PUBLIC LECTURE: “Performing Solidarities: ‘Third World’ Alliance as Choreographic Practice in Mao-Era China”
Professor Emily Wilcox (College of William & Mary)
5:00-6:30pm, Tuesday, October 11, 2022
Room 604, UBC Asian Centre (1871 West Mall, Vancouver, BC)
This free event is co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies and the Department of Theatre & Film of the University of British Columbia.
Event details and registration:
Lecture description:
The concept of ‘Third World’ unity emerged in the mid-twentieth century as a way of forging political alliances and solidarities among Asian, African, and Latin American people, by focusing on shared experiences of colonial history, racism, and decolonial struggle and imagining possibilities for global interaction beyond the bipolar Cold War framework.
In this talk, Wilcox explores uses of performance, especially dance, to build and enact transnational alliances across differences. Through examples such as a 1964 Chinese dance drama about the US Civil Rights Movement and the Asia-Africa-Latin America programs of China’s Oriental Song and Dance Ensemble (est. 1962), Wilcox asks what it meant to choreograph alliances with transnational communities in Mao-era China.
About the speaker:
Emily Wilcox is Associate Professor and Director of Chinese Studies at William & Mary. Wilcox’s first book, Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy (University of California Press, 2018), won the 2019 de la Torre Bueno Prize© from the Dance Studies Association. Wilcox is co-editor of Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia (University of Michigan Press, 2020) and co-creator of the University of Michigan Chinese Dance Collection.
Wilcox is a 2021-2023 Public Intellectuals Program Fellow at the National Committee on US-China Relations and a recipient of a 2022 Scholar Grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. Her new co-edited collection, Teaching Film from the People’s Republic of China, is forthcoming from the Modern Language Association Options for Teaching series.