Table Of ContentDon’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
