Interrogating Histories and Historicizing Dance Studies
Deadline for submissions: April 1, 2023
“Always historicize.”
-Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (1981)
For this special issue, we turn our attention to what has been a longstanding focus for Dance Chronicle: dance historical scholarship. We invite a reconsideration of the relationship between dance studies and the discipline of history. How is it that dance scholars have come to practice history? How have disciplinary debates and developments within history intersected with how dance scholars think about historical processes? In drawing from history as a field, which methodologies and subfields have dance historians taken up, and which have been largely overlooked? While some dance scholars have received formal training as historians, others learn historical methods experientially when arriving into archives. This special issue invites dance scholars to revisit how we approach questions of historiography and to open up new directions for historical research in dance studies.
In reflecting on the politics of embedded in historical work, dance scholars have contested western supremacies, Eurocentrism, colonial complicities, and linear models of historical stages that allegedly advance toward greater human freedom. The field has grappled with the structural influences that shape whose documents appear and do not appear in archives. Dance researchers have addressed erasures, omissions, and obfuscations within historical accounts of dance practices. Building on this work, we invite reflections on methodologies and theoretical frameworks that can deepen dance historical work.
This special issue invites articles that explore what kinds of historical analyses dance historians take up and why. What do dance historians choose to examine and also not examine? How do we link events into narrative chains that structure a sense of the past? While the influence of cultural history is widespread within dance studies, other historical approaches receive less consideration, as in the case of world systems analysis, economic history, labor history, history from below, and people’s history, for example. We invite considerations of the wider historical imaginations that inform the methods that dance historians use.
This special issue will bring together scholarship that considers how dance scholars think about history, how we learn from history, and how history can help to sustain us. What does the cultivation of a historical sensibility offer to dance studies as a whole? What might be the critical and radical potential of historical work? We can take dance history as an archive of social conflicts, as they are perceived, negotiated, and remade over time. How do we want our work to participate in these ongoing social conflicts? We invite articles that reflect on methodological and theoretical currents can redirect our current and future research practices.
Potential topics include but are not limited to:
- Contested histories, lost histories
- Additive, corrective, and reparative histories
- Revision as a social and collective process
- The politics of historical research
- Dance history as tragedy; dance history as farce
- Dance and the philosophy of history
- Angels of (dance) history
- Dance and the longue durée
- Dance history and the temporal scale of the Anthropocene and the capitalocene
- Parallel histories produced by those who never professionalized (e.g., community historians, oral historians, indigenous traditions)
- Integrative reviews of particular concepts, debates, methods, or intellectual traditions
Submission Instructions: All manuscripts will receive double anonymous peer review. Manuscripts, 6,000–10,000 words in length, may be submitted any time before April 1, 2023. Dance Chronicle follows the Chicago Manual of Style. Please submit manuscripts through the Taylor & Francis Submission Portal.