Don’t Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture PDF
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Don’t Act, Just Dance Don’t Act, Just Dance The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture CATHERINE GUNTHER KODAT Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress A British Cataloging- in- Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2015 by Catherine Gunther Kodat All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permis- sion from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America For Alex . . . more, more, every day more . . . Contents Preface ix Part I Rethinking Cold War Culture 1 Combat Cultural 1 2 History: From the WPA to the NEA (through the CIA) 15 3 Theory: Adorno and Rancière (Abstraction, Modernism, Gender, Sexuality) 34 4 Dancing: “Don’t Act, Just Dance” 59 Part II Rereading Cold War Culture 5 Figures in the Carpet: Balanchine, Cunningham, “Persia” 71 6 Spartacus 125 7 From Art As Diplomacy to Diplomacy As Art: The Red Detachment of Nixon in China 151 Notes 159 Bibliography 187 Index 203 vii Preface For three days in April 1996, a group of historians and literary scholars gath- ered in Toledo for a conference on U.S. politics and culture during the cold war. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the election of Boris Yeltsin: these were relatively recent events, and there was exhilaration in the air, the sense that a still- emerging field within American Studies— cold war cultural studies— was about to expand in exciting new directions. Most of the participants were tenured senior professors, several from large prestigious universities. I was in the second semester of my first year of full- time teach- ing at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d gotten into the conference by mistake. It wasn’t only my lack of seniority and institutional clout that had me worried. A paper on The Nutcracker? What had I been thinking? Certainly I believed I had something to say that was worth hearing. But could the ballet hold its own among such heavy- hitters as Silent Spring, Alfred Hitchcock, Invisible Man, the Venona Project, and George F. Kennan’s “Long Telegram”? And not just this ballet— any ballet. To be sure, dance history is an acknowledged discipline, and the more theoretically inflected field of dance studies had been on the rise since the mid- 1980s. Still, despite a reputation for being uniquely open to fresh sub- jects and interdisciplinary study, American Studies was not exactly humming with dance- related scholarship. I was not sure why, though I had some ideas. Happily, however, my paper got a friendly hearing— and folks weren’t just being polite.1 Maybe, I began to hope, dance was on the way toward drawing the serious scholarly attention it so obviously deserved. ix x • Preface Time has shown that this hope was well- founded: during the past decade scholarly publication in dance has steadily, if slowly, risen, winning the art form (and its academic study) long- overdue respect. Yet a post- conference encoun- ter in the airport tempered the optimism of the moment. My interlocutor was a well- known Marxist literary scholar whose brilliant critical interrogations of canon formation championed overlooked or disdained literary works. I was star- struck and flattered that he wanted to chat. After we exchanged a few pleasantries and agreed on the overall excellence of the conference, he turned to me with mild incredulity: “You’re really interested in ballet?” “Oh, yes,” I replied. He shook his head. “You know, I hate ballet. It’s so . . . so. . . .” He paused, fixing me with what Henry James might have called a speaking look. “So fake,” he concluded. He waved his hand dismissively. “So elitist,” he added. “You know what I mean?” I was pretty sure I did know what he meant— though I’m not sure that he knew. For his words and tone put me in mind of a passage I had recently come across in Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, in which the sociologist notes, almost in passing, why men with a certain class consciousness deem particular forms of “aesthetic refinement” unacceptable. This is not only because aesthetic refinement, particularly as regards clothing or cosmetics, is reserved for women or because it is more or less clearly associated with dispositions and manners seen as characteristic of the bourgeoisie (“airs and graces,” “la- di- da,” etc.) or of those who are willing to submit to bourgeois demands so as to win acceptance, of which the “toadies,” “lick- spittles,” and “pansies” of everyday invective represent the limit. It is also because a surrender to demands perceived as simultaneously feminine and bourgeois appears as the index of a dual repudiation of virility (382).2 While not explicitly condemning the ballet as the exclusive preserve of danc- ing fairies and imperiled princesses (of whatever sex), my interlocutor’s quick summary of the form as a pretentious celebration of artifice—s o fake, so elitist; in other words, so “simultaneously feminine and bourgeois”— was only a step away from Bourdieu’s toad- and pansy- filled landscape. However inadvertently or unconsciously, his closing remark asked exactly the question about ballet that, as a good leftist, he never would have uttered directly. What he did say seemed plain enough: as a “fake” and “elitist” cultural discourse, ballet could hardly be said to have an aesthetics, let alone a politics, worthy of intellectual engagement. Rooted in falsity, it could never hope to reveal truth; an elitist entertainment, it would never speak to the people. The implication was clear: why was I bothering with something so frivolous and inconsequential— with a
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