Emily Wilcox

Research interests:

I am a scholar of modern and contemporary China with a focus on the cultural history of Chinese socialism. My research uses dance and performance as a lens to explore broader issues in the field of modern Chinese studies, including revolutionary aesthetics, the politics of gender, ethnicity, and race in modern Chinese culture, and China’s role in the development of socialist and Third World internationalism. Methodologically, I use ethnographic and historical approaches, blending embodied field research with rigorous readings of archives, texts, and multimedia sources. My work is grounded in a cultural studies and performance studies sensibility that challenges distinctions between high and low, center and margin, and modernity and tradition. As a critical area studies scholar, I am committed to interdisciplinary approaches that advance anti-colonial and anti-Eurocentric agendas.

My first book, Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy (University of California Press, 2019) won the de la Torre Bueno Prize® from the Dance Studies Association. As the first English-language history of dance in the People’s Republic of China, it uses previously unexamined dance films, a wide range of Chinese-language published and archival materials, and ethnographic field research to analyze the work of major Chinese choreographers over the period from 1935 to 2015. The book challenges the previously held view that Soviet ballet was the primary transnational force shaping China’s socialist dance creation, instead showing the impact of a broader range of intercultural connections, from Trinidad and London to North Korea and Uzbekistan. It shows the important role that ethnic minority and diaspora artists played in the construction of China’s national dance forms and demonstrates continuities and changes from the early socialist period to the twenty-first century. A central argument of the book is that socialist dance experiments laid the basis for what is today known as “Chinese dance.”

I have published more than fifteen articles and book chapters, and I am co-editor of a forthcoming anthology, Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia (University of Michigan Press, 2020). Beginning in 2014, I partnered with the University of Michigan Asia Library to develop a unique collection of primary sources on Chinese dance history, now the largest and most diverse in the world outside China. To increase the impact and visibility of this collection, I co-curated a public-facing exhibition, titled “Chinese Dance: National Movements in a Revolutionary Age, 1945-1965,” in the spring of 2017. A book based on this exhibition is now in progress.

My newest book project, tentatively titled “The East in the Mirror: Performing Inter-Asian Solidarity from Tashkent to Bandung” is based on research I began in 2016-17 while on a Transregional Research Fellowship sponsored by the Social Science Research Council InterAsia Program. The book examines the transnational lives and cross-ethnic choreographies of six influential left-leaning women dancers active during the mid-twentieth century: Sylvia Silan Chen, Choe Seung-hui, Qemberxanim, Dai Ailian, Mikiko Matsuyama, and Zhang Jun. I am interested in how, by engaging in cultural diplomacy and creating and performing dances from parts of Asia other than their own, these dancers embodied shifting political visions of Asian internationalism that challenge traditional conceptions of twentieth-century dance history and Cold War cultural circulation.

Teaching interests:

I teach undergraduate and graduate courses and advise undergraduate and graduate research in a range of fields, including Asian studies, modern Chinese studies, and dance and performance studies. Graduate seminars I have taught recently include “Rethinking China After 1949: New Approaches in PRC Cultural Studies” and “Critical Studies in Asian Performance: Indonesia and China.” I welcome inquiries from prospective students about the PhD in Asian Languages and Cultures, the MA program in Chinese Studies (MIRS), and the Graduate Certificate in World Performance Studies. More information about my courses can be found here.