The medium of dance has been overlooked by Latin Americanists and Hispanists. Many scholars working in these fields have contributed to redefine the field of Hispanism as an “expanded field” (Krauss, 1979) through their commitment to bringing new objects or topics of study excluded from the canon and new methods of critical analysis to this field, thereby radically redefining and opening what was a highly traditional discipline. Yet, dance remains largely marginalized. It has been traditionally the ephemerality or non-reproducibility of dance that has been seen as the obstacle to being considered a legitimate object of research. In this seminar, we aim to explore how theory can be inscribed in or derived from dance/embodied practices. The latter do not function as instantiations of theory. Instead, we “think through/with” rather than “think about” dance/embodied practices. Therefore, we “think through/with” dance/embodied practices to propose that theoretical thinking functions less as a “master discourse” than as an “available discourse” that enables us to articulate the creative process underpinning dance/embodied practices, and dance/embodied practices simultaneously function as a source of conceptual/theoretical inspiration. We understand dance/embodied practices as theoretical texts themselves. Conceptualizing dance/embodied practices as “theoretical texts” enables us to articulate and reformulate wider conceptual concerns, thus engaging with theoretical questions relating more directly to dance, but that can also be very useful for thinking theoretically and in a transdisciplinary manner about other cultural practices. 

To explore and reflect on the specificity and transdisciplinary nature of dance in Latin American and Iberian cultural studies, we welcome proposals for papers (200-250 words) on the following and all related topics: the intersection of dance with cinema, theater, literature, or visual culture; the intersection of critical dance studies with the fields of philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, politics, aesthetics, ethics, feminist, or queer theory. We welcome papers that foreground the imbrication of creative experimentation and theoretical reflection. This seminar particularly welcomes papers that embrace an expansive definition of dance in relation to other cultural practices or displace the choreographic element of the performative event to other places (ie the cinematic camera or the kinesthetic responses on the part of readers/spectators). This seminar also invites papers that explore how the material and discursive conditions of the body and embodiment figure in (re)presentation, the bodily and somatic conditions of writing, or the potential or the failure of language to account for bodily and somatic experiences. For further information contact: Miguel Caballero ([email protected]) and Julian Gutierrez ([email protected])