as the “Queerographer” (173), and Gopal, the exotic foreigner—the author concludes that the International Dance Festival was a microcosm of the ideals, contradictions, and subjective mentality of midcentury American globalism, simultaneously promoting difference, while fearing and opposing “otherness.”
Through the research and writing, conceptualizing, theorizing, and demonstrating the conflicting but intermingled midcentury America's affair with globalism that embraced interculturalism while reinforcing American-centered white hierarchies, Kowal's book is illuminating. It advances the dance history field, as well as associated research fields. Kowal also incites readers to reimagine the more diverse, inclusive America we live in, while advancing our understanding of the physical and mental borders and bordering of whiteness, as well as “otherness” in dance practice and performance. I recommend the book with no reservations to researchers and dance practitioners, undergraduate and graduate students, and to anyone who believes that dance, as the book beautifully demonstrates, connects people. Showing that dance can “make the world smaller,” Kowal's work brings us closer to the hope that our bodies and minds can overcome the complex challenges of our time and make the world better.
