Dancing on the Fault Lines of History: Selected Essays

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Dancing on the Fault Lines of History: Selected Essays

by Susan Manning

University of Michigan Press, 2025

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-0-472-07437-2

Paper: 978-0-472-05437-4

eISBN: 978-0-472-90484-6 (OA)

About the Book

Dancing on the Fault Lines of History collects essential essays by Susan Manning, one of the founders of critical dance studies, recounting her career writing and rewriting the history of modern dance. Three sets of keywords—gender and sexuality, whiteness and Blackness, nationality and globalization—illuminate modern dance histories from multiple angles, coming together in varied combinations, shifting positions from foreground to background. Among the many artists discussed are Isadora Duncan, Vaslav Nijinsky, Ted Shawn, Helen Tamiris, Katherine Dunham, José Limón, Pina Bausch, Reggie Wilson, and Nelisiwe Xaba. Calling for a comparative and transnational historiography, Manning ends with an extended case study of Mary Wigman’s multidimensional exchange with artists from Indonesia, India, China, Korea, and Japan.

Like the artists at the center of her research, Manning’s writing dances on the fault lines of history. Her introduction and annotations to the essays reflect on how and why these keywords became central to her research, revealing the autobiographical resonances of her scholarship as she confronts the cultural politics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

About the Author

Susan Manning is Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University.

Reviews

“Dancing on the Fault Lines of History is a primer on how to do dance history, a rare text as concerned with methods as with content, and with critiquing as well as celebrating the assumptions underlying the emergence of dance studies as a field of inquiry. The ‘keywords’ structure is compelling and highlights the interdisciplinarity of the field and its contributions to larger conversations across the humanities.”— Ariel Nereson, University of Buffalo—SUNY

“Dancing on the Fault Lines is a distinct and enduring invitation into the writing–and re-writing–of modern dance history.”

— Megan Mizanty, thINKingDANCE

"Dancing on the Fault Lines of History archives Manning’s contributions to the field and dynamically proposes directions for dance-historical futures. It also demonstrates various routes through which scholars’ work can develop over the course of a career. The volume is essential reading for graduate and undergraduate students, aspiring and established scholars, and all readers wishing to acquaint and familiarize themselves with histories of modern dance and the field of dance studies writ large."

— Hannah Kosstrin, Theatre Survey

“Dancing on the Fault Lines of History brings together into a single volume some of Susan Manning’s most influential essays. Spanning the full range of her career to date, this volume documents significant transitions in dance history scholarship and Manning’s interventions into the field through feminist historiography, critical race studies, and transnational studies. This volume maps some of the most significant transformations in the intellectual history of our discipline and Manning’s participation in their advancement. Insightful and generative, the volume dances between national and transnational histories with methodological and theoretical creativity and clarity.— Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, The University of Texas at Austin

“An intellectual history of the evolution of the field of dance studies by a seminal scholar whose concerns and interventions have played an important role in the development of the field and continued debates. . . . An excellent reference and easy-to-teach volume, including two never-before-published essays exciting in their critical methodologies and serving to advance the nascent field of transnational dance studies.”— Rebekah Kowal, University of Iowa

"[T]his collection of essays by one of the genre’s founders proves that modern dance is a subject of rich cultural meaning, thanks to her probing analyses."— Shannon Titas, Library Journal

"A book that spans thirty-eight years of writing by a single author is a rare opportunity to notice continuities and discontinues over the course of a career. This opportunity is even more valuable when the author is scholar Susan Manning, in a collection that includes her own comments on writing published decades ago. Dancing on the Fault Lines of History is both an archive of dance studies scholarship and a reflection of how interdisciplinary fields evolve."

— Kate Mattingly, Theatre Journal

"As an open-access book, Dancing on the Fault Lines offers clear, actionable approaches for scholars in adjacent fields who are considering writing about bodies in motion, spectatorship, and dance making. Altogether, the volume stands as a testament to the truth that dance can help us all to understand, traverse, and transcend the fault lines of history on which we live."

— Emily Hawk, Dance Chronicle