In September 2020, ALC Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Studies Emily Wilcox published her second book, Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia (co-edited with Katherine Mezur). The edited collection is published by the University of Michigan Press and is part of the Dance Studies Association's “Studies in Dance History” series. With essays by leading scholars of dance and performance studies, history, and literary studies in East Asia and North America, Corporeal Politics is the first academic book in English to investigate the nexus of dance and politics across the East Asia region. Its sixteen essays examine a wide range of issues, including social mobility, international migration, Japanese colonialism, socialist aesthetics, gender and sexuality, and digital technology as they relate to dance and embodied performance. Countering common narratives of dance history that emphasize the US and Europe as centers of origin and innovation, Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia highlights transnational and intercultural trajectories in global dance developments and centers artists from East Asia as important creators and theorists in the performing arts.
The book is based on the international conference "Dancing East Asia: Critical Choreographies and Their Corporeal Politics" held at the University of Michigan Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies in April 2017. It follows Wilcox's first book Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy, published Open Access by the University of California Press in 2018, which won the 2019 de la Torre Bueno Prize® from the Dance Studies Association.
