The Sentient Archive

The Sentient Archive gathers the work of scholars and practitioners in dance, performance, science, and the visual arts. Its twenty-eight rich and challenging essays cross boundaries within and between disciplines, and illustrate how the body serves as a repository for knowledge. Contributors include Nancy Goldner, Marcia B. Siegel, Jenn Joy, Alain Platel, Catherine J. Stevens, Meg Stuart, André Lepecki, Ralph Lemon, and other notable scholars and artists. Hardcover is un-jacketed.

A kaleidoscopic anthology of essays published by Catapult magazine about the stories our bodies tell, and how we move within—and against—expectations of race, gender, health, and ability Bodies are serious, irreverent, sexy, fragile, strong, political, and inseparable from our experiences and identities as human beings. Pushing the dialogue and confronting monolithic myths, this collection of essays tackles topics like weight, disability, desire, fertility, illness, and the embodied experience of race in deep, challenging ways. Selected from the archives of Catapult magazine, the essays in Body Language affirm and challenge the personal and political conversations around human bodies from the perspectives of thirty writers diverse in race, age, gender, size, sexuality, health, ability, geography, and class—a brilliant group probing and speaking their own truths about their bodies and identities, refusing to submit to others’ expectations about how their bodies should look, function, and behave. Covering a wide range of experiences—from art modeling as a Black woman to nostalgia for a brutalizing high school sport, from the frightening upheaval of cancer diagnoses to the small beauties of funeral sex—this collection is intelligent, sensitive, and unflinchingly candid. Through the power of personal narratives, as told by writers at all stages of their careers, Body Language reflects the many ways in which we understand and inhabit our bodies. Featuring essays by A.E. Osworth, Andrea Ruggirello, Aricka Foreman, Austin Gilkeson, Bassey Ikpi, Bryan Washington, Callum Angus, Destiny O. Birdsong, Eloghosa Osunde, Forsyth Harmon, Gabrielle Bellot, Haley Houseman, Hannah Walhout, Jenny Tinghui Zhang, Jess Zimmerman, Kaila Philo, Karissa Chen, Kayla Whaley, Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Marcos Gonsalez, Marisa Crane, Melissa Hung, Natalie Lima, Nina Riggs, Rachel Charlene Lewis, Ross Showalter, s.e. smith, Sarah McEachern, Taylor Harris, and Toni Jensen.

Through a post-1968 perspective on the past 50 years, Performing Memory brings together case studies on new developments in the relationship between politics and visual representation—including the histories of dance, theatre, political performance and cinema—and investigates how they relate to the interlinked concepts of visuality, corporeality and mobility. Using a collective transdisciplinary attitude from within historical disciplines, and looking across to artistic fields, this volume demonstrates that memory is not merely a recollection of experience but an interactive process, in which the body, mobile and constrained, is both a point of departure and reference.

(Un)sighted Archives of Migration acknowledges that migration is a fundamental part of social practice and collective memory. However, archives that have undergone migration or were established by individuals or communities with migration experience gain little public and institutional attention. This volume with its transversal perspective across the fields of art, anthropology and social activism, offers new perspectives on the enormous potential of migratory archives as resourceful spaces for encounter and remembrance, and as a contribution to the plural collective memories and identities of post-migratory societies. Emphasizing the archival agency by migrants, the chapters raise new questions with regard to the multi-directional, collaborative forms of knowledge production within and beyond an archive, its boundaries, and its materiality. Focusing on the complexities of power relations, spatial and temporal dynamics, media practices, and meaning production involved in the making, maintenance, viewing, appropriation, destruction and loss of such archives, the chapters contribute to a critical methodological and theoretical discussion about (un)sighted archives as spaces of encounter and resistance in a liminal zone of visibility and invisibility. This book was originally published as a special issue of Visual Anthropology.

What is »materiality« in dance and performance? What role does »the material« play in the formation for the cultural memory of ephemeral arts? The contributors to this volume examine concepts of materiality in dance and performance, the use of materials in artistic practices and the role of social media in changing the perception of time-based artefacts. The volume shows how the focus on materiality transforms contemporary artistic work and challenges established concepts of dance and performance research.

This innovative book examines the changing relationship between communities, citizens and the notion of the archive. Archives have traditionally been understood as repositories of knowledge and experience, remote from the ordinary people who fund and populate them, however digital resources have led to a growing plurality of archives and the practices associated with collecting and curating. This book uses a broad range of case studies which place communities at the heart of this exciting development, to illustrate how their experiences are central to our understanding of this new terrain which challenges traditional histories and the control of knowledge and power.

In a ‘post-everything’ world, we have felt more pain than happiness in building and tampering with borders. The term ‘border’ has been expanded to become a ploy for grim, chauvinistic, self-flattery, and ultra-nationalist bigotry. We have also faced notorious coverage of the ‘border’ in the media worldwide, and its diverse forms have been extensively deployed in cinema and literature. Centering on a wide range of literary and cinematic genres, the contributors to this volume explore and explain distinct theoretical and scholarly arguments to promote research on literary, linguistic, and media representations of the word ‘border.’

The vital role of dance in enacting the embodied experiences of Indigenous peoples In Dancing Indigenous Worlds, Jacqueline Shea Murphy brings contemporary Indigenous dance makers into the spotlight, putting critical dance studies and Indigenous studies in conversation with one another in fresh and exciting new ways. Exploring Indigenous dance from North America and Aotearoa (New Zealand), she shows how dance artists communicate Indigenous ways of being, as well as generate a political force, engaging Indigenous understandings and histories. Following specific dance works over time, Shea Murphy interweaves analysis, personal narrative, and written contributions from multiple dance artists, demonstrating dance’s crucial work in asserting and enacting Indigenous worldviews and the embodied experiences of Indigenous peoples. As Shea Murphy asserts, these dance-making practices can not only disrupt the structures that European colonization feeds upon and strives to maintain, but they can also recalibrate contemporary dance. Based on more than twenty years of relationship building and research, Shea Murphy’s work contributes to growing, and largely underreported, discourses on decolonizing dance studies, and the geopolitical, gendered, racial, and relational meanings that dance theorizes and negotiates. She also includes discussions about the ethics of writing about Indigenous knowledge and peoples as a non-Indigenous scholar, and models approaches for doing so within structures of ongoing reciprocal, respectful, responsible action.