Dancing Language: The Politics of Bodily Movement and Gesture in Latin America

Abstract

Dancing Language: The Politics of Bodily Movement and Gesture in Latin America analyzes historical, artistic, and literary productions where dance as a cultural practice has established a semiotic system in which bodies can be recognized and differentiated. This study focuses on three different historical moments: the discovery of the new world, Mexico’s nation-identity-building project, and contemporary neoliberal practices in the United States. I engage with Visual Studies, Dance and Performance Studies, and Latin American cultural criticism to examine the ways in which dance practice has influenced the identarian, economic, and political discourses in Latin America. Dancing Language argues that dance has shaped the notions of identity in Latin America through the recognition and understanding of physical movement. I contend that dance has also provided us with the necessary tools to read and understand moving bodies through colonial practices, the structuration of a Nation-State identity, and the question of what it means to be a Latin American body in a neoliberal state. Although this dissertation is about dance, and I do reference specific dance pieces, techniques, and dance theorists, my objects of study are not specifically dances or dance productions. I take, instead, cultural productions and literary works that have been used to represent, theorize, and promote different identity and nation-building discourses, where I see dance as the departing point for the debates around these works. Through the readings of 16th-century copper engravings by Theodore de Bry, Nellie Campobello’s poem Teatros, American reality tv show So You Think You Can Dance and Fernando Frías’ Ya no estoy aquí, I demonstrate how dance more than a social and artistic practice, is an institutionalized language structure that disrupts the hegemonic practices of reading. Dancing Language is an approach to decenter current reading practices and provides tools and vectors to analyze identity discourses regarding Latin American Cultural Studies.