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2010/1 Module Catalogue
 Module Code: DANM001 Module Title: CULTURE, POWER AND DIFFERENCE
Module Provider: Dance,Film & Theatre Short Name: CP & D
Level: M Module Co-ordinator: FENSHAM RS Prof (Dnc Flm Thtr)
Number of credits: 30 Number of ECTS credits: 15
 
Module Availability
Spring Semester
Assessment Pattern
Components of Assessment
Method(s)
Percentage weighting
Coursework
6000 word essay
100%
Module Overview
Prerequisites/Co-requisites
Module Aims
  • To deepen knowledge and understanding of ‘culture’ as a product of political circumstances, including global discrepancies in power.
  • To stimulate debate around the political implications of choreography, as identified in current dance scholarship.
  • To extend understanding of national and global identities as addressed in choreographic practice.
  • To identify critical frameworks for understanding the historical, political, and economic issues that inform national and global identities in dance.
Learning Outcomes
Knowledge and Understanding:
  • An advanced understanding of the contingent and constructed nature of cultural identities.
  • An enhanced critical awareness of the challenge posed to traditional scholarship by postcolonial nationalism and globalisation.
  • A critical engagement with current theories of culture and national identity as articulated not only in dance studies but also in postcolonial, transnational, and diaspora studies.
  • An advanced understanding of how specific choreographies can articulate and challenge national identities.
  • An indepth awareness of how these practices negotiate other economic, political and social factors.
Cognitive/Intellectual Skills:
  • Ability to engage critically with theories of ‘cultural’ and ‘national’ difference.
  • Ability to critique existing arguments through oral and written means. Ability to understand and debate the relevance of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of dance.
  • Ability to apply theories in an original and independent way.
  • Ability to synthesise theories from a wide range of disciplines.
  • Ability to reflect upon and debate the scholarly and political implications of different choreographic and discursive strategies.
Practical/Key Skills:
  • Interact with a range of resources for the study of nationality and globality, especially but not exclusively in dance.
  • Ability to generate independent and original arguments based on these resources.
  • Ability to locate, select and organise research materials independently.
  • Ability to undertake self-directed research on a specific dance example.
  • Ability to debate ideas in a seminar format.
  • The development of a scholarly vocabulary for observing and analysing ideas. Derive and apply these ideas to specific dance examples.
Module Content
  • The module examines a range of dance practices that have been represented as ‘cultural’ forms, situating their ‘cultural’ identity in relation to colonialism, nationalism, and to global political and economic forces as well as in relation to their historical context.
  • The module investigates different theoretical models deployed by scholars of colonialism, nationalism, and postcolonial identity and by those who examine such paradigms in relation to dance. The module brings together interdisciplinary approaches from performance studies, dance studies, history, and feminist theory.
Methods of Teaching/Learning

Lecture, video analysis, and group discussion.

Selected Texts/Journals
Required reading:
 
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York : Verso, 1991.
 
Browning, Barbara. Samba: Resistance in Motion.  Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.
 
Manning, Susan. Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of MaryWigman. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993.
 
O’Shea, Janet. 2003. “At Home in the World? The Bharata Natyam Dancer as Transnational Interpreter.” The Drama Review. 47 (1) (T177), 2003, pp 176-186.
 
Savigliano, Marta. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion.  Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford : Westview Press, 1995.
 
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York : Vintage Books, 1979.
 
Recommended reading:
Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: a Derivative Discourse.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
 
Chakravorty, Pallabi. Dance, Hegemony, and Nation: The Construction of Classical Indian Dance.  South Asia , XXI (2), 1986, pp 107-120.
 
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism.  London : Routledge, 1998.
 
Trinh, T. Minh-Ha. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Last Updated

08.01.07