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28 Codex Curated and with an introduction by Dan Bacalzo An Interdisciplinary Review of Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces by SanSan Kwan (Oxford University Press, 2013) In Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces, SanSan Kwan utilizes her own bodily experience of walking, bicycling, driving, or otherwise moving through a city as the entry point into how she discusses the way diasporic identity is produced in relation to five cities with large ethnically Chinese populations at particular historical junctures in the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries. Combining this unconventional approach with detailed descriptions and interpretations of choreographed dances and other movement formations, Kwan reveals the multiple layers of meaning inherent in our experience of urban spaces. Though Kwan’s methodology is dependent on her own subjective experience, this does not limit her ability to rigorously examine a wealth of social, historical, political, and aesthetic material. The book is an outstanding example of interdisciplinary scholarship, and so for this review, I invited scholars from five different fields to give their take on how Kwan’s work might speak to their individual areas of specialization. Asian studies scholar Mark Bender laments the growing obsolescence of traditional Chinese dramatic forms, while noting how several of the choreographed pieces that Kwan examines are hybrid creations that draw on material such as traditional Chinese myths. Josephine Lee, writing from the viewpoint of Asian American studies, focuses on the complexities of contemporary identity formation as revealed by Kwan’s attention to embodied motion. Charles Starks, an urban studies specialist, zeroes Codex 29 in on Kwan’s discussion of navigating particular cities and makes suggestions for how she could have made this approach even more effective. LaRonika Thomas, who engages with the work from the perspective of performance studies, takes note of how Kwan describes the performance of “Chineseness” through both the creation of meaning by individual bodies in various places and the way particular spaces choreograph bodies . Ying Zhu contemplates how Kwan’s work intervenes in a broadening of the field of dance studies through the author’s attention to her own body’s kinesthetic response to different cities. Of these cities, only Shanghai is located in mainland China. Hong Kong and Taipei both have complex histories that tie them to the mainland while also keeping them separate, which Kwan unpacks as part of her study. The remaining two cities—New York and Los Angeles—are located within the United States and are not predominantly Chinese but have thriving Chinatowns. Kwan invokes sociologist Michel Laguerre’s (2000) concept of a global ethnopolis to argue for their inclusion, defining that term as “an ethnic neighborhood contained within a larger metropolis that, because of its intrinsically global history, is active in transnational , border-crossing activities that link it to sites outside the city and the country of which it is a part” (109). Kwan’s goal here is to separate the concept of “Chineseness” from a specific nationality. She is also not interested in defining who gets to count as “Chinese,” instead focusing on how community identity is forged within these varied urban spaces. Dan Bacalzo is assistant professor of theater at Florida Gulf Coast University and worked for more than fifteen years as a theater editor and critic in New York City. 6 Work Cited Laguerre, Michel S. 2000. The Global Ethnopolis: Chinatown, Japantown, and Manilatown in American Society. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Asian Studies Perspective Mark Bender In the 1990s, one could ride a bike along canals lined with whitewashed cottages in Lower Yangzi cities and catch bits and pieces of classic love stories told by Suzhou pingtan storytellers via radio. As related in Kinesthetic City, the urbanscape of this region has changed dramatically in 30 Codex the last twenty years, and experiences embodied by persons engaging the streets and buildings and traffic and crowds have drifted dramatically away from earlier moments. More than three hundred unique styles of storytelling and dramatic performance were once popular in local areas all across China but are now either obsolescent or existent only in hybrid formats in tourist venues or on television or computer screens. Kinesthetic City documents several...
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