Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia is a collection of sixteen essays that explore dance, broadly defined, throughout East Asia. Editors Katherine Mezur and Emily Wilcox bring us the first book-length collection of Anglophone essays that aim to “radically contextualize” the various dance practices of East Asia, from tracing the “mobile dancer” of imperial China, to contemporary theater performances in Korea and duets with robots in Taiwan (25). Major contributions of this publication are highlighted below while also addressing the productive tension it presents for the advancement of East Asian authorship in US dance studies. The question of inclusion is raised regarding the visibility of ethnic East Asian editors in the curating of Anglophone anthologies that aim to justly represent the diverse regions and dance practices of East Asia within a traditionally Western-centric canon, an endeavor which Mezur and Wilcox have so nobly undertaken here.

This collection makes five excellent contributions to the field of dance studies. First, dance is broadly defined in two categories beginning with “art dance,” which governs all dance devised for the stage. Dance is also conceptualized as private entertainment, tourist performances, public protests, and all other movement forms distinct from the previous category. This capacious understanding of dance engages the various ways that bodies move in, through, and beyond geographies of East Asia. Second, this anthology identifies the wealth of interdisciplinarity inherent to dance studies by integrating scholarship that bridges such areas as cultural studies, history, and geography, drawing on material and symbolic analyses of what it means to dance East Asia. Third, a methodology of “corporeal politics” is advanced to prioritize the body, acknowledging the artist's physical body in motion as the basis from which expression and meaning is produced and negotiated. A theory of corporeal politics is emphasized to investigate how bodies simultaneously reinforce and transcend static notions of belonging determined by citizenship, class, race, nation, gender, and sexuality. Fourth, an unorthodox approach to the definition of body includes the anthropomorphized robot. Fifth, delightful insight is offered from formerly active performing and choreographing dance scholar, Ting-Ting Chang, to whom this anthology is posthumously dedicated. Featuring an embodied researcher helps push forth an anti-Orientalist discourse that mobilizes the recontextualization of East Asia from the perspective of ethnic East Asian dance scholars working and dancing across perceived disciplines and boundaries.

In these ways, the editors object to a universal view of East Asia, resist a monolithic definition of its dance, and more broadly, refuse a singular definition of dance. Wilcox's introduction extends a critique of whiteness in US dance studies, arguing that Western-centric and racist ideologies of Orientalism obscure vital debates and ongoing progress by ethnic East Asian scholars in academia. The experiences of East Asian artists are prioritized through intimate encounters via interviews, essays, and memoirs. An open-access platform invites readers to engage with relevant videos, photos, and links to external sources; the digital platform choreographs a space for the East Asian performing body beyond the thirty-two print photographs and illustrations included in the pages. This addition invites the active participation of the reader to become a cochoreographer that brings to life the East Asian dancing archive.

Wilcox provides a thorough historical explanation of the three meanings of East Asia, first describing China's predominance of cultural influence in the region. Next, East Asia operated as a form of self-designation amidst European colonialism, and, finally, the term served US government expansion in global anti-communist propaganda post–World War II. Wilcox, a Sinologist and former student of Chinese dance, also furnishes a detailed justification for the anti-Orientalist framework, identifying the need for East Asian dance practitioners to be presented as active agents “who articulate their own ideas and create new artistic forms relevant to their contemporary lives” (9).

In part 1, “Contested Genealogies,” the case studies situated at the turn of the twentieth century focus on Chinese dance in Imperial China, and Japanese and Chinese “danced” adaptations of opera as reflecting transnational cultural exchange and the realities and resistance to colonialism. Part 2, “Decolonizing Migration,” expands the geographic boundaries of East Asia by examining the in/out flow of bodies and dance cultures from Japan and Korea to Europe in the twentieth century. Part 3 is entitled “Militarization and Empire” and concerns the Japanese Empire post–World War II and the role of dance as both building and deconstructing militarized cultures. Part 4, “Socialist Aesthetics,” examines the production and evolution of socialist dance culture in North Korea and the People's Republic of China during the mid-twentieth century. One chapter in particular underscores one of the ways in which Mezur and Wilcox's volume is successful in tracking a twenty-first-century East Asian “mobile dancer.”

Part 4 contains an engaging contribution from formerly active performing and choreographing dance artist, Ting-Ting Chang. Including the research and lived experience of an East Asian dance practitioner is important because it is the stated imperative of the editors to challenge the whiteness of US dance studies and the idea that East Asian dance “exists in an exotic and distant vacuum” (11). The very aspect of Chang's mobilities as a researcher, performer, and choreographer in a visibly marked body that kinesthetically generates a liquid definition of East Asia beyond its geographical and cultural spheres is paramount to the mission of this collection and a testament to the editorial commitment to creating spatial justice for the inclusion of embodied research in this text.

Chang's contribution is titled “Negotiating Chinese Identity through a Double-Minority Voice and the Female Dancing Body: Yang Liping's Spirit of the Peacock and Beyond.” It examines how, over the course of a decade, Liping, an ethnic minority dancer from southwest China, adapted a Dai ethnic minority folk dance into an internationally circulating mass-media stage choreography. Yang was the first artist from Mainland China to visit Taiwan since 1949. The peacock dance choreography not only reestablished official communication between Mainland China and Taiwan but also carried out the Chinese government's mission to export a nationalist ideology. This chapter exemplifies how this collection successfully performs a fluid catalogue of East Asia that presents the problematics of appropriation and dance authorship while reflecting on the productive mobilities that dance crossings provide for the visibility, acknowledgement, and representation of the East Asian dancing body. Part 5, “Collective Technologies,” presents more recent investigations into collective choreographies that engage with social issues, including religious dance in resistance to the emergence of LGBTQ+ identity in Korea, and dance collaborations with anthropocentric robots in Taiwan in the twenty-first century.

Finally, co-editor Mezur provides the coda that concerns dance as a form of progressive activism. Mezur reiterates the body's role in processes of militarization and agency; she waxes poetic a call to action for readers to apprehend the lush terrain of “danced” activism as an ongoing legacy of East Asian dancers, directors, choreographers, and dance scholars. This work would be of interest to those working in Asian studies, dance studies, diaspora and global studies, LGBQT+ and gender studies, among others.

Mezur and Wilcox excel at a deft and uncluttered collection of diverse regional views of East Asia through the deployment of scholarly writing that is clear, concise, and directive. This collection offers the field of dance studies its first Anglophone, historical canon of East Asian dance as a way to radicalize whiteness in US dance studies. The editors’ earnest desire to showcase ethnic East Asian scholars and performers is apparent here; they gather various ethnic East Asian perspectives from dance administrators to those in dramaturgy, and academic scholars who have had dance training. The bricolage of views reflects diversity in professional and academic specializations, and Wilcox and Mezur's unique textual choreography of the East Asian body negotiates a space for the East Asian artist. The only critique concerns the inclusion of an ethnic East Asian editor in the collection of such a valuable and innovative publication. How might this text be different if an East Asian editor were involved? Does it matter? How do the tensions of choreographing authorship of the East Asian body inform the ways that we understand sharing power, explicit acknowledgement, and the dicey process of intercultural exchange intrinsic to compiling an anthology that seeks redistributive justice in dance studies? Collections such as Yutian Wong's Contemporary Directions in Asian American Dance (Reference Wong2018) prioritize autoethnographic narratives that fundamentally reject chronology and canon; Wong's pivot away from canonical structure meets the Asian body in a different way to provoke and occupy spaces in performance that reject temporal taxonomies. But will the East Asian dancing body ever be at a place to make such a move to reject the fundamental structure of the historical canon? Maybe not. But Mezur and Wilcox have bravely provided a starting point for re-envisioning this cultural crossing.