Michelle Clayton

Touring History: Tórtola Valencia Between Europe and the Americas

In 1907, the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario published the collection El canto errante [ The Wandering Song ], containing a poem entitled “La bailarina de los pies desnudos” [“The Barefoot Dancer”]. The title leads the reader to anticipate an aesthetic of lightness and simplicity, yet the poem is weighted down by its many cultural references: at least one per line, and barely harmonizing amongst themselves. Its space is heavily perfumed, thickly ornamented, animated by the movements of a dancer who invokes different cultural references and plastic forms with each extended limb, each trembling body part. At first sight sinuously seductive, this central figure unravels into a welter of fragments and contradictions: both animal and divine, eroticized and chaste, a lunar deity (Selene) and a literary character (Anactoria), a “constellation of examples and of objects” ( constelada de casos y de cosas ) whose body, as the line suggests, barely contains its referential chaos.

Inside/Beside Dance Studies: A Conversation Mellon Dance Studies in/and the Humanities

In 2012, Susan Manning, Rebecca Schneider, and Janice Ross collaborated across their home institutions of Northwestern University, Brown University, and Stanford University, respectively, to found a research initiative interrogating the field of dance studies. This manifold project, Dance Studies in/and the Humanities, receives funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through 2015 and includes a series of public roundtable discussions. This conversation—abridged from the original event—took place during two such roundtables at Brown University in June 2013, and it features substantial contributions from scholars Michelle Clayton, Mark Franko, Nadine George-Graves, Andre Lepecki, Susan Manning, Janice Ross, and Rebecca Schneider. Speakers address what dance studies may need, want, or do in this current historical moment. Manning articulates her experience being “inside” and “beside” dance studies through teaching in an integrationist/assimilationist model that promotes dance as a subfield in humanities (and occasionally social science) departments. Franko asserts that dance studies formed as a result of an epistemological break in the 1980s and adds that interdisciplinary frameworks can also support this relatively new field. Through embracing the partiality that comes with interdisciplinarity, Clayton encourages participants to investigate generative misunderstandings. Ross provides a comprehensive account of the crisis in the humanities, and Lepecki connects this crisis to the permanent state of war in the U.S. and emphasizes the importance of theory in dance studies. Falling short of Afro-pessimism, George-Graves calls for dance studies to infiltrate the upper echelons of higher education administration, and Schneider articulates post-structuralisms link to the Global South while calling for more scholarly representation from this area of the world. Through exploring possibilities for embodied knowledge, reenacting post-structuralism, and embracing partiality, these scholars address the expanding aperture of dance studies in a global economy. Topics identified for future discussion include decentering the whiteness of dance studies transnationally, exploring how dance studies methodologies are currently utilized in academia, and expanding dance studies beyond the American academy.

Cities in Ruins: The Politics of Modern Poetics by Cecilia Enjuto Rangel (review)

from memory of the cultural production of what Conley names (despite substantial amounts of debating and scholarly criticism from the past three decades) “the Golden Age,” the book reflects it quite precisely (256). If, on the other hand, the search for the Siglo del Otro can include as much an incorporation of modern and postmodern signs, references, and methods in early modern criticism, and vice versa, there is much work to be done, and this volume is one good step in that direction. This important collection of essays argue for a more detailed study of the correspondences between memory, landscape, place, space, and theater as signs of early modern and postmodern times, to which I add, as signs of the importance of such early modern times for the study of both modern and postmodern texts and contexts. Spectacle and Topophilia opens up the way for other scholars and readers to continue dwelling in this relation, and to consider the sense of place and spectacle as elements that signify and make new and various kinds of sense in the Hispanic world.

Introduction to Julio Cortázar, The Situation of the Latin American Intellectual

In 1967, the Argentine author Julio Cortázar was invited by the Cuban writer Roberto Fernández Retamar to contribute an essay on the ‘Situation of the Latin American Intellectual’ to the journal Casa de las Américas. Cortázar and Retamar had struck up an important friendship earlier in the decade; in their correspondence and their personal encounters in both Paris and Cuba they confirmed their common dedication to both Latin American literature and to urgent questions of contemporary politics. The immediate backdrop to their exchanges was the growing international success of Latin American writing, on the one hand, and on the other, the increasing influence of socialism in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. Fernández Retamar played a central role in the reorganization of cultural institutions in Cuba, which had a ripple effect through the continent and beyond; the rearticulation of aesthetics and politics had an international reach, and contributed both to the increased visibility of Latin American writers, as well as to the political awakening of many of them, as Cortázar makes clear in this document. Despite his powerful alliance with a prominent figure on the Latin American left, however, Cortázar was beginning to come under fire from other writers and intellectuals on two specific grounds: first, the accusation that his fiction invested too heavily in fantasy at the expense of a reality felt as increasingly pressing and thus unconscionably evaded; second, a distrust over his decision to settle in Paris, where he had been living since 1951, when he took up a post as translator at UNESCO. Retamar’s invitation to Cortázar to speak categorically as a Latin American intellectual thus not only hoped to extract a statement of links between the Cuban revolution and contemporary literary experiments from one of the continent’s most visible writers, but was likely also an attempt to shore up his friend’s political and literary credentials, and to reiterate his relevance for Latin American aesthetics and politics alike. Cortázar, quite surprisingly, turned the invitation on its head, cannily recasting the terms of the debate. He responded not with an essay but with an open letter, which allowed him – he insisted – to make his statements as a particular individual rather than as a representative type or authoritative voice. In this nuanced document, Cortázar explicitly resisted speaking as a ‘Latin American intellectual’, emphasizing not only the separation of his aesthetic writings from his political beliefs, but his physical distance from events on the ground, given that he had been living in France since 1951. That distance, Cortázar polemically suggested, had allowed him to develop a more textured view of Latin America: through his greater access to a broad range of informational sources on what was happening in the world and at home, and because in Paris he had come into