5 concentrates on the conflicts between Hurston'sembodiments of the folk as diasporic and critical re-ception of her work, grounded in "paradigmatic no-tions of black primitivism" (xiii). Chapter 6 reprisesKraut's theoretical examination of Hurston's desig-nation as "choreographer" in the context of artisticcollaborations with Mura Dehn, Irene Lewisohn,Doris Humphrey, Ruth St. Denis, Helen Tamiris,and Irene Castle, all of whom were white. Finally,in a coda, Kraut projects her study past the 1930sto assess the potency and meanings of Hurston'schoreographic legacy in U.S. dance formations.

Throughout the book, what emerges is Kraut'sformulation of what she calls Hurston's "embodiedtheory of the folk." Kraut grounds this idea in Hur-ston's folkloric approach to her work for the dancestage and her intention to represent the AfricanAmerican experience in diasporic terms. Draw-ing on her anthropological research of Africanistvernacular dance formations from the black Southand the Bahamas, Hurston's choreography in the1930s "resituated African American cultural prod-ucts in relation to the material conditions of laborin a southern rural community, as well as to Africanroots and routes" (120). Kraut's claim adds dimen-sion to recent scholarship about Hurston's writingsin arguing that her danced embodiments "were notsynonymous with her textual representations" (120).To Kraut, Hurston's attention to the nuances as-sociated with live performance demonstrates hercommand of embodiment as a dynamic expressivemode. It also suggests the artist's knowledge thatsome of her ideas about the black folk experience,as being vital, syncretic, and diasporic, could bestbe conveyed as dance.

RebekahJ. KowalUniversity of Iowa

BELLS OF CHANGE: KATHAK DANCE,WOMEN AND MODERNITY IN INDIAby Pallabi Chakravorty. 2008. Calcutta: Seagull

Books. 216pp., illustrations, index. $29.95paper.

KATHAKA: THE TRADITION: FUSIONAND DIFFUSIONby Ranjana Srivastava. 2008. New Delhi: D. K.Print-world (P) Ltd. 268pp., illustrations, index.$yo.oo cloth.

Kathak, the classical dance of North India, hasmoved from intimate court performances tograndiose concert halls and the globalized world

of media and diaspora in less than one hundredyears. Through this journey, dance and dancers havenegotiated and struggled with processes of tradi-tion and transformation. These have been furthercomplicated with questions of authenticity and au-thority, including who has the right to define whatis or is not kathak, and who can or should speak forthe dancers themselves. These questions are oftenanswered through references to the dance's past,said to be rooted in the practices of male, Hindustorytellers. Yet, this history itself is controversial,not the least because it seems to privilege one voicewhile marginalizing others. Two recent books aboutkathak, dance scholar Ranjana Srivastava's Kathaka:The Tradition: Fusion and Diffusion, and visual an-thropologist Pallabi Chakravorty s Bells of Change:Kathak Dance, Women and Modernity, approachthese questions about the dance's past and presentin very different ways.

Central among kathak's marginalized voicesare those articulating the experiences of women.Chakravorty's Bells of Change purposely sets outto redress this imbalance. Identifying herself as an"insider's insider," Chakravorty revisits her ownexperiences as a middle-class Bengali women whostudied kathak dance in Kolkata during her youth.She merges her personal experience with the re-search tools and theoretical frameworks she learnedcompleting her doctorate in anthropology in theUnited States. This multifocal approach allows herto combine narrative and reflexive voices while sit-uating her study in anthropological, postcolonial,South Asian feminist, and Indian aesthetic theories.Using these various means, Chakravorty offers whatshe terms "an objective analysis of culture, powerand identity, in combination with subjective experi-ence and emotion" (2). More specifically, her aim isto provide "a self-conscious intervention to locate,identify and legitimize little known women dancersin Calcutta . . . [and to] restore them as subjects oftheir own history" (12).

Bells of Change contains six chapters and freelymingles theory, ethnography, and reflexivity. Chap-ter 1, "Locating Dance," functions as a frame forthe study, moving through several subsections thatclarify the book's theories and methodologies. Thesecond chapter, "From Nautch to Classical Kathak,"looks at the dance's history through a unique andrather controversial lens. Whereas standard his-tories of kathak outline a linear progression fromtemple to court to urban stage through the activi-ties of male hereditary dancers, Chakravorty plac-es kathak's history firmly in the salons of femalehereditary performers called "nautch" or "dancing

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girls" by the British. Her goal is to legitimize thelegacy of female dancers, "completely marginalizedin the official representation of classical Kathak"(27), and thus provide a foundation for the book'ssubsequent focus on female voice. The research hereis particularly solid and potentially of great interestto feminist and cultural historians, in addition todance scholars.

Chapter 3, "Public Modernity and ClassicalKathak," uses a largely theoretical frameworkto analyze kathak's intersections with moderni-ty, hegemony, globalization, and locality. In thenext chapter, "Women and Kathak in EverydayPractice," Chakravorty's personal voice returns asshe knits together experience from her own em-bodied practice, "life stories" of professional andamateur women dancers, Indian aesthetic theory,and Hindu mythology. She uses these disparatemeans to demonstrate convincingly how womenin India emerge as "actors who make choices" andas subjects of their own dance while inhabiting"the patriarchal domain" of the Indian classicaldance world (113-14). This is the book's stron-gest chapter, combining original fieldwork andindigenous theory with incisive critical thoughtregarding women's subjective and individual ac-tions within patriarchal social and artistic contexts.By comparison, chapter 5, "Tradition and Innova-tion," breaks less new ground. The first section,"Traditional Organization" returns to the dance'shistorical background to give a comparativelyuncritical and rather cursory overview of custom-ary teaching relationships, lineages of hereditarymale dancers, common dance items, and musicalinstruments. Arguably, of course, this is not whatthe book is about, and the chapter's second sec-tion, "Innovations and New Directions," returnsto the more compelling subject of women's rolesin contemporary creative dance.

The final chapter, "Sustainable Pluralism," thentackles the question of kathak dance's survival in theglobalized world, where "tradition is not favouredover modernity [nor] pursuit of excellence . . . overdemocracy" (171). Chakravorty further recommendsthat dance anthropologists adopt performativemodels of culture focusing on the subjectivity ofthe dancers themselves as agents. In her summary,she calls for "multi-sited fieldwork" in kathak re-search, a reorienting of focus from star performersto consumers, and, most of all, a recognition of thereality of kathak dance in local and everyday con-texts. Her final statements clarify her goal of shift-ing "the framework of classical Indian dance from[an] exotic... and Orientalist timeless tradition" to

one that embraces "relations of power in colonialand postcolonial India" (176).

While Chakravorty's intention in Bells of Changeis to uncover and disseminate a multifaceted frame-work for kathak dance, in particular one that in-cludes women and moves away from the widelycited monolithic narrative privileging a patriarchaland devotional tradition, Ranjana Srivastava's bookKathaka: The Tradition: Fusion and Diffusion setsout to prove something quite different. Motivatedperhaps by the rumblings about the contributionsof hereditary women (courtesans) and Muslims,Srivastava presents and defends a clearly stated ar-gument that "Kathaka as a traditional Indian art isdefinitely a legacy of the Indian cultural heritage"(ix) and that "like other Indian dances, it boastsof an ancient lineage" (1). Armed with a veritablearchive of historical writings, visual material, andcontemporary literature, Srivastava addresses thequestions of kathak's past and present by diggingdeeply into India's ancient history.

The results are mixed. Srivastava begins by ar-ticulating some of the research issues, pointingout that "[t]he study of the available literature onKathaka is not very rewarding [as]. . . scholars referto its origin by implication rather than analysis"(3). She then sets out to fill the gaps through anextensive and detailed investigation. The first twochapters comprise a survey and analysis of Sanskritdocuments and are followed by an original study ofsculpture and iconography. The two final chaptersthen aim to connect past with present; chapter 4,"Kathaka: A Classical Dance," provides an itemby item description of a typical performance, andchapter 5, "Kathaka: An Indigenous Indian Dance,"summarizes the evidence of the previous chapters.The book then ends with the somewhat surpris-ing assertion that "Lord Vishnu as the source ofboth classical and folk elements [in kathak dancehas] been established without a doubt" (249). Otherplaces in the narrative are also undermined by fan-ciful conclusions and other oddities. A number ofthe paintings that supposedly illustrate "kathak"postures and gestures do not depict dancers at allbut people in nonperformance contexts. The text'svoice and approach often shift quite suddenly toflowery rhetoric ("it is a story of love and tolerance,of people and a nation," [v]), mythological attribu-tions ("it is the dance of Vishnu himself," [63]), andaccusations of "damage" and "hazards" wrought onIndian culture by various invaders (4-5). There isalso an ahistorical undertone—curious in a bookabout history—as important dates are often miss-ing and information is presented out of sequence.

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Perhaps Srivastava assumes that her educatedreader will know the dates of her sources, but theresult is reminiscent of the "Orientalist timeless"past critiqued by Chakravorty.

Srivastava's goal is to uncover an ancient andindigenous kathak dance, but the result is in manyways a defense of the hegemonic, patriarchal kathakChakravorty seeks to re-evaluate. Yet, Srivastava isclearly knowledgeable, and thus seems to struggleoccasionally with some of the emergent contradic-tions in her research. Since she argues that kathakis Indian and devotional (Hindu), she needs eitherto explain or downplay the historical reality of theMuslim courts and musicians. She attempts to doboth, accusing the Muslims of damaging Hinduculture while simultaneously crediting a few keyrulers with the preservation of kathak dance. Her in-teresting hypothesis that the kathak dance we knowtoday took its final form in the court of Gwalior isundermined by a reluctance to discuss the contribu-tions of Muslim musicians to the court's musicallife. Furthermore, she barely touches on the role ofwomen, the central theme of Chakravorty's book.Only in chapter 4 does she address the historicalreality of courtesan dancers in a section subtitled"Grace and Ada of Kathaka Dancers." Her proseis odd here and forms a curious stream of sentencefragments that perhaps reflects her unease with thesubject. The topic is then closed abruptly with theassertion: "The author would like to point out thatthe qualities of grace and suppleness are inherentqualities in the [dances] which originated fromVishnu himself" (224).

It is tempting either to dismiss Kathaka: TheTradition as unscholarly due to its lack of criti-cal voice and frequent reference to deities, or toembrace it as more authentically "Indian" for thesame reasons. Outside the dance literature, how-ever, postcolonial, subaltern, and feminist areas ofIndian scholarship offer insightful and thought-provoking studies on a myriad of historical andcurrent issues. Chakravorty, defending her ownwork lest it be dismissed as too "Western," evokesAmartya Sen's multiple examples of indigenousrational and heterodox thinking in The Argumen-tative Indian (2005). It is a pity, therefore, thatSrivastava's work is not also more critical sinceshe has investigated a vast number of sources, andher theory regarding kathak's possible genesis inGwalior is worthy of serious consideration. Katha-ka: The Tradition is therefore a rich resource forkathak dance researchers, yet not extremely usefulas an introduction for nonspecialists or as a sourceof scholarly thought. Bells of Change, on the other

hand, imparts information, ideas, and social analy-sis that reach out beyond the immediate topic ofkathak and thus has much to offer the world ofdance scholarship.

Margaret E. WalkerQueen's University, Kingston, Ontario

Work Cited

Sen, Amartya. 2005. The Argumentative Indian: Writings onIndian Culture, History, and Identity. London: Penguin.

BALLROOM, BOOGIE, SHIMMY SHAM,SHAKE: A SOCIAL AND POPULAR DANCEREADERedited by Julie Malnig. 2oog. Urbana and Chicago:University of Illinois Press, xii + jjy pp., figures,notes, contributors, and index. $25.00paper.

A revelation occurred to me in the middle of read-ing Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A So-cial and Popular Dance Reader, thoughtfully editedby Julie Malnig. In his essay "Beyond the Hustle:1970s Social Dancing, Discotheque Culture and theEmergence of the Contemporary Club Dancer,"Tim Lawrence describes the way early disco danc-ers in New York's downtown nightclubs did awaywith the heterosexual, partner-based dancing tradi-tions that had dominated nightclub dance floors fordecades and replaced them with a style of celebra-tory group dancing that cultivated social cohesionthrough displays of individual virtuosity (199). InLawrence's description I immediately recognized ahistorical precedent for the kind of free form, groupdancing that goes on every weekend in cities acrossthe country, and hence for my own experiences ofcontemporary club going.

That our everyday embodied behaviors are shapedby specific historical conditions is one of the centrallessons of the "cultural turn" in scholarship sincethe 1980s. The essays included in this volume bringthat crucial insight to the study of North Americansocial dance—from the colonial period to the pres-ent—with appealing immediacy. Malnig's collectionoffers a wide-ranging historical overview of Ameri-can popular dance forms that will be an invaluableresource for students and scholars. But the book isjust as significant as a survey of the current "state ofthe field"of social dance studies. The strongest of theessays situate American dancing bodies within spe-cific material and social contexts and attend to thecomplex set of circumstances (economic, national,racial, sexual) through which they move. In so doing

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