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Choreographing Copyright

Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance

Anthea Kraut (Associate Professor of Dance, Associate Professor of Dance, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA)

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Hardback

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English
Oxford University Press Inc
14 January 2016
Choreographing Copyright is a new historical and cultural analysis of U.S. dance-makers' investment in intellectual property rights. Stretching from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, the book reconstructs efforts to win copyright protection for choreography and teases out their raced and gendered politics, showing how dancers have embraced intellectual property rights as a means to both consolidate and contest racial and gendered power. A number of the artists featured in the book are well-known in the history of American dance, including Loie Fuller, Hanya Holm, and Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille, and George Balanchine. But the book also uncovers a host of marginalized figures--from the South Asian dancer Mohammed Ismail, to the African American pantomimist Johnny Hudgins, to the African American blues singer Alberta Hunter, to the white burlesque dancer Faith Dane--who were equally interested in positioning themselves as subjects rather than objects of property. Drawing on critical race and feminist theories and on cultural studies of copyright, Choreographing Copyright offers fresh insight into the raced and gendered hierarchies that govern the theatrical marketplace, white women's historically contingent relationship to property rights, legacies of ownership of black bodies and appropriation of non-white labor, and the tension between dance's ephemerality and its reproducibility.

By:  
Imprint:   Oxford University Press Inc
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 160mm,  Width: 239mm,  Spine: 25mm
Weight:   1g
ISBN:   9780199360369
ISBN 10:   0199360367
Pages:   336
Publication Date:  
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Primary ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Anthea Kraut is Associate Professor in the Department of Dance at University of California, Riverside and author of Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston (2008).

Reviews for Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance

A magnificently complex argument based in meticulous archival research, <em>Choreographing Copyright</em> examines the function of copyright in both affirming and contesting key cultural values for artists of different raced, classed, and gendered identities. --Susan Leigh Foster, Distinguished Professor, UCLA <em>Choreographing Copyright</em> is a provocative book that sheds new light on the history of modern, vernacular and commercial dance. By attending to the raced, gendered and classed biases that influence choreographers' claims of originality, authorship and ownership, Kraut lends keen insight into the implicit social politics behind the fixing of moving bodies. She finds in vibrant case studies arguments about subjectivity, property, protection and value writ large and pushes us to recognize the instabilities of bids for personhood through creative expression. --Nadine George-Graves, Professor, University of California San Diego Department of Theater and Dance <em>Choreographing Copyright</em> is a well-written, well-researched (many of the pages are almost half foot notes), well-stated, well-argued dance tome. Even when the reader might not agree with the contentions made, there is absolutely no doubt to Kraut's thoroughness, thoughtfulness and expertise. --<em>Critical Dance</em> [E]xpertly researched... --<em>The Dance Current</em>


  • Winner of Winner of the 2017 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics from the American Society for Aesthetics.

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