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Dance has always been a method of self- expression for human beings. This book examines the political power of dance and especially its transgressive potential. Focusing on readings of dance pioneers Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, Gumboots dancers in the gold mines of South Africa, the One Billion Rising movement using dance to protest against gendered violence, dabkeh in Palestine and dance as protest against human rights abuse in Israel, the Sun Dance within the Native American Crow tribe, the book focuses on the political power of dance and moments in which dance transgresses politics articulated in words. Thus the book seeks ways in which reading political dance as interruption unsettles conceptions of politics and dance.
This chapter presents a discussion of the connection between dance and human rights. Drawing on the concept of the human rights paradox in radical democratic theory. Two case studies are discussed; the practice of dabke as Palestinian national dance, and Archive, a dance work documenting human rights abuse in Palestine.
systemic properties from the sphere of radical contingency, Feenberg’s use of radical democratic theory is to some extent a colonisation of it as well, such is his sense of the importance of technology to contemporary social and political dynamics. He writes, for instance that, ‘the social imperatives of capitalism are experienced as technical constraints rather than as political coercion’ ( 2002 : 69). This suggests that struggles over the articulation of the technical code are not running in tandem with contests for control of political discourse but actually supplant
.g. political- economy perspectives) or as being produced through broader societal power relations (e.g. Foucauldian accounts). Radical democratic theories view the self as being constructed through the actions of the masses as they develop common desires for equality. In contrast, a Meadian view places the self at the centre of analysis, but a self that is produced through intersubjective relations and which is complex and uneven, forged within the dynamics of different attitudes, values and conventions of social groups and the individuality of the constantly emergent ‘I
organising and radical forms of action outside the institutional framework. The key role of the labour movement for political and economic change is still relevant today, despite the significant changes that have altered the global socio-economic system. In their collective work, Joel Beinin and Frederic Vairel reiterate the durability of economic reasons that fuel labour organising. International financial institutions, as well as postmodern radical democratic theory, despite their divergent perspectives, share the view that the