Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2019

Publication Title

The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies

Abstract

Focusing on Carlos Acosta, the Cuban performer who became the first black principal dancer of London’s Royal Ballet, this chapter proposes that a new cosmopolitanism characterizes contemporary ballet. Such cosmopolitanism, informed by the institutionalization of diversity, is achieved through the presence of Latin American and Asian dancers in European and North American companies. Inclusion of the subaltern lends these institutions an image of multiculturalism and globality that increases their social capital. Yet, ballet’s new cosmopolitanism impels subaltern dancers to negotiate the fraught politics of moving from the periphery to the center, where they find themselves both valued and devalued for their race and nationality. This essay interrogates situations in which ballet’s emerging displays of diversity, while ostensibly fostering recognition of the subaltern, may prove cosmetic and not transcend coloniality. Problematic politics of desire underlie ballet’s new cosmopolitanism whenever subaltern bodies, as in Acosta’s case, are racialized, consumed for erotic pleasure, and fetishized as signifiers of diversity. Against a background of growing xenophobia and paired with this hedonistic consumption of the other, some forms of institutionalized diversity characterize a Marcusian regime of repressive tolerance in which multiculturalism is celebrated onstage while offstage the other is stigmatized as a burden to the nation.

First Page

298

Last Page

310

DOI

DOI: 10.4324/9781315306551-21

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Rights

Licensed to Smith College and distributed CC-BY under the Smith College Faculty Open Access Policy.

Comments

Peer reviewed accepted manuscript of chapter 21 of The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies, ed. Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett (New York: Routledge, 2019)

Included in

Dance Commons

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