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In Caribbean and Atlantic Diaspora Dance: Igniting Citizenship, Yvonne Daniel provides a sweeping cultural and historical examination of Diaspora dance genres. Daniel investigates social dances brought to the islands by Europeans and Africans, including quadrilles and drum/dances as well as popular dances that followed, such as Carnival parading, Pan-Caribbean danzas, rumba, merengue, mambo, reggae, and zouk. She reviews sacred dance and closely documents combat dances, such as Martinican ladja, Trinidadian kalinda, and Cuban juego de maní. In drawing on scores of performers and consultants from the region as well as on her own professional dance experience and acumen, Daniel adeptly places Caribbean dance in the context of cultural and economic globalization, connecting local practices to transnational and global processes and emphasizing the important role of dance in critical regional tourism. Throughout, Daniel reveals impromptu and long-lasting Diaspora communities of participating dancers and musicians.

This article analyzes two contemporary pieces, Faustin Linyekula's La Création du Monde 1923–2012 and Vera Mantero's A mysterious thing said e. e. Cummings, which respond to dance productions presented in Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century by criticizing their “negrophilic” attitude. The article juxtaposes the analysis of these two contemporary pieces with rereadings of the historical choreographies/events of the 1920s to which they refer, namely, Les Ballets Suédois's La Création du Monde (1923) and Josephine Baker's performances. Theoretically revisiting historical works that developed within such a “negrophilic” framework alongside contemporary pieces relating to them can be taken as attacking this very framework, trying to “undo” the Eurocentrism inherent in its cannibalistic processes. Such a perspective may allow for the acknowledgement of plural, multiple views of Africanistic presences in an otherwise “negrophilic” context.

The focus of this article is the transformation of ragtime dancing into modern social dance by hundreds of teachers, writers and performers working in an emerging dance industry, rooted in New York City. Based on dance manuals and magazines of the period, I argue that dance professionals worked collectively to create new products (i.e. dances) that could more easily be mass-produced and marketed. Importantly, they called their efforts a 'refinement' of ragtime and justified their work through discourses of artistry and morality. Upon closer examination, however, the changes they made to the dances indicate that artistry and morality were actually achieved by removing the black associations of ragtime dancing and instead, using modern social dance to construct an idealized white racial identity.

Mary Wigman (1886-1973) visited London on two occasions in order to perform her solo work. These fleeting visits act as the backdrop to an essay on the reception of her dance in Britain. In both dance composition and in spectatorship Wigman encouraged a process of self-enquiry. This new approach challenged prevailing cultural expectations in Britain concerning the nature of dance performance. Wigman returned to Germany having made little overt impact on the dance culture in Britain. But the possibility remains that her visits influenced the development of dance in a more oblique way by acting as a stimulus to the inter-war drive to establish a British ballet tradition.

Reconstructing and citing historical dance pieces as well as making the dance stage a site for archiving dance performatively have become major trends in contemporary dance (as this issue of DRJ demonstrates). Contemporary choreographers have left behind the incessant striving to create new movements and instead are engaging in dialogue with the past. While the “avant-garde” in Western stage dance was once perceived as embodying the “new” and was believed to be different from dance forms considered marked by tradition, these demarcations are now being challenged by both dance historians and artists (Franko and Richards 2000; Burt 2003). What's more, reenactments increasingly destabilize distinctions between the artistic and academic fields as they highlight the performative nature of “doing history” and present modes of research that involve lectures, texts, and documentation in a stage setting. As such, the past is a playground for the present—a notion of history that is also encouraged academically by a critical historiography that reflects on the narrative structures implicit in doing dance history (White 1990; Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer 1999). History as well as the act of memory are now considered a process that “constitutes, stages, re-stages, and constantly modifies its object while simultaneously creating new models and media of commemorating” (Fischer-Lichte and Lehnert 2000, 14; my translation).

Leslie Burrowes (1908-1985) was the first British dancer to receive the full diploma of the Wigman School in Dresden and subsequently became Wigman's official UK representative. The letters she wrote to her benefactor, Dorothy Elmhirst, with the addition of my commentary and annotations, provide a lens through which to view the School as she experienced it. Her return to London brought her into a quite different cultural environment. I argue that she energetically launched her career, performing and teaching in her new style and contesting what she considered to be false charges against modern dance. But it appears that, by the end of this period, she had adjusted her expectations, away from solo theatrical recitals (in the Wigman mode) and more towards the education of children and students, and a small-scale but intense programme centred on her home studio.

This article considers ragtime dancing within the contexts of American minstrelsy, African American migration, and European immigration. Based on archival research and drawing upon contemporary minstrelsy scholarship, I argue that ragtime dancing of the early twentieth century can be understood as a form of participatory minstrelsy that allowed dancers to embody markers of \"blackness.\" I further suggest that, as they danced \"black\" to ragtime music, European immigrant youths distanced themselves from African Americans and facilitated their own strategic assimilation as Americans.