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.
Event Details
Date & Time: Tuesday, October 11, 2022 | 5:00-6:30 PM (PDT)
Location: Room 604 (seminar room), UBC Asian Centre, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver (map here)
Registration: Registration is required. Please RSVP with this link here.
This free event is co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies and the Department of Theatre & Film of the University of British Columbia.
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.