| This dissertation crosses the disciplines of dance, politics, feminist studies, cultural studies, and Asian American studies. The central focus of this dissertation investigates Chinese dance in Hawai'i that cannot help but also discuss the politics of colonization/decolonization. The methods employed in this work include ethnographical research through interviews to provide a genealogy of Chinese dance in Hawai'i, and reading dance as text. Reading dance as text enables an analysis of the politics of power at different trajectories that underlie and influence dance choreographies and events. Through this methodological approach, this dissertation inserts dance into political science to bring yet another cultural genre that has shaped our understandings of others -- the imagined others that applies to the ways in which we imagine nation-states as well.;Appropriating Arjun Appadurai's -- scapes, the dancescapes that I advance in this dissertation indicate that transformations of racial-spatial imaginaries that have been occurring globally also occur on the stage. Dancescapes allow for a different way of thinking about dance that is reflective of a culture, or cultures, that are "fractal and disjunctive" yet fluid and constantly changing. The primary dancescapes that I investigate are those of Ruth St. Denis, Chinese diaspora in Hawaii and institutionalized dance in China. Dance in several films are also an investigative site to advance one of the objectives of this project, which is to disentangle -isms such as racism and classism, at intersections of dance and politics. Through this project I coin the term silenced practice to refer to the politics that underlie dance choreographies and performances. In understanding the politics that have operated in silenced practice in dancescapes, this project aims toward provoking the resistance to essentialized identities. |
