ABSTRACT
This essay will be primarily devoted to a metacritical discussion of the relation of dance history to a larger, inter-or post-disciplinary movement within academia known as cultural studies.1 I will begin by framing the discussion as a choice between pursuing dance history as an autonomous discipline and seeking its greater integration into other intellectual and institutional sites. Although such binaries never do justice to the actual range of choices available, they do serve to demarcate the territory of an important debate within the field of dance history today. If, as I believe, something closer to the integration model is desirable, the role of dance in potentially receptive fields such as cultural studies should be examined. The second section of the essay offers an example of a research project that engages dance history in a way that refuses to acknowledge its autonomy as a field of study and that might be classified as “cultural studies” or perhaps “performance studies” in some versions of how those projects are currently understood. Those readers worried about the subordination of dance to other, nondance, intellectual agendas will probably find their fears confirmed at this point. The essay therefore ends with a consideration of this issue, approaching it through Jill Dolan’s recent critique of performance studies. My goal is not to insist on one correct relationship that dance historians ought to establish with interdisciplinary projects such as cultural studies, but to articulate issues raised by the possibility of such an engagement that seem important to current debates in dance history.
