534 / Theatre Journal Ethnologic Dance Center. While critics understood St. Denis’s work as modernist and so evaluated it as individual artistic expression, they framed La Meri’s as ethnologic, to be measured by its adherence to what scholars deemed its authenticity. La Meri her- self disregarded St. Denis’s romanticized and inspi- rational performances as cultural colonialism and emphasized what she viewed as more responsible ways of melding forms. Even though discourses contemporary to the time constructed white bodies as universal, through which viewers could experi- ence the worlds the performer presented, La Meri’s whiteness did not aford her this privilege. Instead, her commitment to teaching these practices accu- rately prevented infuential critics from considering her a full-fedged artist, thus deepening tensions reinscribing Western hierarchies. Chapter 3 pursues Sierra Leonean choreographer Asadata Dafora’s work in the 1940s. Kowal focuses on his African dance festivals at Carnegie Hall for the African Academy of Arts and Research, as well as his company’s tour to historically black colleges against the backdrop of the pan-Africanist and anti- colonial movements of the decade. Dafora’s work, Kowal argues, engendered a feeling of pan-African- ist diasporic kinship among black audiences, even though some of his work reproduced primitivist representations that played into commercial tastes. Kowal’s renewed look at Dafora’s work reconsiders its aesthetics and historical spectatorship. Chapter 4 focuses on Sol Hurok’s international dance festival within the 1948 New York City Golden Jubilee Celebration, as well as how the obstacles that plagued it—such as public-relations mishaps and concurrent booking with the wildly popular Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo—revealed fundamental prob- lems with the way Hurok and other dance globalists conceptualized and presented these dance practices. The lack of international participation, with few responses to Hurok’s many invitations to dance companies abroad, meant that only three companies performed: France’s Paris Opera Ballet led by Serge Lifar, who was entangled in criticism for his Nazi sympathies; Ram Gopal and the Hindu Ballet Com- pany from India; and the American modern dancer Charles Weidman, whose bisexuality, Kowal shows, stands as an example of how American containment applied equally to non-heterosexual people as to other nondominant populations. Correspondence between Gopal and presenters like Ted Shawn at Jacob’s Pillow reveal diferences of opinion between international artists and US presenters over what counted as being based in personal expression, as opposed to being nationalist or culturally bound. Through meticulous archival work Kowal expert- ly navigates lacunae left by the historical records, conveys a sense of the political decisions that framed the dances she studies, and introduces urgent new evidence that challenges established narratives about the role of concert dance in US imperialism and the role played by cultural and neocolonial calculations in the country’s ascendancy as a global superpower. She also includes fascinating photos of La Meri’s, Dafora’s, Gopal’s, and Weidman’s works, many of which have not widely circulated. Given how valuable these images are, I would have liked Kowal to engage them more directly, perhaps to il- luminate how the visual experience of the dances contributes to the book’s central claims. Nonethe- less, she provides readers with the tools to chal- lenge the analytical legacies left by early cold war dance critics. Understanding the postwar period through the actions of US globalism is crucial to identifying and dismantling white supremacist institutions established to support the country’s power, espe- cially as we witness the gears of history churning out new world orders. Kowal’s signifcant book is instructive for readers in dance, theatre, and perfor- mance studies, as well as for students of national- ism, imperialism, and American history, who seek to ascertain how the past constructed our present and how to use cultural mechanisms to improve our collective futures. HANNAH KOSSTRIN Ohio State University CHOREOGRAPHIES OF THE LIVING: BIO- AESTHETICS IN LITERATURE, ART, AND PERFORMANCE. By Carrie Rohman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; pp. 198. Is it because dance is considered the most “ani- mal” art form that it has been marginalized by art critics? This is one of the important questions raised in Carrie Rohman’s Choreographies of the Living, a well-argued and physically attuned book that seeks to foster new interactions between animal studies and dance studies. Symbolic language and rational concepts are the spiritual gifts that have long sup- ported notions of human exceptionalism and link us to the divine as opposed to the earthly or animal. The human is above all a subject of language and to be praised as such. But to be a subject of language is also to be subject to language and to the distor- tions that words produce. This is one reason that the linguistic turn in literary studies has been followed by eforts to identify other forms of communication that are less easily manipulated by structures of discursive power and are more evocative of what