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The pop show: racial performance and transformation in global arts industries

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The pop show: racial performance and transformation in global arts industries

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Content i

THE POP SHOW:

RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND TRANSFORMATION IN GLOBAL ARTS
INDUSTRIES

by

Inna Arzumanova

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

August 2013

Copyright 2013 Inna Arzumanova
ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is difficult to overestimate the impact that my dissertation committee has had on
this particular project and on my scholarship in general. Having such a dedicated and
supportive committee has been a unique privilege.
First and foremost, I am indebted to Josh Kun, who has been my advisor, mentor
and dear friend throughout my time in the doctoral program. Josh’s mentorship has been
instrumental in so many ways and this project would truly have been impossible without
his constant support, his patient guidance and his insight. Throughout the process of the
dissertation, I realized that Josh not only knew what I was interested in before I did, but
always managed to nudge my work in the most interesting direction. Josh’s work has,
without a doubt, been a model for my own scholarship. But I also benefited enormously
from being Josh’s research assistant over the last five years. I would not have dared
attempt a project with multiple arts sites were it not for the inspiration of Josh’s
scholarship. And I would have never developed a love for archives were it not for Josh’s
projects. I have been extraordinarily lucky to have him as my mentor.
Sarah Banet-Weiser has also been a tremendous source of intellectual support
during my time at USC. Working and writing with Sarah has been an immeasurable
learning experience and has shaped my own work in important ways. Reading her work
has made mine better. Sarah has often encouraged me to pursue difficult avenues in my
work, to investigate areas I found challenging, and most of all, to defend my work. For all
these things, I will be forever grateful. Most of all, I will be grateful for her friendship
and her support.
iii

I was lucky enough to take a class with Taj Frazier right before I began this
project. Since then, his insights into this dissertation have been critical for me. He has
generously talked over difficult ideas with me, offered tireless encouragement and
reminded me why I embarked on this journey in the first place. Taj is a devoted and
moving teacher and his pedagogical style has also been very influential for me.
From Dorrine Kondo, I learned to value the editor’s eye. Her close readings of my
work and her feedback have, from the beginning, shaped my perspectives about these
topics. Her work in general has been so foundational for my own thinking (I was first
introduced to some of the basic frameworks in this dissertation in her class). Dorinne’s
compelling writing about performing arts and arts cultures has both inspired and
advanced my own scholarship.
This project has been much improved from the instruction and advice of Tara
McPherson, who is a generous teacher and has always been willing to offer her help.
Also important were friends and colleagues who provided important feedback during this
project. Among them were Melissa Brough, Priscilla Leiva, Patty Ahn, and Anjali Nath.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ii
Abstract vi
Introduction: Popping Up Around the Globe 1
The Dirty Work of Tricksters: Transforming the Economy
that Transforms Them 4
Contemporary Industries, Historical Legacies 8
The Business of Globalization: Defining the “Global” and Neoliberalism 12
Making Sense of Industries: Cultural vs. Creative 20
Becoming Visible in the Global Context 26
Performative Moves and Authenticity in the Global Context 30
Pop-Up Performance, Making-do and Power 37
Excesses of Performance, Encounter, and Imagination 43
Case Studies: “Performance Art,” Fashion, Visual Art, and Dance 47

Chapter One: The Countess and the Princess: History’s Mobile Racial Transformations
52
Countess di Castiglione: Ambassador, Professional Beauty, Auteur 55
Scholars Consider the Countess: Authorship, Gender Identity,
and the Male Gaze 58
Castiglione’s Symbolic Travels: Mobile Photographs and
Racial Masquerades 62
Princess Indita: Travels of a Hopi Princess 73
Indita’s Strategic Transformations: Touring, Racial Novelty,
and the Industry Machine 80

Chapter Two: Performing Modernity and Race on the Runway: Pakistani Fashion Week
and the Aesthetics of Off-Center Industry 87
Mapping the Terrain of Global Fashion 92
Gaultier and Cavalli Visit: The Rise of the Off-Center 96
Pakistan’s Fashion Industry: Sociocultural Growth and Institutionalization 103
Pakistan’s Fashion Industry: Textile, Trade Liberalization,
and Global Ambition 106
Performing Global Visibility: Tradition, Tactics, and Transmutation 112
International Ambition: Remaking Industry and Public Diplomacy
Into ‘Culture’ 113
Gendered Labor: Garment Workers and Artisans 121
Aesthetic Performances of Modernity: Heterogeneity and Mysticism 127
Beyond Autoexoticism: The Industry’s Pop-Up Performances 136
Considering the Veil: Hegemonic Leaks and Performative Excesses 140
Symbolic Futurity and the Veil as Global Citizenship 150
v

Chapter Three: Wandering Bodies, Wandering Imaginaries: Heritage and
Cosmopolitanism in Visual Art 154
The Art World Market: Financing Exhibitions, Expansions, and
Creative Travel 159
A Trifecta of Aesthetic Demands: Site-Specificity, Cultural Identity
and Homogeneity 173
Site-Specific Art: Space and Place in the Global 174
Cultural Identity: Finding the Bodies in Site-Specificity 177
Homogeneity: Biennials, Triennials, and Thematic Cohesion 180
Market Visibility/Market Viability: Race and Pop-Up Performance 186
Maldonado and González in the U.S.: The Unruly Jungle and Folk Culture 189
Maldonado and Tayou in Europe: Delivering Abstractions
and Colonial Visions 200
The Body of the Artist: Branding Heritage and Diasporic Identity 215
The Brand Catch-All: Racial Elasticity and Excess Absorption 219

Chapter Four: Dancing the Nation: Travel and Racial Transformation in the U.S. Dance
Industry 225
Funding the National Body: Institutionalization and Industry in the U.S. 231
Funding the Contemporary Dance Body: Public/Private Sponsorship
and its Demands 246
Shifting Balance for Funding: The Role of Race in Attracting
Diversified Funding 252
Ethnographers and Avatars: Race in Contemporary U.S. Dance
and AAADT 256
Israeli Dance: A History of Touring and U.S. Exchange 269
Ohad Naharin’s Batsheva at Home and On Tour 271
The Case of Alvin Ailey and Ohad Naharin’s Minus16: Finding
Possibility in Abstraction 286

Conclusion: Trickster Artists: The Market Cleans Up Dirt Rituals 295

Bibliography 304

vi

ABSTRACT

Global cultural and arts industries, with their multiple centers and overlapping
circuits of creativity and capital, operate on the constant and necessary movement of
bodies. These bodies belong to visual artists, dancers, songwriters, designers and models,
all of whom are forced to contend with the varying systems of racialization and racialized
value that their bodies become subject to in the process of global mobility. Arts industries
send bodies into motion across global scapes, emphasizing the portability of artists and
their aesthetics. For artists to manage that movement through the cultural and
sociopolitical circuits of the globe, they must stage their own bodies and their works
according to wildly varied conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality, transforming
constantly, making and re-making the edges of their identity performances.
This dissertation considers these performances of race using the grammars of
racial performativity to explore the conditions under which race is staged, exhibited, and
trafficked in global cultural and arts industries. Case studies from the fashion, visual art,
and dance industries serve as lenses for examining the possibilities and limitations of
racial performance in the creative circuits of globalization. How does racial performance
both help and limit the transformation and mobility – symbolic and literal – of the
racialized body? How are particular racial performances a tactical resource in global
movement? How do industry’s global economies script racial performance and how do
artists navigate those scripts through strategic racialization?
Mapping the discourses of racial performance onto the selected case studies, I
propose a new optic for understanding the ways in which racial performance can
correspond to the geo-political demands of global movement. That optic is pop-up
vii

performance, a concept that helps us confront how artists strategically play with the
permutations of the racialized body, calibrating performances of race according to
varying economies and their attendant systems of racialization. Examining the artistic
practices of designers, visual artists, and choreographers through this optic enables us to
understand the racial feeling and value articulated through their bodies and their
aesthetics as inseparable from site-specific political economies of race.
1

INTRODUCTION: POPPING UP AROUND THE GLOBE

In 2012, Harper's Bazaar announced that it would be the first international
fashion magazine to appoint a Global Fashion Director. A few months later, in the
beginning of 2013, an influential dance industry analyst implored dance companies to
face the fact that “forces of globalization are permanently changing the landscape facing
dancemakers” (Kirschner, 2013, para.13). Elsewhere, U.S. art critics continued to
denounce the growing cohort of contemporary art buyers from Russia and the Middle
East. The globalization of art worlds, it seems, has been on everyone’s minds. Art worlds
have expanded, touring maps have multiplied and artists now have more territories to
cover, more places to perform. And perform they do.
Artists like Máximo González travel these expanded maps and drag their
aesthetics around the globe, putting on a show in every destination. In one place,
Gonzáles’s Mexican perforated paper banners are strung up outside, as signifiers of folk
culture, populism and Mexican nationalism. In a different place and a different arts
economy, he installs the same banners indoors, hinting that they are part of an abstracted
glimpse at human nature. In a third place and a third arts economy, he hangs them up in
narrow and isolated, modern, cement alleys, this time signifying “colonization” and
“invasion.” An exhibition is erected and then folded up like a cardboard display, its
aesthetic moralities as temporary and improvised as its allotted exhibit time. The
exhibition will appear again, in a different site, embracing a different aesthetic purpose,
popping-up all over the exhibition circuit, every time with a customized cardboard
display. Like a trickster, the artist transforms himself and his aesthetics, craftily traveling
2

the globe thanks to the magic of performative reinvention. But when it comes to global
art worlds, González is far from alone. Artist tricksters are popping up everywhere.
“All tricksters like to hang around the doorway, that being one of the places
where deep-change accidents occur,” Lewis Hyde (1998) has written (p.124). This
trickster is a shape-shifting overseer of crossroads that makes ambiguous but frequent
appearances in literary, mythological, folkloric and historical archives across the world.
Through his transmutations and mischievous play with mysticism and its contingencies,
the trickster creates and re-creates the borders that mark each moment. Those borders are
geographic, spiritual, but also ideological. The doorways represent what Hyde calls each
culture's joints, the moments – whether spatial or temporal – of each culture's utmost
vulnerability. It is in those doorways where tricksters trade on the ideological instabilities
of crossroads, transforming their own appearances, deceiving, moving across borders,
between worlds, forcing those who follow as well as those who watch to contend with the
unpredictable.
The contemporary trickster, Hyde tells us, is the artist, who moves through global
doorways, trading on imagination – whether disruptive, conservative, or endlessly
productive – and playing with racial identities in order to enable passage. The artist
trickster, embedded in global cultural and arts industries, dramatizes racial structures of
feeling through dance, fashion, and visual art, moving through complicated geographies
and equally complicated economies. The trickster performs to gain inclusion; transforms
to gain visibility; accommodates to gain mobility. The artist trickster is the global
economy’s complicit offspring – made mobile and hyper visible by economic
globalization but not uncontaminated by its aesthetic obligations. The global artist
3

trickster is the subject of this dissertation. What is at stake, I ask, when artists’
articulations of racial feeling and their own racialized presences are both enabled and
regulated by their industry’s global ambitions and neoliberal economics? What happens
to artistic aesthetics – fashion, forms of visual art, dance choreography – and their ability
to grapple with racial epistemologies when their visibility is commissioned by the global
economy and their mobility is required by that economy?
This dissertation focuses on cultural and performing arts industries currently
understood as “global.” These are industries that routinely use the term “global” as an
industry descriptor and refer to “globalization” as the contemporary economic structure
that defines their cultural compass and their economic ambitions. In making globalization
the centerpiece of their economic and cultural architectures, arts industries like fashion,
visual art and dance are often celebrated as racially, culturally and geographically
inclusive. Contemporary art biennials spring up in places like Dubai and Shanghai. Dance
companies bill themselves as racially diverse, culturally cosmopolitan travelers. The
fashion world touts itself as expanding and democratic, pointing to the popularity of
designers who hail from Latin American and Asia. When it comes to arts industries, we
are led to believe, the focus on the global as both industry reality and strategy has done
away with old, racially-charged asymmetries and power structures. Places and
populations that were previously invisible in these art worlds’ governing circuits, these
industries insist, have now been made visible. And this global visibility is precisely the
point. Arts industries, with their multiple centers and overlapping circuits of creativity
and capital, operate on the constant and necessary movement of bodies. These bodies
belong to visual artists, dancers, songwriters, designers and models, all of whom are
4

forced to contend with the varying systems of racialization and racialized value that their
bodies become subject to in the process of global visibility, circulation and mobility.
Compelled by the neoliberal economic structures supported by globalization, arts
industries send bodies into motion across global scapes, emphasizing the portability of
those artists and their aesthetics. That movement is the movement through the cultural
and sociopolitical circuits of the globe. For artists to manage it, they must become
strategically flexible tricksters, staging their own bodies and their works according to
wildly varied conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality, transforming constantly, making
and re-making the edges of their identity performances and the aesthetics they produce.

The Dirty Work of Tricksters: Transforming the Economy that Transforms Them
In the following chapters, I consider these performances of race using the
grammars of racial performativity to explore the conditions under which race is staged,
exhibited, and trafficked in different contemporary global cultural industries. In order to
do this, I trace global artists’ varying racial performances across their geographic circuits
of exhibition, performance and circulation, asking how and under what conditions these
global artists produce drastically variable racial epistemologies. Case studies from the
fashion, visual art and dance industries serve as lenses for examining the possibilities and
limitations of racial performance in the creative circuits that attend economic
globalization. Each chapter takes a specific arts industry as its focus, sketching out the
contours of that industry’s global economies, history of growth, and recent legislative
developments. This economic face of the industry is then brought to bear on the
industry’s history of representing race and engaging racialized bodies in movement.
5

Finally, contemporary case studies are placed in conversation with these histories in order
to consider the modes of racial performance that the industries require in the
contemporary moment. For each industry, I juxtapose economics with racially-marked
aesthetic articulations to understand the economic imperatives that condition global
circulation, the transformations that artists and their aesthetics undergo in order to
circulate, and the ways in which aesthetic articulations can produce imaginaries that push
back against the conditions of their own production. Because each industry operates on a
unique set of cultural preconditions, drawing on varied histories of institutionalization
and different contemporary economic structures, each chapter addresses a slightly
different domain of what constitutes global art practice and visibility. In Chapter 2, the
mediated global visibility and modes of racial performativity available to Pakistani and
Chechen fashion designers demonstrate the ways in which the fashion industry negotiates
a geographically-determined sense of value. The aesthetic trends and racial
transformations of contemporary visual artists from Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Cameroon
addressed in Chapter 3 describe the ways in which a romanticized notion of ‘wandering’
is at the heart of both global aesthetics and global economies, conditioned simultaneously
by the logics of both. Chapter 4 discusses the U.S. and Israeli dance industries, their
treatments of racial feeling and racial embodiment, reminding us that an industry’s
“global” descriptor does not exist without a simultaneous attachment to “the national.”
Each of the chapters explores the economic and aesthetic conditions that
underwrite mobility within the specific context of racialization. To be clear, when I refer
to global mobility, I am invoking a set of three, concurrent mobilities: (1) the physical,
transnational or global circulation of bodies (artists, dancers, designers, etc.), exhibitions,
6

fashion shows, and dance companies; (2) the figurative movement of racialization on
display in the artist’s work (how race becomes a mobile signifier, transforming from one
set of racial knowledges to the next); and (3) the figurative transformation of the artist as
a racial subject and global citizen. These inextricable modes of mobility all occur inside
what can be called the sanctioned circuits of global cultural and arts industries.
Considering the racial imaginations and racial systems conjured up by artists whose
works incorporate global movement into their aesthetic scripts and whose own mobile
bodies become discursive anchors for the legibility of those artworks, instructs us to also
consider each industry’s economic impulse for mobility.
Examining the transformations that bodies in these arts industries deploy, I
propose two imbricated ways to understand these obligatory performances. First, I
suggest that the transformations undertaken by bodies in motion can be understood
through the theorization of what I call pop-up performance. This optic helps us confront
how artists play with the permutations of the racialized body, calibrating performances of
race according to varying systems of racialization, wherein the racial feeling and value
articulated through the bodies of artists and their aesthetics become inseparable from site-
specific political economies of race. Secondly, I propose that the racial currency of global
arts industries’ traffic is not only performance but also, transmutation; that certain racial
permutations of these pop-up performances gain currency as a way to become visible and
legible inside global scapes. As I argue throughout the dissertation, the contemporary
moment has exceeded the inquiry into what specific forms of racialization travel. What
travels, as I contend, is transformation itself. Consequently, I consider how the realities of
cultural and economic global migration and imagination recast the existing literature on
7

racial performance and transformation. This dissertation reads globalization and racial
performance through each other, using the racialized artist body as well as its attendant
aesthetic imaginaries as the migrating agent.
Focusing on global art industries in order to understand the relationship between
racial performance and economically-conditioned global mobility has particular
advantages. In this dissertation, I am interested in the racial imaginaries that artists,
designers, and choreographers produce as they become mobile in global art worlds.
Following in the reasoning offered by bell hooks (1995), this dissertation looks to modes
of expressive culture – to fashion, visual art, and dance – as the ways in which otherwise
silenced publics make altars to their modes of remembering and curate their own
structures of feeling, all the while meeting their respective industries' mandates of
mobility. The focus on imagination here is to suggest that corporeal performance
generates unexpected and often ambivalent imaginaries that are temporary (bound by the
performance) but can sometimes leave a kind of alchemical trace, transforming the
conditions that made them possible in the first place. I look for these moments of
slipperiness in every industry, seeking to understand how global economics contains the
aesthetics it sends into global motion, but also how the performative dimension of race
can sometimes work in excess of that containment. bell hooks gestures to this relationship
between corporeal performance and the imaginary it produces when she describes the
work of Jean-Michel Basquiat: “Despite an addiction to masking/masquerade in his
personal life, Basquiat used painting to disintegrate the public image of himself that he
created and helped sustain” (hooks, 1995, p.46). The artists and aesthetics that populate
the following chapters suggest that the global traveling artist must inhabit a position
8

similar to Lewis Hyde's trickster – transmute, make-do, adapt, imagine and re-imagine
her own aesthetics – inside the globe's sociopolitical doorways, spilling the excess of
imagination as the body goes about its tactics of survival and movement.

Contemporary Industries, Historical Legacies
The case studies offered in this dissertation capture a particular feature of
economic and cultural globalization – its shifting and often contradictory relationship to
racial performance and racial imaginaries. The arts industries I examine in this project are
spaces where visibility and legibility of racialized performances are undoubtedly profit-
driven and enabled by neoliberal economies, but also unpredictable and potentially
unstable because of their dependency on imagination and transformation. This
dissertation offers a way to think through these contradictions, intervening in the
longstanding discussions of the global's relationships to race and creativity. The
connections between economic globalization and its imbrication with expressive cultures
and racial imaginaries have been addressed by scholars from many disciplines (DeFrantz,
2012; Joselit, 2013; Lim, 2012; Martinez, 2009; Mbembe, 2001; Nielsen, 2012; Phillips
& Steiner, 1999).
1
Likewise, the ways in which various articulations of racial exhibition,
forms of artistic practice, performance and transformation in the global are in
conversation with cultural expressions have also been topics of scholarship (Camacho,
2008; Condry, 2006; Fisher & Mosquera, 2004; hooks, 1995; Kester, 2011; Kun, 2005;
Lipsitz, 1994; Smith, 2011). However, there is less work that is interested in using
corporeal racial performance as an analytic for the examination of how bodies are

1
The scholars I list here are only a tiny sampling of the scholars who are interested in the intersections
between the global political economy and artistic practice. I examine the works of many of these scholars
in more detail in Chapters 2, 3, and 4.
9

rendered – and continuously re-rendered – in contemporary global arts migration. In light
of this, I work at the junction of these bodies of knowledge to explore how the varied and
overlapping theories of racial performance can inform the discussion of racial visibility in
global contexts and in transnational travel – its conditions of possibility, its limitations, as
well as its excesses.
Racialized encounters, performance, and traveling imaginaries are here in
conversation with the scholarship on economic and cultural globalization, as well as its
ties to neoliberal capitalism. Together with Hyde's trickster, the figures that populate
these global arts industries remind us that a degree of spectacle, of strategic
performativity, and racial transmutation, are a prerequisite for the movement across
boundaries, for productive mobilities that seek to pass through unchallenged but also
quietly, stealthily re-imagine the realities they leave in their wake. It is an insight that
expands the discussion of how racialized bodies move across geographic and cultural
scapes in a moment of intensified global migration. That is, this dissertation proceeds
from the dual assumption that bodies – especially racially-marked bodies – do not gain
mobility unchallenged or undetected. Neither do they pass through previously
unavailable doorways without leaving a trace or changing the ideological or even
geographic corridors that nurtured their movement. Instead, bodies and publics seeking to
move through global doorways or across sociopolitical boundaries do so by mobilizing
racial performance, by engaging in compulsory performances in order to purchase their
own mobility. This relationship between racial performance and global mobility has been
explored by several scholars in recent years. Ruth Philips and Christopher Steiner (1999)
have discussed the ways in which the cultural encounters of the global have “transformed
10

indigenous constructions” of arts objects in accordance with Western power and its
colonial commodity production (p.4). They have called these transformations the
“baggage” of global cultural encounter. Similarly, Lara D. Nielsen and Patricia Ybarra
(2012), in their volume Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations,
analyze “theater, dance, and performance events… [to] attend to the multiplicities of
neoliberal deployments as they play out in macrocosmic and distinctly local modes”
(p.8). The volume, like this dissertation, is also interested in the dialectic between the
ways in which performance can work to consolidate assemblages of power on the one
hand and to work to upend that power, on the other. While I am indebted to the work of
the above scholars and certainly, motivated by some of the same queries about the
growing interconnectedness between neoliberal ideology, the financialization of artistic
practice, and artistic expression, my work deviates from theirs in several, specific ways.
First, in this dissertation, I examine the performances of specifically racial and gender
identities, tracing how particularly racial epistemologies become both resource and the
space of transformation for global artists. Secondly, I trace these racial and gender
transformation by focusing on global mobility, showing how the same body of work and
the same artist calibrate their racial knowledges and racial representation to accommodate
various destinations, one after another. This method of tracing racial performance across
several destinations is of particular significance for me because one of my arguments
(indeed, one of my concerns) in this work, is that the global demands a continuous,
endlessly changeable racial performance of global artists of color to the point of
pathology. Racial structures of feeling and signifying racial bodies become as flexible
and changeable as the local deployments of neoliberal markets need them to be, which
11

means that for participating artists, racial performance is not only a strategy but a kind of
constant, manic demolition and reconstitution of their own subjectivities. Artists become
necessary chameleons, economically compelled to rely on a vision of the world as
fractured and multiple, and improvising their subjectivities accordingly. While I am not
invested in an understanding of art forms as static or somehow controlled by their artist
“authors,” I argue that something is lost when the life of the art form – its transformation
and mobility – is so deeply informed by the whims of local, neoliberal economies. In the
case of visual artists, as I suggest in Chapter 3, this practice of adaptation is so racially
elastic and expansive, that it manages to consume moments of fissure or potential
intervention. Furthermore, it is a system that implicates not just the local deployments of
neoliberal logics, as Nielsen and Ybarra argue, but importantly, the artist as well. Third,
this dissertation offers an analytic, pop-up performance, for understanding the ways in
which racial and gender identities are strategically deployed, temporary, remixed, and re-
assembled across many different destinations.
The suggestion that in order to exhibit or perform in multiple geographic regions,
artists from all industries have always made strategic, site-specific repertoire selections,
is not unique to the contemporary moment. Tactical aesthetic and repertoire choices have
always been significant for artists to ensure touring and wide exhibition. In Chapter 1, I
briefly explore two historical figures that did just that, each tailoring her racial
performances to her economies of mobility. These two figures – Countess di Castiglione
and Princess Indita – lived and worked in drastically different historical and economic
contexts. Yet, examining the two side-by-side urges us to be attuned to histories of racial
performance; to understand that a measure of racial transformation has always been at the
12

root of art worlds’ mobilities and that these performances solidified into strategies just as
their relevant industries solidified into capitalist institutions. The biographical sketches I
offer in this chapter are a way to understand the immediate urgency of studying the
contemporary manifestation between racial performance and mobility in art industries. If,
as Castiglione and Indita’s stories suggest, racial performances become both increasingly
strategic and necessary as art worlds congeal into art industries, then the contemporary
global moment is unprecedented for arts industries. As I show in each chapter,
contemporary industries’ neoliberal logics dictate that for artists, global travel and
exhibition has never been this high and this mandatory before. Consequently, artists’
predicament of having to accommodate so many markets and so many aesthetic
commitments has never been this compulsory. In some cases, artists’ aesthetics and
designs transform drastically from place to place, alleviating the threat of racial encounter
in travel. At the same time, however, these racial transformations also undermine artists’
ability to intervene in both the scopic and lived regimes of racial domination through
artistic practice. In arts industries, when global visibility gains so much currency, the
racial transformations that artists undertake in their aesthetics and on their own bodies
become nearly pathological, as variable as the global economy needs them to be.

The Business of Globalization: Defining the “Global” and Neoliberalism
When it comes to the arts industries I discuss in this dissertation, the idea of the
“global,” often used as a vague catch-all descriptor to signal each industry’s commitment
to navigating the economic and cultural roads of globalization, constitutes a particular set
of meanings for this project. Whatever its cultural and aesthetic limitations and
13

possibilities, I approach the term “global” not just as a descriptor employed by arts
industries, but also, as a primarily economic term, seized by industries (among them,
cultural and arts industries) as a way to characterize and explain their own market
expansions and continued capture of increasing amounts of labor populations, consumer
markets, and geographic visibilities. It is a definition espoused by scholars like Arjun
Appadurai (1990, 1996), Jodi Dean (2009), Lisa Duggan (2003), David Harvey (2005),
Achille Mbembe (2001), Saskia Sassen (2001) and many others. According to this logic,
the global, and the creative encounters it both enables and informs cannot exist without
the expansion of capitalist and neoliberal markets. The concept of the global, in this
project, describes the 20
th
century period of economic globalization and neoliberal
expansions.
2
I approach global arts industries as first and foremost economic industries,
made possible through the convergences of increasingly globalized neoliberal capital, the
logics of cultural exchange, the circuits of labor, as well as the coexistent (although not
always synchronous) movements of publics, ideas and bodies of knowledge.
To understand global arts industries as mechanisms that simultaneously enable,
mandate, and unravel racial performance, it is necessary to first address the economic and
cultural conditions of each industry’s contemporary existence. As I mentioned, each
chapter begins by first outlining its focal industry’s economic structure, explaining the
ways in which each industry has taken on the models of economic globalization and
neoliberalism in its own unique way. In chapters 2, 3, and 4, the terms “globalization,”
“neoliberalism,” and “global cultural/arts industries” are invoked, for the most part,

2
This is an important distinction. An imaginary “global,” particularly in arts industries, existed well before
the mid or late 20
th
century. However, because I am interested in contemporary neoliberalism’s version of
the “global,” I use the term to refer to the concurrent formations of economic globalization and
neoliberalism that are typically traced back to mid-late 20
th
century and that dominate the contemporary
moment.
14

without an exhaustive explanation of wider, non-industry-specific contexts. The
following engages and defines these key concepts in order to provide some insight into
the more abstracted formations of economic globalization and its relationship to tactics of
mobility as they have informed my work here.
In his book Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai (1996) announces that the two
central “diacritics” of globalization are media and migration. Exploring the relationship
between these two domains of globalization, he argues, echoing other scholars of
globalization and culture like Nicolas Bourriaud (2009), Néstor García Canclini (2005)
and Achille Mbembe (2001), is a way to understand the work of imagination, as it is
constituted by a “modern” subjectivity. Together, media (specifically, electronic
mediation) and migration transform mass mediation, which then offers new resources for
the construction of an imagined self and an attendant imagined world. Certainly, not
everyone is mobile and any examination of migration must contend with the limitations
of mobility, not to mention with the values proffered by those bodies of scholarship that
privilege mobility as the only feature of economic globalization. Appadurai temperes his
investment in mobility accordingly, arguing that it is publics' proximity to movement that
is unprecedentedly high, even if movement itself is still limited. Even if mobility remains
selective and often inaccessible to certain peoples, the argument goes, most everyone
knows someone who is mobile, living and/or working in diaspora, constantly in a state of
migration. Additionally, most publics are constantly exposed to non-local images, scripts,
and/or sensations through mass mediation (Appadurai, 1996). The imbrication of these
two “diacritics” means that for Appadurai, globalization is not the narrative of cultural
homogenization, but rather the resource for the production of collective imaginations that
15

bend the global to their own versions of “modernity.” The author uses the global
proliferation of diasporic public spheres as examples of spaces of potential contestation,
where the grand Western narratives and temporalities of “modernity” can be challenged.
3

It is a perspective that he shares with many other theorists of globalization, culture and
imagination. George Yudice (2003), for example, says that “migrations and diasporic
movements generated by global processes have complicated the unity presumed to exist
in the nation; belonging may be infra- or supranational” (p.29).
Appadurai’s insights into the relationship between globalization and mobility
suggest that transnational possibilities and the encounters that they inform cannot exist
without the attendant terrors and disruptions posed by the notion of modernization, which
is itself responsible for increasing the scale of mobility. The overlapping roles of
expanding markets, armies, technologies (often, of surveillance) and media must all be
accounted for in the examination of bodies in movement. Appadurai’s characterization of
these domains of globalization is useful for the study of global arts industries. These
industries rely on the constant movement of artists and performers (world tours,
international exhibits, traveling troupes, etc. are now normative), but also contribute to
the vast repository of mass mediation that Appadurai speaks of. In this way, the industries
actually encompass both mobile publics and immobile ones, whose exposure to mobility
is through mass media (and often, entertainment). In fact, while focusing on arts
industries is certainly a departure from the terrors of military expansion and
modernization, global arts industries nevertheless exist partly due to those processes of
modernization and importantly, police its bodies according to the same logics of racial

3
For Appadurai, these grand narratives are represented in the writings of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and
Émile Durkheim. For them, he argues, modernity hinges on a single significant historical moment that
serves as the critical break between the past and present, between tradition and modernity.
16

and gendered performance. This is precisely why the relationship between globalization,
mobility and race are a crucial context for the examination of expressive cultures' uses of
racial performance.
The suggestion that human location (and subsequently, human mobility) is
constituted by displacement and movement as much as it is by stasis, is a useful way to
understand the sociopolitical and cultural conditions that mark each moment of
encounter. Points of contact bring into collision not only different histories of movement
but also varying conditions of danger, forcing encounter between drastically different
degrees of freedom. The conditions of movement then, need to be read along the lines of
race, gender, sexuality, class, and citizenship to account for the different ways with
which, to take but one example, female domestic workers on the one hand, and male
students, on the other, experience modernity through global movement. These
asymmetries hold (although, again, to different degrees and with vastly different
consequences) in global cultural and arts industries. A visual artist who self-identifies as
a U.S. citizen will be expected to perform race and modernity in ways that do not cohere
with the expectations made of a Cameroonian artist living in diaspora. Their performative
articulations will have to proceed according to the racial readings their bodies are subject
to, the citizenship each can claim, the histories of modernity and mobility each can lean
on, and importantly, the economic structures that provide visibility at that particular
moment. For James Clifford (1997), the “practices of mobility and stasis, autonomy and
interconnection” are an especially poignant framework for observing modes of
globalization because, as the forthcoming case studies will show, they are negotiated
through power relations that are informed by empire, the histories and contemporary
17

residuals of colonization, as well as flows of capital (p.164). These negotiations are
precisely the spaces where individuals and publics look to resources that aid and facilitate
transit. It is inside the space of these negotiations where racial performance can become a
means of survival, a platform for expression, the temporary public sphere for an
unscripted imaginary, or all of the above.
While Clifford's binary of mobility and stasis provides one way to consider
mobility in economic globalization, Saskia Sassen (2001) provides another, equally
significant to the operations of global arts industries and their traffic in bodies. Sassen's
binary deals more directly with economic globalization, with what Appadurai (1990)
would call the “financescapes” of globalization processes, the same ones that render
artists' mobility and aesthetic portability requirements for visibility and ultimately,
success, in global arts industries. Additionally, much like in other industries, these
economic processes are brought to bear simultaneously (although not always evenly) on
the flows of cultural, informational, public, and labor-oriented economies that arts
industries rely on for operation.
Given this imbrication, it is necessary to first describe what is at stake in the
discussion of this particular political economy. That is, what Appadurai, Clifford, Sassen
as well as other scholars of contemporary globalization engage with is often referred to as
neoliberalism, sometimes late capitalism, and other times, specifically in the U.S.
context, Post-Fordism. The three have undoubtedly varied inflections but nevertheless
share some of their most basic economic principles. Because this dissertation dialogues
between notions of racial performance, and global industry-based exhibition and touring,
I address the contemporary moment's prevailing economic philosophy as neoliberalism.
18

Following scholars like Néstor García Canclini (2001), Jodi Dean (2009), Jeremy Gilbert
(2008), David Harvey (2005), and George Yudice (2003), I understand the principal
foundations of neoliberal logics as the increasing marketization of all aspects of the
public and private domains, the reduction of all interactions to the principles of the free
market, the global expansion of all public and private institutions in search of markets,
the redefinition of “public-interest,” and the elimination of all local financial and cultural
investments in the social body. Gilbert has described neoliberalism as:
a set of political ideas and practices which revives the core assumptions of
nineteenth – century liberalism: that the individual in competition with other
individuals for resources is the irreducible unit of human experience; that the
first purpose of politics is to protect the autonomy of the private individuals; that
the right to accumulate, possess and dispose of property at will is the most is the
most fundamental right of such individuals; that the role of the state is therefore to
ensure that nothing interferes with the capacity of private individuals to
accumulate and enjoy property (Gilbert, 2008, p.32)
Drawing from this definition, the neoliberal agenda is here used as the economic
philosophy that stands in for a commitment to individualism, to a citizenship founded in
allegiance to consumption as the sole mode of democracy, to private property, as well as
to the self-branding that is made compulsory inside these wide-reaching processes
(Banet-Weiser, 2012; Gilbert, 2008; Harvey, 2005).The notions of self-branding,
individualism, and a rendering of democracy are in fact key in understanding the range of
racial performances – both corporeal and ideological – adopted by the artists and
performers featured in the case studies. Furthermore, as the case studies make clear, the
19

role of the neoliberal political economy is envisioned as a central one in the fashion,
visual art, and dance industries, necessarily engaging the flows of capital and corporate
finance, which authorize the global expansion of these expressive cultures. In turn,
exploring the notion of overlapping and mutually-sustaining global arts industries leads
to conversations about the fundamental features of creative and material labor inside
these industries. In the case studies, 'labor' refers to the production of ideas and styles,
manufacturing, distribution, self-branding, and exhibition. In the chapter on fashion, for
example, I discuss the creative labor of designers in addition to the physical labor of
garment workers. With this rendering of the neoliberal agenda and political economy,
Sassen's invocation of the economic face of globalization is now invested in some
specificity. I use Sassen's discussion of economic globalization as a way to understand
the ways in which neoliberal economic philosophy underwrites and dictates global arts
industries, their performances of race and their relationships to racialized labor.
As the chapter on dance demonstrates most directly, Sassen's argument that
economic globalization is embedded in the national is a significant concept for addressing
mobility and performance in global arts industries. In some ways, artists and performers
produce their own racialized bodies in ways that imitate the relationship between the
national and the global, a trend that is exceptionally evident among the visual artists and
dancers discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. According to Sassen, “The material and legal
infrastructure that makes possible the global circulation of financial capital, for example,
is often produced as 'national' infrastructure – even though increasingly shaped by global
agendas” (Sassen, 2001, p.264). Economic globalization produces new spatialities and
temporalities, both of which belong to the global and the national. The global and the
20

national exist in a state of constant and necessary interaction and it is this interaction that
marks the global most significantly, rendering it only a “partial condition” (Sassen, 2001,
p.260). Sassen's argument is particularly useful here because of her reliance on both the
temporal and spatial dimensions to explain these interactions. She continues that most
nation-states have never achieved “spatiotemporal unity,” bringing into an internally-
differentiated order many spatialities and temporalities instead (Sassen, 2001, p.260).
Because the varied spatialities and temporalities inside the national order do not
necessarily correspond perfectly to the whole of the order, they often form “dynamic
spaces of overlap and interaction” with the global (Sassen, 2001, p.261). These spaces of
interaction suggest that there are “frontier zones” or “analytic borderlands” that produce
“the combined thickness and specificity of the national and the global” (Sassen, 2001,
p.261, 267). That artists engage in racial performance in order to both invoke and manage
these frontier zones and borderlands is addressed through the case studies. However, that
these same artists and performers use the tools of expressive culture to perform only
emphasizes Sassen's point. What Sassen calls the interaction between the global and the
national is also the interaction between the temporalities and spatialities of each, between
the structures of feeling, the cultures, bodies, and economies that each sends into motion
and bring into encounter.

Making Sense of Industries: Cultural vs. Creative
The above discussions of the imbricated nature of neoliberalism and various
domains of globalization (financial, cultural, social, etc.) have energized much of the
recent scholarship on cultural, creative and arts industries. While I have been using the
21

term “arts industry” freely throughout this chapter, the debates that populate this
particular strand of scholarship are in fact, heavily contentious about terminology and
provide some significant context for the discussion of industries highlighted in the case
studies. Terminology is key as it signals the fundamental distinction that dominates the
scholarship on these industries, dividing it into roughly two ideological camps: those who
speak about “cultural industries” (including “media industries”) and those who prefer
“creative industries.” The difference lies primarily in scholars’ perspective on the
relationship between culture and political economy. “Culture industry” scholars like
David Hesmondhalgh (2008, 2013), Bill Ivey (2008), Scott Lash and Celia Lury (2007),
Angela McRobbie (2002), Toby Miller, et.al. (2005), Bill Ryan (1991), George Yudice
(1999, 2003) have been driven by a critical political economy approach to studying
cultural and media production. Often informed by a Marxist reading of cultural
production, these scholars have sought to expand the principles and fears laid out by Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in their seminal essay “The Culture Industry:
Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (Hesmondhalgh, 2008). This cohort of scholars has
been occupied with the ethical problems of capital accumulation in individual cultural
and media industries, asking how the conditions of cultural production operate and
inform those products’ creation and circulation. For example, echoing George Yudice’s
argument that culture operates (and circulates) as a resource for the global economy, Lash
and Lury focus on the animation media industry, arguing that culture becomes what they
call “thingified,” wherein the industry operates on the mediation of culture-based
“things” (rather than representations). But “culture” has also taken on some specificity
among scholars like John and Jean Comaroff (2009) and Arlene Dávila (2012),
4
who

4
An important caveat here is that Arlene Dávila actually refers to “creative” industries several times in her
22

examine what happens when race and ethnicity, as specifications of widely-deployed
“cultural” difference, are made to work towards neoliberal economies. They argue that
cultural work, in the neoliberal economies that buttress cultural industries, is haunted by
racial hierarchies and rigid racial authenticities whose purpose is to brand racial identity
and harness it for neoliberal global capital.
5

Summarizing this large and rather varied body of scholarship and its commitment
to complicating Horkheimer and Adorno, Hesmondhalgh explains that it “has been able
to offer explanation of certain recurring dynamics, rather than polemically bemoaning the
processes of concentration and integration that are a feature of capitalist production –
including media production” (Hesmondhalgh, 2008, p.553). Most of the above-
mentioned scholars attribute these massive transformations of cultural industries to the
early 1980s, to the rapid concurrent growths of both neoliberal logics and economic
globalization. In thinking about neoliberalism, scholars like Angela McRobbie (1998,
2002), Andrew Ross (1997, 2003), and Ruth Towse (1996) have focused on the re-
definition of artistic labor in cultural industries, providing some insights into the
character of the workplace in neoliberal cultural economies.
This critical political economy approach to cultural industries has generated
another, closely related body of scholarship, which has been motivated by the same
ideological perspectives on the economics and ethics of cultural industries, but has
tackled local and national cultural arts policy specifically.
6
Michael Denning (1997), Bill

book. However, her discussions of processes of commodification, her critique of racial branding as well as
her navigation of the relationship between race and mobility place her squarely in the critical political
economy camp of scholars.
5
John and Jean Comaroff, for example, argue that racial authenticity is “the specter that haunts the
commodification of culture everywhere” (p.10).
6
As this list shows, this body of work on cultural arts policy has also been carried out by many of the same
scholars as the more general work on cultural industries, production and labor.
23

Ivey, Angela McRobbie, Toby Miller (2000), Justin O’Connor (2004), J. Mark Davidson
Shuster (1985), George Yudice, Annette Zimmer and Stefan Toepler (1999) have all
discussed the (often nation-specific) transitions in arts policy and arts funding as a way of
understanding how cultural industries interact with their fluctuating sources of funding.
In a small departure from the more general research conducted under the cultural and
media industry umbrella, these scholars are often interested in spaces traditionally
understood as “arts” industries (opera, dance, symphony, visual art, etc). The shift in
terminology (if not, ideological perspective or ideology) is not incidental. Across most of
this scholarship, focusing on public policy has also meant focusing on the performing and
visual arts sectors as those are the sectors that have typically benefitted from state and
local subsidy. In fact, the neoliberal withdrawal of “public-interest” oriented government
(federal and local) subsidy for the arts has been the starting point for many of these
scholars. With some variation, these scholars contend that neoliberal logics have led to a
failure of cultural policy and the transformation of cultural industries into multinational
corporations that operate in the global marketplace according to free-market principles.
As I signaled in the beginning of this brief review, the “cultural industry”
approach is not alone. This body of scholarship is often mirrored, on the other end of the
critical spectrum, by scholarship on “creative industries.” Before describing the
significance of that particular wing of industry studies, however, it is important to note
that scholars of “media studies” often offer a compromising middle-ground between the
two, seemingly mutually-exclusive positions between “cultural” and “creative” industry
scholars. While scholars of both “cultural industries” and “media industries” prefer a
critical political economy framework for the analysis of cultural production, scholars of
24

“media industries” embrace a position that accounts for the political economy approach
but stops short of economic determinism, arguing that a certain degree of creative agency
plays a significant role in both production and consumption (Havens, 2006; Havens,
2013; Havens & Lotz, 2011; Holt & Perren, 2009; Mayer, Banks, Caldwell, 2009;
Stevenson, 2002; Turow, 1997). In the introduction to their anthology, for example,
Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (2009) stipulate that the Horkheimer and Adorno school of
thought is, for the most part, deeply contrary to the positions they take up in media
industries scholarship. Instead, they advocate for a focus on creative autonomy and a
more complicated perspective on economies and institutions, where there are multiple
competing stake-holders and often a combination of public and private interests. Media
industry scholars are not just interested in the relationship between industry, economy,
legislation, and text but also between audiences and consumers.
There is also a group of scholars whose preference for the term “creative
industry” indicates their ideological break with the positions and methods espoused by
scholars of critical political economy almost entirely. Richard E. Caves (2000), Elizabeth
Currid (2007), Richard Florida (2002, 2007), and John Howkins (2001) all focus on
notions of “creativity” and “innovation” as the foundations of what they call the new
economy.
7
These scholars often avoid criticisms of neoliberalism and its market cultures
and instead, champion the branding of cities and its “creative populations,” urging public
policy to support free-market style competition in order to yield “innovation,” which they
see as essentially a version of public-interest. Unsurprisingly, disagreements between the

7
Richard Caves is an uneasy member of this group. While he does prefer to call these industries “creative”
and does shy away from the kind of Marxist political economy critiques that the earlier group prefers, he is
also not quite as celebratory as Florida or Currid.
25

first set of scholars, who address cultural, media and arts industries and this one, are vast.
Susan Galloway and Stuart Dunlop (2007) explain this distinction well:
abandonment of the term ‘cultural’ in favour of ‘creative’ industries is significant
within a ‘knowledge economy’ context. Whereas originally the cultural industries
– broadcasting, film, publishing, recorded music – were incorporated into cultural
policy, in this new policy stance, culture has been subsumed within a creative
industries agenda of economic policy, and in the process its distinctive aspects
have been obscured (p.19).
This review of some of the basic ideological and political distinctions that
undergird the scholarship on global cultural and arts industries provides important
background for an explanation of the ways in which I approach and define cultural,
media and arts industries. This project is motivated by some of the same concerns that
appear in the critical political economy scholarship. I am interested in each industry’s
consolidation into a neoliberal industry and the impact this process has had on the
conditions under which racial representation and racially-marked bodies travel and
circulate within the circuits of that industry. Consequently, while I do not support
conclusions that point to economic determinism, I do follow in the traditions of critical
political economy scholars by yoking economic transitions to aesthetic transitions,
critiquing the impact that free-market logics have had on the aesthetic articulations made
visible inside industries. Furthermore, I deal, in part, with the roles that national public
policy and government subsidy have had in shaping the racial climates of each industry.
As the above literature review has shown, public policy has often subsidized cultural
industries by understanding them as arts industries, connoting public-interest. Because of
26

this persistent history, I use the term “arts industry” wherever relevant. Consequently, I
refer to the U.S. and Israeli dance worlds as “arts industries”; to the Pakistani fashion
industry, which has been primarily imagined as a purely capitalist enterprise, free from
government subsidy, as a “cultural industry”; and to the visual art market, which toggles
between histories of free-market and public policy, as both an “arts” and “cultural”
industry.

Becoming Visible in the Global Context
As each of the industry case studies in the forthcoming chapters demonstrates, the
fact that arts industries that trade in expressive cultures are currently (and increasingly)
modeled after global neoliberal industries triggers a host of consequences for the artists
who participate in the industries and for their aesthetic articulations. While consequences
with regard to aesthetics and racial performances are typically both industry-specific and
economy-specific, there is one recurring motif: visibility. First, the new visibility that
industries grant to previously uncovered creative geographies is often heralded as one of
the primary victories of globalizing arts industries. Secondly, participating and
maintaining sustainability in each of the global arts industries I discuss requires that
artists stay mobile and stay visible. The compulsory global mobility that characterizes
contemporary global arts industries is in part, a way to secure continued, renewed
visibility within that industry. Circulation is a way to continually derive profit from
artists’, designers’, and dance companies’ visibilities. This relationship between mobility
and visibility seems to be an obvious one. However, because this dissertation is interested
in racially-marked bodies and the aesthetic expression of racial feeling, the basic
27

contradictions of global visibility must be addressed. For artists of color as well as for
racially-marked institutions that are suddenly visible on their industry’s maps, these
contradictions incorporate the flows of capital, neoliberal logics, and their attendant
structures of racial power.
More specifically, the question of visibility in increasingly global arts industry
landscapes, where the only bodies of value are visually legible ones, is also a question of
representation – the precondition to visibility is legibility. Representation, in turn, is a
commitment to embodiment, to marked bodies that bear essentializing meaning inside the
confines of a host of acceptable categories. The trouble with visibility, as it is inescapably
wed to representation, is best articulated by Evelynn Hammonds (2004) in her assertion
that “in overturning the 'politics of silence' the goal cannot be merely to be seen... [as]
visibility in and of itself does not... challenge the structure of power and domination,
symbolic and material, that determines what can and cannot be seen” (p.312). Visibility,
and the essentialized embodiment it often relies on to communicate difference, makes no
political guarantees and is entirely subject to the conditions of its production. What
Hammonds points to is the suggestion that visibility cannot be an end onto itself. To
borrow this insight for the visibility afforded and demanded by the global marketplace, is
to conclude, with the help of Michel Foucault (1979), that this visibility, evacuated of its
political moralities, operates like neoliberal currency. In discussing the power-laden
architecture of Bentham’s Panopticon, Foucault argues that visibility is a disciplinary
mechanism, functioning like a “trap,” producing in the visible subject, a constant
consciousness of visibility that leads her to constantly comply with the hegemonic
operations of power. “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it,” says
28

Foucault, “assumes responsibility for the constraints of power … he becomes the
principle of his own subjection” (Foucault, 1979, p.202-203). It is this kind of “trap,” I
argue throughout this dissertation, that many artists of color and off-center institutions
find themselves in, when operating inside their global industries.
Many scholars of globalization have employed Foucault’s theory on visibility in
order to understand how global visibility and mobility condition one another and the
cultural product that is generated at their intersection. For example, Radha S. Hegde’s
(2011) anthology, entitled Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media
Cultures, proceeds from this very supposition.
8
Hegde posits the relationship between the
visible labor of global stardom and the invisible labor of workers (like garment workers,
for example) to think about the ways in which gendered global visibility might provide
some insight into the ways that globalization structures racialized and gendered
inequities. In this volume, Radhika Parameswaran (2011) discusses the visual economies
of India’s beauty industry, while Angharad N. Valdivia (2011) examines the gendering of
who and what becomes globally visible as representatives of Latinidad. Other scholars
think through the concept of portability in conjunction with gendered spectacle, arguing
that the two interact in global visibility and global celebrity (Duvall, 2011; Thomas,
2011).
9

What these discussions illuminate for the present project is that the visibility that
accompanies artists’ global mobility operates deceptively and cannot be understood as a
symbol of uncontaminated progress in the sphere of global racial power and its persistent

8
Hegde actually cites Foucault’s “trap” comment with regard to visibility in her introduction (Hegde, 2011,
p.1).
9
Duvall discusses global celebrity humanitarians, while Thomas is interested in a fashion exhibition that
took place in Paris.
29

asymmetries. If mobility is undertaken in order to secure visibility, then the stakes of that
visibility also condition artists’ expressions according to patterns of site-specific
legibility. However, it is important to distinguish between the work of scholars described
above and the arguments I make in this dissertation. Scholars like Hegde, Parameswaran,
Valdivia, Duvall, and Thomas are all interested in the relationship between those
gendered discourses and bodies that travel and those that do not, thinking through the
nuanced differences that determine portability, mobility, and visibility. In this
dissertation, however, I am interested in a different configuration of this context. I argue
that artists strategically engage many different, site-specific and economy-specific racial
performances in order to be mobile. In other words, while I use the work of these scholars
as a starting point, I also argue that racial performances in the global are constituted by
many different, economically-determined racial performances that artists are compelled
to activate in order to continually travel. I am not asking what becomes visible and what
does not. Rather, I argue that artists and their ‘products’ become visible by constantly
engaging in a continuous, in some ways manic reframing of themselves and their
aesthetics. Instead of the binary (visibility/invisibility, portability/non-portability), I am
interested in the multiplicity of performances that fuel mobility; in what it means when
there are as many racial performances as there are economic destinations. It is a
relationship that can be understood through a theoretical analytic that I call “pop-up
performativity.”

30

Performative Moves and Authenticity in the Global Context
Throughout this dissertation, I use “pop-up performance” as a theoretical
framework to explain the ways in which artists traveling the circuits of their global arts
industries activate site-specific and economy-specific racial performances in order to
purchase legibility and ultimately secure continued mobility. Importantly, it is an analytic
that reflects and explains the work of contemporary, specifically global artists.
Consequently, to prevent anachronistic and oversimplified comparisons, I do not use the
pop-up lens in Chapter 1, which discusses a performer from the 1800s and another from
the early 1900s. I understand the racial performances that Castiglione and Indita
undertake in Chapter 1 as precursors to pop-up performance; precursors that illuminate
the ways in which pop-up performativity belongs to a long legacy of racial performance
in the arts but is also deeply indebted to the contemporary socioeconomic moment. Pop-
up performativity, I argue, is a unique aspect of economic globalization. It is a set of
economically-motivated and economically-dictated racial performances that, in their
willingness to comply with the variances of the global economy, provide considerable
insight into the conditions that structure mobility for artists who are racially marked as
other. The pop-up analytic is first and foremost rooted in understanding identity and
subject construction through the performative lens.
Drawing on legacies of poststructuralist thought, Judith Butler (1990) offers a
formulation for the theory of performativity.
10
While Butler famously eschews the issue
of race in this work (a topic she then taken up in her next book, Bodies that Matter), the
theory of performativity nevertheless offers a compelling framework for thinking through
the movement and productivity of racialized subjectivity; the same movement that is, as I

10
Specifically, Butler cites feminist poststructuralism as her primary inspiration.
31

will explain below, systematically denied people of color through the essentialist
rhetorics of authenticity in global mediascapes. Butler argues that social agents constitute
social reality through acts, making gender itself an act, rather than a socially constructed
role. Butler's resignifying intervention into the discursive formations of gender identity
posits that gender is unstable and relational, “both intentional and performative” (Butler,
1990, p.190). Gender identity, for her, “is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of
repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the
appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler, 1990, p.33). That is, that
which we understand as “internal” is the effect of compulsory performativity, naturalized
through ritualized bodily acts. Similar to another poststructuralist thinker, Jean
Baudrillard (1994), Butler positions the performance of drag as a “parody [that] reveals
that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an
origin” (Butler, 1990, p.188).
Importantly, for the examination of racial identity construction, Butler
conceptualizes performance as an emphasis on the process of “becoming,” where identity
performance is a morphing production for the body and its corollary identity (Butler,
1990). If identity must be maintained through performance, then the interruption of that
streamlined performance constitutes a critical break in socially-acceptable racial and
gender norms, suggesting potential sites of intervention, threatening a becoming (Butler,
1990). It is precisely this “becoming,” this notion of an ever-dynamic, producing and
reproducing subject, a subject who performs herself in order to be legible, that can serve
as a critical intervention for the examination of racialized subjectivity in the global
context. While the theory of performativity is critical for understanding the ways in
32

which subjectivities are mobile and in a constant state of becoming, in order to make it
portable for the examination of race, the analytic must be considered alongside
embodiment. That is, racial identity is here understood as both performance and
embodied, lived experience; as discursive construction and material presence. Many
scholars of race and performance have interrogated this dialectic of racialization by
looking to histories as well as contemporary instances of staged racial performance.
Building on Butler’s foundational work, scholars like Daphne Brooks (2006),
Nicole Fleetwood (2011), E. Patrick Johnson (2003), Tavia Nyong’o (2009), Cherise
Smith (2011), and Shane Vogel (2009) have recently employed the analytic of
performativity to examine racial formations, racial masquerades, deployments of racial
“authenticity,” and other variations on racially-indexed performances both in historical
and the contemporary contexts. Tavia Nyong’o, echoing another scholar of racial
performativity, Jared Sexton (2008), argues that discourses of racial hybridity work to re-
inscribe a deep investment in an American national fantasy, by deferring the promise of
hybridity to a race-less future and repressing knowledge about the history of these
processes. The hybrid figure, Nyong’o asserts, is akin to the old “mongrel” figure, now
masquerading as contemporary novelty. In light of this relationship, the author looks for
performative possibilities that “spin… the body into and out of the symbolic order, a
performance that becomes a mirror in which seeing and being seen convene without ever
quite converging” (p.103). Nyong’o, like Joseph Roach (1996), finds these moments in
the minstrel traditions of the circum-Atlantic world. Also considering minstrelsy, Daphne
Brooks examines post-bellum black musical theater and racial melodrama, observing
33

how bodies in performance work to alienate existing racial scripts through
transformation.
Other scholars of race and performativity have focused explicitly on performance
in the contemporary moment. E. Patrick Johnson, for example, relies on several
contemporary sites of black performance to unpack the notion of black authenticity in the
contexts of nation, masculine identity, citizenship, and heteronormative familial structure.
Johnson is particularly interested in the ways in which tropes of authenticity affix the
slipperiness between blackness as performed and as embodied. Cherise Smith’s work on
the conceptual and performance art of Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and
Anna Deavere Smith
11
and their navigations of racial, gendered and classed identity
explores some of the same themes. Smith argues that these artists’ performances of
identity switching and boundary crossing do not so much do away with more traditional
forms of identity politics as they emphasize the ambivalence that resides at the cross-
sections of these identity categories. While Johnson and Smith are both interested in the
U.S. context, George Yudice’s work yokes identity performance directly to
contemporary, global circulations of racial identity and cultural expressions (performance
art, visual art, music, etc.). He argues that the movement of cultures and cultural
industries – indeed, the very thing that makes them “expedient” in his primary argument
– is facilitated by the performative dimension. “Globalization,” Yudice argues, “brings
different cultures into contact with each other, it escalates the questioning of norms and
thus abets performativity” (p.31). As I discuss shortly, if moments of global encounter,
per Yudice, require performance to manage the “questioning of norms,” then we must ask

11
Cherise Smith examines projects and performances from the 1970s into the present.
34

what kinds of racial and gendered performances succeed in resolving the potential threat
posed by that questioning.
The works of the above scholars are key to understanding why performativity is a
useful framework for the examination of racialization in global arts industries.
Specifically, their discussions of subject (im)mobility and authenticity illuminate what is
at stake for the special currency that racial authenticity has in global circulations of racial
forms. Racial authenticity, as I explain in more detail in Chapter 4, is the fixing of racial
identity into predetermined categories and attendant bodies of knowledge. The practice
uses racially signifying bodies to search out the truth of identity and racial feeling,
immobilizing the subject it seeks to authenticate. Lawrence Grossberg (1997) explains
that in these essentialist positions, “the answers are guaranteed and everything is sewn up
in advance. Identities are fixed” (p.258). Identities are predetermined by sociohistoric
relationships that are both immobile and necessary. Racial authenticity dictates that
bodies (racialized, gendered, etc.) stand as guarantees for intellectual, psychological and
political commitments and capacities.
It is this subject-immobilizing technology of racial authenticity that scholars have
observed in the global. Each of the forthcoming chapters discusses the ways in which
specific racial authenticities operate in different industries. In the fashion industry, I
discuss the tropes of Orientalism. In the chapter on visual art, I think through what David
Joselit (2013) calls “identity tags.” And in the chapter on dance, racial authenticity takes
on specific manifestations with regard to corporeality and blackness. Here however,
Herman Gray (2005) proves helpful. Gray argues that racial authenticity is the media's
primary lens for the examinations and claims over what constitutes racial identity (Gray,
35

2005).
12
In the contemporary moment, marked by neoliberal capitalism and globalization,
this disciplining of the racially-marked body through the imposition of fixity is done
partly in the service of audience segmentation. That is, Gray argues that authenticity
produces audiences as markets, allowing publics to be segregated and grouped based on
essentialist identifications with racial groups. For example, expressive cultures identified
through authenticating discourses are profitable commodities that travel and circulate
globally, propelled by their specific global cultural industry. This proliferation of media
representation inside neoliberal global economies reduces the politics of racial justice to
visibility, equally restricting global citizenship to media consumption and representation
(Gray, 2005). But the work of racial authenticity does end there. There is also the issue of
cultural encounter.
As I have shown, globalization has been defined as a moment marked by
hypermobility, the increasing growth and global reach of neoliberal capital, shrinking
distances, mass mediation, growth of technoscapes, displacement, but also emergent
nationalisms, diasporic public spheres and off-center cultural economies (Appadurai,
1990; Bourriaud, 2009; King, 1997; Mbembe, 2001; Yudice, 2003). It is exactly these
processes of economic globalization, as George Yudice has observed, that bring different
cultures into encounter with one another. The point of contact for these encountering
cultures is an alienating one, leading to the questioning of existing norms and scripts
(among them, racial norms and scripts). Inside arts industries, these points of encounter
are not left to unravel on their own. On the contrary, to guarantee safe legibility and
industry profitability, these moments of encounter must be mitigated through an easily

12
Herman Gray is talking about blackness and black cultural formations specifically here.
36

legible racial performance; an authentic performance (Yudice, 2003).
13
The logics of
race, in turn, are indebted to a visual economy. The visible, as Robyn Wiegman (1995)
has argued is the central mode through which race is made 'real'. Particular bodies, once
visible, are assumed to have natural, equally particular meanings. In order for the visual
economy to work (indeed, to be deemed reliable), those meanings must be stabilized,
anchored to the bodies they are understood as representing. Wiegman explains that “the
visible economy of race [is] an economy of parts that enables the viewer to ascertain the
subject's rightful place in a racial chain of being” (p.21). Racial authenticity articulates
these racial stabilizations in the global moment, operating as a fulcrum around which
media visibility is distributed. According to the scholarship described here, then, the only
kind of racial performance that is tolerated and indeed acceptable inside global cultural
formations is a legibly “authentic” one. If authenticity is the primary mode of racial
presence and visibility, then performativity, which unseats the very premise of fixity and
corporeal guarantee that authenticity is built on, emerges as a useful theoretical tool for
imagining the ways in which performance (compulsory performance) sustains racial,
gendered, and sexual identities. It is a theoretical tool that allows us to account for the
transformation of subjectivities; to read that which “authenticity” would render
incoherent; to grapple with the unguaranteed, improvisational and constantly shifting
subjectivity that informs each performance of identity.

13
I am deliberately manipulating Yudice’s original argument a bit here. His point is that the moment of
encounter invites performativity, but he considers this an opening for potential disruption of norms.
However, because I am dealing explicitly with cultural and arts industries here, it is important to remember
that this moment of performativity is always already scripted by industry structures. Consequently, while I
do agree that the moment of encounter could be a productive one, as I show in the forthcoming chapters, it
is also a moment that is often harnessed for conservative, economic ends.
37

Pop-Up Performativity, Making-Do and Power
In contrast to the stable racial authenticity that, as scholars contend, dominates
global mediascapes, reading artists' identities through the performative lens allows us to
better understand the nuances of these racializations – how “authenticity” requirements,
for example, change from one political economy to the next. Speaking specifically to the
performative nature of cultures deployed as resources in global economies, Yudice
importantly observes that “context conditions expediency” (Yudice, 2003, p.41). In other
words, context dictates performance and performance, in turn, re-stages context. Since
context is constantly shifting under the conditions of globalization's hypermobility, the
performances that contexts inform follow suit. “Performative force,” Yudice continues, is
“understood and experienced differently in different societies” (p.43). If artists, designers,
choreographers and dancers are compelled by their industries to be constantly mobile,
then how do we account for their identity constructions and aesthetic articulations of race
within constantly changing geopolitical and economic contexts? How do we balance the
notion that global mobility requires of artists both legible authenticity and
performativity? And where in this schema is the hand of the artist herself? How does she
construct her racial identity and her aesthetics in this landscape? One way, I propose, is
through the analytic that I have been calling pop-up performance.
Pop-up performance is a strategic performance of identity (including the
performance of one’s aesthetic sensibilities as an extension of identity) that
accommodates its assumed climate of reception. Here, the technologies of the pop-up
concept are key. I rely on two, related traditions of the pop-up concept. First, and most
basic, the pop-up refers to a format of children’s books, where flipping a page reveals an
38

unexpected three-dimensional display that is erect when the reader lands on that page and
quickly folds away as soon as the reader turns the page. The three-dimensional image lies
dormant between the pages of the book, ready to pop-up, to be on full display as long as
necessary. The image appears fully formed, coherent and legible, and is only visible as
long as its site – the book pages it lives on – allow. Borrowing from this long-standing
tradition in children’s publishing, the pop-up has also emerged as a retail concept in the
last fifteen years. Pop-up retail spaces began appearing first in the U.S. and the U.K. in
the early 2000s and then quickly gained ground all over the world. The brands Vacant
and Comme des Garçons are typically cited as the primary innovators of this “guerrilla
store” concept. These retail stores appear overnight, in typically vacant spaces, offering
exclusive deals and sometimes VIP-access to limited-edition products and then disappear
just as quickly (Tzortzis, 2004). Stores pop up for a few weeks or a month at a time and
then fold up and move onto a different location. The retail trend picked up momentum
among global brands starting in 2008, when economic malaise began to set in across
many global economies, resulting in an eventual economic collapse, which brought with
it a major slow-down for retail-based industries. The pop-up store offered a solution. The
concept relies on short-term real estate leases, which benefit the renter, whose profits are
uncertain as well as the landlord, whose properties are otherwise vacant due to wide-
spread economic recessions (Lopez, 2013; Tzortzis, 2004). In a slow economy, these
stores also work to generate a particular mode of trend-setting buzz. Richard Watson
(2010), for example, argues that this “blend[…] of business and conceptual art…
recognizes that in retail you can only be hot for so long” (p.216). Furthermore, as
Andreas Tzortis pointed out, the concept allows new brands to experiment with different
39

price-points at a relatively low risk and established brands, to shore up exclusivity
through a limited-edition experience. The pop-up store, then, is in many ways a reaction
to the uncertainties and instabilities of neoliberal economies and their fluctuations. The
concept itself is a form of making-do; an improvisation on doing business and making art
in the contemporary moment.
The brief background on the pop-up concept is a reminder of the pop-up
functionalities that the performative analytic I have devised here rests on. Both in
children’s books and in the retail world, the concept of “pop-up” is deployed as both a
verb (to pop up) as well as a descriptive adjective (a pop-up shop, a pop-up book). In
thinking of the pop-up as a mode of performance utilized by global artists, I follow in this
logic. In global art worlds, performers and artists eschew aesthetic and identity-based
continuity in favor of what I call pop-up performance. Exhibitions and performances pop
up around the world, putting on display temporary pop-up aesthetics and pop-up racial
identities that correspond to their locations. Artists mount their exhibits and performances
in one specific location, customizing their aesthetic expressions and autobiographical
narratives according to site-specificity. They remain for a short period of time (the
duration of the exhibit or the performance), disappear, and pop-up again, in a different
location, with a shifted set of aesthetic expressions that has been recalibrated for the new
site. In pop-up performance, the basic materials for identity construction remain the
same, comprising a kind of archive of available identity building blocks that are used to
construct and erect each pop-up. As the exhibition and artist pop-up in a new location,
changing their sociopolitical context of reception, these materials re-assemble into a new
permutation; a site-specific, temporary, improvised, ever-adaptive and importantly,
40

legible pop-up. As the exhibit or performance pops up in a new location on the global
exhibition and touring circuit, the artist’s aesthetic articulation and racial identity become
subject to pop-up logics as well. In keeping with the performative lens, these
permutations are all equally valuable; all equally real. They are, however, strategically
arranged in compliance with each new context of reception – where the pop-up is being
mounted – in order to carve out a space of articulation and (compromised) visibility. The
analytic is not only intended explicitly for the exploration of racial performances in
global cultural arts industries, it is also a direct outgrowth of this scholarship.
Contemporary visual artists, for example, obligated to exhibit constantly and
internationally in order to remain valuable to their industries, mobilize some of the same
art forms, techniques, styles and motifs over and over again in the traveling works. This
would not be surprising (artistic style, after all), except that as their works travel, they
articulate drastically different sensibilities when it comes to race. These patterns of
adjustment repeat in every one of the industries I discuss. In Chapter 4, for example, a
choreographer uses his trademark “Gaga” movement praxis as his building blocks,
arranging the moralities of that praxis into choreographic pop-ups that comply with
European dance economies one moment and then with the U.S. dance economy the next,
delivering wildly different racial moralities as his troupe pops up in varying performance
contexts. In Chapter 2, Pakistani and Chechen fashion designers do the same,
reconstituting their aesthetic, making strategic selections, all for the opportunity to keep
popping up in the circuits of fashion’s visibility, to keep traveling and to stay mobile. As
the case studies make clear, pop-up performance, much like its predecessors in pop-up
41

retail, emerges in response to the demands imposed by neoliberal logics and the
industries that logic regulates.
To return to the global’s demand for racialization (authenticity and performance),
I suggest that pop-up performance allows artists to navigate different arts economies
through a permanent state of performance. Importantly, however, these performances are
performances of economically and geopolitically inflected authenticities. What pop-up
performance enables us to understand is that as arts industries imagine themselves more
and more as “global” industries, the artists who populate these industries have to maintain
mobility across wider geographic regions and therefore encounter multiple
“authenticities.” In each new exhibition or performance destination, artists must tweak
their own racial identities and their works’ racial identities to account for the new
context. Consequently, in each new exhibition site, the artist mounts a new, temporary
but customized permutation of identity and aesthetic. This permutation lasts only as long
as the exhibition, since travel mandates are also customization mandates. As the case
studies in the following chapters make clear, I argue that while site-specific arts
economies are not absolute determinants in artists’ pop-up performances, they do
significantly inform the racialized permutations that each pop-up will display and
embrace as its (temporary) aesthetic. It is this element of pop-up performativity that
warrants examination with regard to power. That is, following Michel Foucault’s (1976,
1978) notion of disciplinary and capillary power, I understand this performative rubric to
be both an expression of power, and the subjection to power.
14
In undertaking pop-up

14
The contemporary mode of power, according to Foucault (1976, 1978) resides in decentralized force
relations, where the most prevalent form of power is productive rather than repressive. Its’ fragmentation,
discursiveness and placement in social relations, makes it particularly insidious as its omnipresence
naturalizes it, disguising it through normalizing mechanisms that seeks to discipline (Foucault, 1978).
42

performances to enable their own presences in global arts industries, artists are exercising
forms of power, at the same time that they are accommodating the imbricated structures
of racial and economic power. Artists are engaged in a strategic selection of racial
assemblages that best suit their ideological, financial, and safety needs at each particular
moment and destination. At the same time, however, they are remixing available and
economically-determined racial scripts. As the case studies show, while these racial
scripts may not represent one homogeneous body of “authenticity,” the varying
authenticities demanded of artists might seem more democratic but actually inflict an
equal amount of violence onto the mobile racially-marked subject. Artists’ expressive
articulations and their own presences in global industries, then, are made visible and
conditioned by the same neoliberal logics.
In this way, it is helpful to think of artists’ pop-up performativity as a specialized
form of what Michel de Certeau (1984) calls “making do.” De Certeau defines making-do
as “an art of the weak,” undertaken in response to the mobilization of power and
importantly, inside the web of discipline, “manipulat[ing] and divert[ing] these spaces”
(p.37, p.30). These tactics play out “within enemy territory,” and are motivated by the
desire to make predetermined conditions more habitable for those without access to the
strategies that could significantly and immediately alter the discipline of social
organization (de Certeau, 1984, p.37).
15
I propose that de Certeau’s notion of “making-
do” provides some good background for explaining the ways in which power dynamics
are woven into the very architecture of global artists’ pop-up performances. The pop-up
performances described in this dissertation are deployed by those who are otherwise

15
Scholars like James Scott (1990), Robin Kelley (1994), and Alexis McCrossen (2009) refer to the make-
do in order to articulate covert tactics of resistance.
43

unable to either manage or alter the disciplines of racialization that each geopolitical and
economic contexts presents. Since, as I have explained with the help of Yudice and
Weigman, the global mobilities of arts industries generate potentially unstable cultural
encounters that require performativity to alleviate racial incoherence or uncertainty, pop-
up performances are as much about economic visibility as they are about ideological (and
sometimes physical) safety. These performances are intended to secure safe mobility and
legible participation in global arts industries. To say that pop-up performance is
“strategic,” then, is not at all to suggest that artists of color are responsible for their own
continued racialization. On the contrary, I argue that neoliberal logics have structured arts
industries in such a way that artists of color must perform – and must perform
compulsively, continuously, and obediently – in order to exist in their creative
economies. Furthermore, if these same artists are to find productive spaces for the
articulation of unscripted and potentially disruptive structures of racial feeling – as I
suggest throughout the dissertation that they can – they must also do it within the context
of these arts economies.

Excesses of Performance, Encounter, and Imagination
The strategic pop-up performances that happen at the point of global encounter
can be seen as tactics that emanate from a place of powerlessness and work to furnish the
spaces they inhabit with safety and other minimal amenities. Mobilized by the artists,
designers and choreographers detailed in this dissertation, racial pop-up transformations
become tactics of the make-do, staged inside arts industry structures that are increasingly
neoliberal and globally-oriented. As accommodating of power as these performances are,
44

and as scripted through the tropes of racial legibility and visibility as they are, however, I
argue that contemporary global artists manage to pry open temporary spaces of
destabilized and unscripted articulation. As passage and mobility are purchased through
constant racial performance, existing scripts and imaginaries are slightly altered in each
performance's wake, making inflections in systems of value that structure the traffic in
bodies, a traffic that is representational as much as it is material. Like Hyde’s tricksters,
16

global artists make-do within the economic and ideological architectures of their
industries through pop-up performance. They submit their own bodies as well their
bodies of work to the technology of the pop-up, its mechanisms of transformation and re-
assembly. They look to mutation and compulsory performance; performance that can
sometimes deliver an alienating play with social codes, along with productive visual
imaginaries, turning the inevitability of their conditions towards their own ends. The
production of these imaginaries – the conditions that can yield these imaginaries as well
as their fates – is one of the theoretical threads I pursue in the following chapters. In other
words, I am interested in the ways that industries restrict and compel racial dialogues in
global arts cultures, how artists accommodate those restrictions through performance, but
also, whether this hegemonic system has any leaks.
As I discussed in earlier sections of this chapter, George Yudice has argued that
the global movements of cultures and racially-marked articulations are facilitated by
performance. This performativity, what I have described as the compulsive need to

16
James Scott, in fact, makes this connection directly in his discussion of trickster stories as belonging to
the hidden transcript of resistance, which is an infrapolitical undertaking. “By knowing the habits of his
enemies, by deceiving them, by taking advantage of their greed, size, gullibility, or haste does [the trickster]
manage to escape their clutches and win victories... The structural position of the trickster hero and the
strategems he deploys bear a marked resemblance to the existential dilemma of subordinate groups” (Scott,
1990, p.162-163).
45

continually reproduce oneself and one’s work on the terrain of ever-changing racial
discourses through the technology of the pop-up, is also a space rich with productive
possibility for the performing subject and her performing aesthetics. Performativity
sketches out its own double-bind: it is compelled by the structures of domination that
dictate (in this case, racial) normative subjectivity, but is also inherently unstable,
becoming both more normalized and riskier with every performative permutation. The
key here, per Butler, is the performative dimension of “becoming” (Butler, 1990). If the
legibility of racial identity is to be maintained, in part, through a series of normalized
performances that are deemed “authentic,” then any interruption in the faithful
reproduction of these performances constitutes a kind of break with those mechanisms of
racialization that operate through racial authenticity and racial othering. If global artists
are invited to navigate their global industries through economy-specific modes of
“becoming,” then inexact reproductions of those norms can actually “become” sites of
volatility and intervention. As artists erect their latest pop-ups to produce yet another site-
specific and economy-specific racial permutation, they risk an illegible reproduction of
norms and sometimes even, a legible subversion of those norms. Throughout the
dissertation, I call these moments hegemonic leaks – temporary fissures in what were
meant to be rigidly controlled (indeed, economically controlled) racial performances.
Leaks can manifest in the form of racial memory, temporal messiness, and a corporeal
unraveling of racial “authenticity.” These hegemonic leaks, as the case studies show, are
not always possible and when they are, they are not necessarily intentional on the part of
the artist. It is the very nature of performativity: harnessable, but without guarantees.
46

As artists, dancers, choreographers and designers engage in pop-up performances,
animating strategic racial identities through racialized performance, they generate racial
imaginations. Motivated by the logics of profit and global visibility and compelled by the
same industries that bind those performances, the racial performances discussed in the
case studies can be conservative, disruptive, or both. The very act of performance
introduces instabilities into the performance, making the body that performs and then
recalibrates to perform again, a site of creative production and imagination. For artists
especially, working inside creative industries, the creative imagination is a fundamental
resource for pop-up tactics that seek to re-make contexts in more habitable forms.
Pakistani designers, for example, offer alternative racial and historical imaginaries by
making the Islamic veil globally visible, re-scripting the possibilities for the image of
global Islamic citizenship. The dance world’s cultural ambassadors, typically restricted
by nation-based and locally-sourced funding practices, swap aesthetics through cultural
encounter. Unexpectedly, the choreographic public diplomacy engineered by one dance
company becomes the corporeal tools for another dance company’s enacted racial
liberation. In affecting transformations that re-stage their racially-marked contexts, these
artists’ primary currency is, after all, the imagination, laden as it is with registers of
memory and desire. Like trickster figures, those who perform through popping-up –
whether it is for survival, for legibility, or for articulation – affect the spatial and
temporal context, the doorway that houses their racial performance.
This dissertation focuses on the notion that artists and performers draw on racial
performances as a resource, to negotiate the unscripted encounters that are produced
through their own global movement. Pop-up performance is a tactic of producing one's
47

body in ways that are both legible and safe inside the grammars of the global. Moreover,
as performing bodies cross thresholds and make their way through the doorways of each
industry, they leave traces in their wake, changing the walls that line each context,
making slight inflections in the memories they leave behind. The mobile body sometimes
unleashes alternate imaginaries at the same time that it holds on to traces of meaning and
value. Put another way, imagination not only motors the deployment of racial
performance, it is also the storage space for the traces left behind, having stood witness to
that performance. If the trickster artist does indeed create and re-create the domain she
commands, then the traces of that creation register in the leftover imagination.

Case Studies: “Performance Art,” Fashion, Visual Art, and Dance
As noted in the beginning of this chapter, racial pop-up performativity and its
relationship to global mobilities and encounters will be explored through case studies of
contemporary global arts industries. I use the case studies as a way to investigate the
conditions, limitations, and possibilities of racial performance and travel in contemporary
global cultural industries, such as fashion, visual art, and dance. Chapters are divided
thematically, with each one staging a conversation between two or more examples in a
given industry. These global arts industries do not just require travel as part of their
neoliberal structures; they also condition aesthetics in accordance with their economic
intentions of wide distribution and mobility.
The economic dimension is critical here as I have selected case studies that hail
from different corners of global arts industries. That is, these chapters address the
aesthetics and individual creative figures behind fashion, visual art, and dance as much as
48

they address the industries that nurture and enable these articulations, making them
legible, visible and globally mobile in the first place. To mention cultural industries in
this manner is to understand these aesthetics and imaginaries as produced and made
visible under the auspices of the global's dominant economic enterprise – neoliberalism. I
argue that the contemporary examples described in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are implicated in
and in some cases, enabled by the neoliberal logics of global capitalism. The ways in
which this relationship between industry and imagination is made and unmade through
the play with racial and gendered performance is the overarching topic of this
dissertation. With the help of trickster artists, this relationship is dramatized in the
cultural and geopolitical doorways of global arts industries. Here, the case studies testify
to the conditions of their own mobility, performing to reveal what is necessary but also,
what is possible.
Before proceeding to the contemporary case studies, however, it is necessary to
explore the ways in which racial transformation has always been a resource for mobility
(both subject mobility and travel) in different art worlds. Chapter 1 offers two brief
biographical sketches of artists who have used different forms of racial performance in
order to secure their own mobilities as creative figures. I have deliberately chosen two
performers from vastly different time periods and geopolitical and economic contexts:
Countess di Castiglione and Princess Indita. That they represent these different contexts
reminds us that racial performance and racial permutations have always been deployed
for mobility. Additionally, Castiglione and Indita’s different worlds testify to the urgency
of considering contemporary racial performances, when arts industries have congealed
into capitalist enterprises and when aesthetic sensibilities are often structured through
49

global economic considerations from the ground-up. Because my primary concern in this
dissertation is the contemporary moment, Chapter 1 functions more as an extension of the
dissertation’s Introduction. The chapter’s purpose is two-fold. First, these two historical
vignettes offer a historicist perspective that is critical for any contemporary work. While,
as I argue, neoliberal economics and globalization in the contemporary moment mean
that artists are required to undertake geographically wider and more constant mobility
than ever before, the concept of mobility has always been integral to cultural and arts
industries. Moreover, as the Countess and the Princess remind us, that mobility has a
history of being intertwined with racial transformations. Second, this chapter sketches out
just what I mean by mobility; it addresses subject mobility across varying, racialized
identity permutations, at the same time as it considers the physical movement of artists
inside industries that are both symbolic and financial. This chapter provides a brief
historical backdrop in order to explain why the nature of the contemporary moment’s
relationship between arts industries, race, and mobility is such a vital object of study.
Chapter 2, “Performing Modernity and Race on the Runway: Pakistani Fashion
Week and the Aesthetics of Off-Center Industry” focuses on the contemporary fashion
industry, using Pakistan's growing manufacturing and fashion industry as well as
Chechnya's entry into the networks of global fashion as subjects of inquiry. Part of what
we can consider the fashion world’s “jagged maps,” the Pakistani and Chechen fashion
industries provide considerable insight into the conditions that constitute global mobility
for contemporary fashion’s “off-center” industries (Bourriaud, 2009; Enwezor, 2009).
Juxtaposing the careful, racially-tactical performances of Pakistani designers and industry
officials domestically with those performances they engage as they begin to be mobile
50

inside fashion’s governing maps, reveals the cost (in terms of specific racializations) of
the off-center’s global mobility. Additionally, this chapter explores the aesthetic
imagination that is generated in the production of Islamic fashion for the global and
diasporic markets and its potential hegemonic leaks.
Chaper 3, called “Wandering Bodies, Wandering Imaginaries: Heritage and
Cosmopolitanism in Visual Art” examines the global market for the exhibition and sale
of contemporary visual art. In this chapter, I stage a conversation between three
contemporary visual artists – U.S.-based Puerto Rican artist Sofia Maldonado, Mexico-
based Argentinian artist Máximo González, and the Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine
Tayou. Tracing the pop-up performances favored by these three artists, I consider the
aesthetic commitments of their various works and importantly, how the strategic
changeability of those aesthetic commitments during transnational travel and exhibition
can be seen to correspond to their respective arts markets. Lastly, I consider how artists
use their own racial identities, specifically, their diasporic identities, in order to create a
self-brand. This self-brand, as I argue, ultimately reconciles any fissures that might result
from their compulsive performances of popping-up.
This dissertation’s last case study, Chapter 4, “Dancing the Nation: Travel &
Racial Transformation in the U.S. Dance Industry” focuses on two specific dance
troupes: Ohad Naharin’s Israeli company Batsheva and the U.S.-based Alvin Ailey
American Dance Theater. This chapter investigates their histories of cultural exchange
and public diplomacy and that shared history’s impact on the possibility of racial
dialogues in choreography and dance aesthetics. The two dance troupes selected for this
chapter demonstrate and complicate dance's longstanding relationship with racial
51

embodiment, cultural exchange on stage and transnational mobility. Ultimately, this
chapter offers a picture of the global dance world that is deeply indebted to an imagined
but economically-significant ‘national’ but nevertheless capable of producing excess
corporealities and hegemonic leaks.
The case studies presented in this dissertation thread together expressive cultures
in order to show how they operate as cultural faces of global, neoliberal, performing arts
industries and how their compulsory play with racial codes can illuminate the role and
shape of racial embodiment and performance during global mobility. Consequently, there
is no specific formula for how chapters are structured. Each industry employs its own
unique version of the neoliberal philosophy, requiring equally unique rubrics of
evaluation. As a result, each of the industries illuminates a different aspect of what Sassen
considers the “thickness and specificity of the national and the global” (p.267). The
fashion industry tells us about the operations of racially-marked geographies and industry
maps. Marked by an aesthetic and physical “wandering,” the visual art industry
emphasizes the conditions of a mandatory, incessant mobility. And dance industries
function as a staunch reminder that the national is still very much an economic and
ideological component of what industries like to imagine as the expanded global.

52

CHAPTER ONE: THE COUNTESS AND THE PRINCESS: HISTORY’S
MOBILE RACIAL TRANSFORMATIONS

One was a controversial, endlessly masquerading Italian countess in mid-
nineteenth century France, living between multiple realities and crafting her biography
and myth through traveling photographs. The other was a U.S. Vaudeville performer in
the 1910s, traveling that entertainment industry’s circuits as a Hopi Princess, Hawaiian
musician, snake-charmer and filmmaker. The former operated inside symbolic economies
of celebrity, fueled by the advent of photography, the circulation of cartes-de-visite, and
the cultural popularity of masquerade attractions. The latter, on the other hand, was an
industry performer, making-do inside the very non-symbolic economies of travel and
stage appearance as they were dictated by the socioeconomic conditions of the industry.
Decades, economies, and geographies apart, what these two historical figures have in
common is their strategic navigations of the relationship between racial performance,
mobility, and economy.
This chapter pairs the two women – Countess de Castiglione and Princess Indita –
in order to examine their biographies and their racial performances in the context of
travel and mobility. Their sketches in this chapter are meant to provide a glimpse into the
long and complex relationship between histories of mobility and their indebtedness to
racial performance. The Countess’s and the Princess’s stories illuminate the various ways
in which racial performance has been a mechanism of geographic mobility and
circulation in the past. Simultaneously, these two stories demonstrate the urgency in
considering what happens to this relationship between racial transformation and mobility
when contemporary global arts industries both mandate and accelerate widening scopes
of travel, requiring artists to participate in order to be visible and industry viable, a topic
53

that the rest of this dissertation takes as its focus. The detour into historical examples of
racial performance and travel both situates the dissertation’s contemporary case studies
with regard to their inherited histories and reminds us why it is necessary to examine the
contemporary manifestations in the first place. As such, I consider the two historical
vignettes offered in this chapter as an extension of the ideas laid out in the Introduction;
intended more as prefaces to the forthcoming explorations of contemporary global arts
industries.
This dissertation is primarily interested in the various modes of racial
performance, transformation, and economically-compelled play that characterize
contemporary global cultural and arts industries. The forthcoming chapters on fashion,
visual art, and dance industries all explore the strategic racial performances that artists,
dancers, choreographers, and designers undertake in order to participate in the global
mobility that their respective cultural industries require. Consequently, I track these
artists’ racial transmutations across each industry’s global economic stage, asking how
we can link the specificity of each racial performance to the economy that compels its
presence. While I am interested in parsing how the contemporary global economy
conditions racial performance and how artists attempt to accommodate those conditions,
it is important to both temper and situate these contemporary discussions in their
historical traditions. The archives of the cultural industries discussed in this dissertation
are replete with examples of racial performance in artistic production.
The notion that artists from various industries have looked to racial performance
in order to articulate their bodies and often, to enable their own geographic and social
mobilities is not new. Wearing physical masks and racially marked fashion, donning
54

blackface, changing one’s aesthetic form or style to signal racialization, changing one’s
name to reflect a new racial identity, fictionalizing a racial autobiography and adopting
racially-marked corporealities through comportment and movement have all been tactics
undertaken by artists. While these racial performances have at once expressed and
accommodated the prevailing regimes of racial power and domination, the historical
examples are actually wildly varied and not conducive to easy comparison. Some were
overt, self-reflexive plays with racial identity, while others were covert performances
intended to fashion a new “authentic” racial identity. Some were violent caricatures,
some carnivalesque and others were undertaken for survival. Likewise, the two case
studies I explore in this chapter are not comparative. As I will show, the racial strategies
mobilized by Countess di Castiglione and Princess Indita operate according to logics and
economies that are not easy to match. Furthermore, while a figure like Countess di
Castiglione can be read as an artistic ancestor of contemporary artists like Cindy Sherman
and a performer like Princess Indita can be seen as an early case of what scholars have
called “playing Indian,” creating any kind of direct genealogies is not my objective here.
Instead, their stories contextualize the artistic racial transmutations of the contemporary
moment by offering historical instances of racial performance both inside the confines of
a cultural industry as well as outside of that definition. The case studies are examples that
correspond to their own unique economies and socioeconomic conditions of travel,
without simple, linear connections to either contemporary performance art or
contemporary forms of racial appropriation.
Divided into two central parts, this chapter discusses each woman on her own
terms, explaining her relevant industries and economies and suggesting a specifically-
55

motivated relationship between her racial transformations and mobility. The first portion
addresses Countess di Castiglione and proceeds in three parts. First, I offer a brief
biographical sketch, describing her legacy and the narratives of her now sparse fame.
Secondly, I examine the little scholarship that does exist surrounding her figure,
considering the works of primarily two scholars who have taken on her legacy with
regard to gender. Finally, I propose that her body of work must be considered through its
relationship to geographic circulation and race, grounded in the parallel contexts of the
photography industry and cultural popularity of racial masquerade. The second portion of
this chapter belongs to Princess Indita and proceeds along slightly different lines,
consisting of two parts. First, because there is very little information available about this
figure, I trace her biography through her travel, noting the racial performances that she
engaged along the way. Second, I situate her traveling and appearances in context of the
Vaudeville industry to which she belonged. I argue that she “made-do” within the
restrictions imposed by the industry through racial performance.

Countess di Castiglione: Ambassador, Professional Beauty, and Auteur
Called “La Divine Comtesse” by her contemporaries and her cult-like biographers
alike, the Countess was born Virginia Oldoini in Florence in 1837.
1
At age seventeen she
married Francesco Verasis, Count di Castiglione, and became Countess di Castiglione
(Apraxine & Demange, 2000; Loliée, 1907). By 1855, the Countess had become a known
beauty and was enlisted in enterprises of cultural ambassadorship (or political intrigue)

1
Frédéric Loliée has her year of birth as 1840 (she often told people it was 1843). However, because Loliée
worked off of the documents that the Countess herself provided, there is reason to approach these two dates
with some skepticism as it was common for a certain class of women to alter their ages at this time.
Apraxine’s year of 1937, therefore, is likely more reliable.
56

by Italian Prime Minister Camillo Cavour, who sought to unify Italy under the
government of Vittorio Emanuele II of Savoia. The unification rested partly on the
decisions made by the Congress of Paris, which was to convene that year in Paris, led by
Emperor Napoleon III, to discuss politics and peace treaties on the continent. Countess di
Castiglione was sent to Paris to informally advocate for unification through friendship
with Napoleon III (Apraxine & Demange, 2000; Loliée, 1907).
2
Presented at French
court in January 1856, she quickly became Napoleon’s mistress, equally quickly gaining
notoriety for sexual impropriety, a reputation that grew exponentially over the following
years and still results in scholars having to refute that she was a courtesan. The affair with
the Emperor lasted only a year and a half, ending in 1857, bringing with it her brief return
to Italy and her separation from her scandalized husband.
3
However, this relationship
catapulted Countess di Castiglione into “dazzling social fame” and led to the
establishment of a long-lasting relationship with the photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson,
of the Mayer & Pierson photography studio in Paris (Apraxine, 2000, p.27). Over the
course of her lifetime, Countess di Castiglione commissioned Pierson to produce over
400 photographs, most of which consisted of photographic portraits of the Countess
herself.
4
The relationship between Castiglione and Pierson endured to her death and
generated a large body of work.
5
The photographs, which are typically divided into three
sets, correspond to definitive stages in the life of her fame: the Napoleon years (1856-

2
According to Apraxine and Demange, the official reason that was given for the Paris trip was to visit her
cousins Count and Countess Walewski.
3
In 1857, the Italian carbonari made an attempt on Napoleon III’s life and the attack was blamed on
Countess di Castiglione, who was consequently banished from court, ending the affair. There is some
speculation that the attack was only an excuse to banish the Countess because the Emperor had already
begun an affair with her cousin (Apraxine, 2000; Loliée, 1907).
4
Much of this archive survived as negatives.
5
The two actually became dear friends and Castiglione called Pierson “Papa Pierson” (Apraxine, 2000,
p.28).
57

1858); her return to Paris and intense social and romantic popularity (1861-1867); and the
mental illness that preceded her death (1885-1895). It is these photographs that are the
favored subject of those few scholars, curators, biographers and fans who have taken the
Countess on as a subject.
Writers and scholars have primarily expressed interest in the photographs because
there is evidence – both visual, in the photographs themselves, as well as recorded, in
letters and diaries – to suggest that Countess di Castiglione not only co-authored the
images, alongside Pierson but that this co-authorship also produced some of the most
visually sophisticated images of the Victorian era. Together, Castiglione and Pierson
played with voyeurism, emphasizing and subverting the gaze of the photographer and the
subject, using mirror-effects, masks, framing the eye, adding color to the photographs,
cropping the image, staging dramas in the style of tableaux vivants and employing early
“photo-shopping” techniques. Castiglione, for example, used pins to attach slivers of
blank paper to the photographs, indicating where she’d like Pierson to dissolve the image,
creating the illusion of slimness or mystique.
6
The nature of the commissioned portraits,
which often surpassed narcissism in favor of what would have been regarded as
eccentricity, only fueled the Countess’s myth, supplying further fodder for her public
reputation as a sexual transgressor. Furthermore, adding to the auteur theories, as I will
discuss in more detail in the next section, Castiglione guarded her photographic images
carefully, allowing only one to ever be sold or displayed in a gallery, preferring instead to
gift photographic albums and cartes-de-visite to select admirers. Castiglione, as Xavier
Demange (2000) explains, “was, of all the celebrated women of the nineteenth century,

6
These slivers of paper are still attached to her photographs, which are housed in the archives at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
58

the one who most assiduously tended her public image with an eye to posterity” (p.53).
Most of all, her biographers have been fascinated by her use of photography to dramatize
identity, to erect fictional biographies, to use her own body in order to produce herself as
a commodity, to orchestrate her public image, and to engage in constant and often bold
identity masquerades. The instrument of photography was, for her, not “an irrefutable
statement of reality but… a malleable tool in the service of the imagination” (Apraxine,
2000, p.12). This suggestion does not only make her an innovator during this time period,
but also gives her some claim to the legacies inherited by contemporary performance
artists like Cindy Sherman, Claude Cahun, Yasumasa Morimura, and Sophie Calle
(Apraxine, 2000).
7

Scholars Consider the Countess: Authorship, Gender Identity, and the Male Gaze
Countess di Castiglione is mentioned in several works of history, art, and critical
theory, but rarely in an extensive manner.
8
Frédéric Loliée’s (1907) biographical chapter,
compiled from private correspondence and Castiglione’s own archives (all of which are
now missing) has served as the Countess’s primary biography. In her book on the
Empress Eugénie, Alison McQueen (2011) refers to her briefly as Eugénie’s
contemporary and romantic competitor (Eugénie was Emperor Napoleon III’s wife). Ann
M. Ryan (2003) cites Castiglione in discussing the photography of Rita Hammond.
Jessica Kerwin Jenkins (2010) offers a few brief paragraphs about the Countess in her

7
Although, it is important to note that Pierre Apraxine explicitly cautions against understanding Castiglione
as a direct precursor to these contemporary artists (Apraxine, 2000).
8
She was also the subject of a biographical work by the poet Robert de Montesquiou, a work that is
regarded more as a fiction given its cult-like treatment of the Countess. Additionally, there was the 1942
film La Contessa Castiglione, the 1955 film La Castiglione, and an audio recording of “conversations”
with the Countess through spirit mediums that was published in 2001.
59

whimsical ode to the “exquisite” and Irving Wallace (1981) includes an entry about the
Countess in an edited volume on sex and celebrity. Pierre Apraxine and Xavier Demange
(2000) provide an exhibition catalog that explores Castiglione’s biography and
photographs, in conjunction with the 2000 “La Divine Comtesse” exhibit that was on
display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
9
In addition to these brief
engagements with the Countess, there are two scholars who have gone beyond the
biographical, to explore Countess di Castiglione and her photographs from the
perspective of critical theory – Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1986) and Shawn Michelle
Smith (1999). Both scholars address Castiglione’s auteur legacy on the terrain of gender
identity, one arguing in favor of this legacy and the other against it.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau examines the professional collaboration between
Pierson and Castiglione in context of feminine subjectivity and the problems that that
subjectivity poses for feminine self-representation, arguing against the supposition that
Castiglione could be considered an author of her photographs. Acknowledging that since
historically women have rarely authored their own representations Castiglione’s
relationship with Pierson is certainly an exceptional one, Solomon-Godeau takes issue
not with the fact of Castiglione’s participation in image production, but in the kind of
images that participation actually produced. For Solomon-Godeau, Castiglione’s
hundreds of photographs – depicting her sleeping, posing, fainting, “improperly”
displaying her legs, taking on various hyper-feminine disguises – demonstrate the extent
to which the Countess regarded herself as object and commodity, presenting a kind of
pathologized performance of normative feminine subjectivity. Leaning on scholars of

9
Pierre Apraxine was the curator of this exhibit and one of the co-authors, along with historian Xavier
Demange, of the exhibition catalog.
60

masquerade, like Joan Riviere (1929), Luce Irigaray (1977) and Mary Ann Doane (1982),
the author argues that Castiglione’s self-representations are indicative of her own
obsessive internalization of the male gaze, collapsing the psychological distance between
the self and the representation/image, between the interior and the speculative exterior,
becoming both subject and object at once. Ultimately, regarding the Countess and her
body of work as a tragic display of the problems of female self-representation, the author
concludes: “The masks, the disguises, the postures, the poses, the ballgowns, the displays
of the body – what is the Countess but a tabula rasa on whom is reflected a predetermined
and delimited range of representations?” (Solomon-Godeau, 1986, p.107).
It is precisely this analysis of Castiglione and her supposed compliance with the
patriarchal scopic regimes of her time that Shawn Michelle Smith disassembles. In stark
opposition to Solomon-Godeau, Smith borrows from a different set of scholars, invoking
Judith Butler (1990) and Chantal Mouffe (1992) in order to discard the assumption that
identity is somehow fixed in the body. What Solomon-Godeau finds troubling in
Castiglione is that the Countess’s prolific production of feminine identities cannot
possibly correspond to what the author considers her interiority. Smith, on the other hand,
in the tradition of theories of performativity, locates Castiglione’s identity in those
representations. More specifically, she locates identity in the narratives that are produced
when we stitch together the seemingly disparate representations and are forced to
consider the body “as a product, not a producer, of identity” (Smith, 1999, p.104). In
other words, for Smith, Castiglione’s photographs are not the demonstration of a
feminine subjects’ inability to construct and represent identity, as Solomon-Godeau
would have it, but the exact opposite of that. Smith argues that the photographic archive
61

is precisely the site of identity creation for Castiglione, where the Countess claims
various available but nevertheless shifting representations for herself, thereby
constructing her identity through multiple subject positions.
As the Introduction to this dissertation has demonstrated, this dissertation works
from the same set of theoretical assumptions about performativity and the construction of
identity as Shawn Michelle Smith. The following chapters both proceed from the
assumption and simultaneously demonstrate the mutability of the self and the ways in
which articulations of the self employ the body as a locus from which to speak in legible
and visible ways. Like Smith, I argue against the duality of the interior and exterior, the
rigidity between subjecthood and objecthood. However, because I deal primarily with
racial identity and racial representation, these theories are made necessarily more
complicated since racial signifiers articulate inside the performative registers but do,
nevertheless, have bodily consequences in the schemes of power and domination. It is
this complexity that I am interested in bringing to the examination of Countess di
Castiglione. While Solomon-Godeau and Smith are interested in the ways in which
Castiglione’s performances index femininity and render “the authorship of womanhood”
(Smith, 1999, p.101), my interest in the Countess lies more in her play with racial
costumes and these particular photographs’ circulation and travel.
For the purposes of this chapter, then, it is necessary to classify the photographs
that she and Pierson produced by genre, which can be seen as corresponding to her
development as auteur. As time went on, the photographs evolved from typical beauty
portraits to decidedly atypical and eccentric images of aging feet, demonstrating her
growing willingness, per Smith, to engage in dramatizing multiple subject positions
62

through tactical masquerade. There are roughly four genres: portraits of Castiglione in
fancy dress, portraits of Castiglione in racially-signifying costume, portraits of
Castiglione as women of the demi-monde, and finally, photos of Castiglione’s legs and
feet (a particular favorite of scholars, who note that producing these images was an act of
transgression at the time, aligning her more with sex workers than nobility). In this
chapter, I am interested in those photos where Castiglione poses in racially-marked
costumes. Coupled with Castiglione’s carefully curated geographic circulation of her own
images, this set of photographs suggests that the Countess used racial performance as a
way to become mobile within the symbolic economies of celebrity, gaining a mode of
mobility that was otherwise unavailable to her because of her noble status. The strategic
circulation of her photographs, as I will show, was underwritten by developments in the
photography industry and the concurrent wide-spread popularity of racial masquerade
culture.

Castiglione’s Symbolic Travels: Mobile Photographs and Racial Masquerades
Within Castiglione’s photographic archive are a series of photos called “Chinois”
depicting the Countess as a geisha, dressed in a kimono, sometimes holding a bamboo
umbrella, looking away shyly. In another photo, she poses casually, leaning suggestively,
with a self-satisfied grin as an Odalisque, a female concubine figure from the Ottoman
Empire. She appears as the Greek Queen Etruria in one photo and as Gustav Flaubert’s
Carthiginian (present-day Tunisian) character Salammbô in another. She is also a Finnish
woman as well as a peasant from Normandy, sitting primly in full costume, knitting, all
the while staring mischievously at the camera. Records suggest that there were also plans
63

in place to photograph her as the Queen of Sheba, a queen that often appears in Ethiopian
and Yemeni historical texts (Demange, 2000). These representations of Castiglione’s
racial masquerade are often interpreted by scholars and biographers as simply more
examples of her range of femininities, without further attention paid to the fact that these
femininities also index racial difference through costume and bodily comportment.
Certainly, as I explain below, for noble women of France’s Second Empire,
10
dressing in
costumes of racialized femininity was nothing novel; neither was the use of photography
to publicize one’s image or conversely, to privately record visual evidence of costumes
worn at balls. It was the ways in which Countess di Castiglione combined those two
practices of racial masquerade and photography that make her a stand-out example of the
intersections between racial performance and mobility. The racial masquerade that was
made normative through the European institution of masquerade became Castiglione’s
primary resource and specific technologies of photography became her primary tool.
Any discussion of the institution of masquerades necessarily draws on the
historical tradition of carnival feasts, which are typically positioned by scholars like
Mikhail Bakhtin (1968) as annual, usually European, festivals where peasants and other
subjects of the state are allowed – encouraged even – to engage in excess, mimicry of the
gentry, the church and authorities, spectacular and grotesque corporeal displays, as well
as plays with masking. These temporary, transgressive celebrations are also referred to as
world-upside-down festivals, rituals of reversal, and dirt rituals, for their traffic in
bawdiness and sometimes, actual filth (Bakhtin, 1968; Scott, 1990; Hyde, 1998).
11
An

10
The Second Empire in France is understood to have lasted from 1852 to 1870. The Emperor at the time
was Emperor Napoleon III.
11
These celebratory renderings of carnival and masquerade have incited academic critiques, which tend to
coalesce around safety-valve theories. Critics like Stallybrass and White (1986) argue that carnivals and
64

important distinction here is that Bakhtin’s carnival is a subversive ritual undertaken by
mostly subjugated peoples in order to create spaces of otherwise unavailable and
unscripted corporeal and ideological liberation; it is the subjugated people's temporary
second life, according to him. While the masquerade balls that I am concerned with in
this chapter are not quite carnivalesque dirt rituals, it is necessary to understand that the
spirit of the nobility’s masquerade balls arose from carnivalesque values of class, race,
and gender subversion. This is why Terry Castle (1986) draws on this tradition of the
carnivalesque in order to explore the institution of masquerade in eighteenth-century
England, a practice that is not unlike the one Castiglione and her fellow French nobles
reproduced in the mid-nineteenth century. Interested in both the cultural institution of
masquerade as well as its image in literature, Castle's tone resembles Bakhtin's in many
ways.
12
For Castle, the decadent costuming and masks of these balls render the body
permeable, revealing corporeal and psychological alterity behind the safety of the mask.
Similarly to Bakhtin, Castle too mentions the dream worlds invoked inside the mask, the
alterity that is sampled through a promiscuous play with identity. Additionally, citing
transgressions that register in the orders of gender, sexuality, class, rank, and citizenship,
Castle observes:
The saturnalian exchanges encoded in masquerade costume – dukes dressed as
footmen, footmen dressed as dukes – were thus reinscribed in the makeup of the
masquerade crowd itself, where dukes and footmen indeed rubbed shoulders in
one 'promiscuous' huddle... Individual behavior was freer at the masquerade than

masquerades are contained spatially and temporally and sanctioned by authorities, functioning like a
conservative mechanism for the release of frustrations of oppression and followed by the full restoration of
order.
12
This is in spite of the fact that Castle acknowledges Bakhtin's skepticism toward the 18
th
century culture
of masquerade, which the latter viewed as a trivialized and diluted version of the original tradition.
65

at virtually any other public occasion where the classes and sexes mixed openly.
The presence of masks and costumes, not surprisingly, was responsible for this
collective sense of increased liberty (p.34)
As scholars like Ann Ilan-Alter (2001), Nicholas Green (1990), John Hutton
(1987), Julia Landweber (2005), Frédéric Loliée (1907), and Alison Unruh (2008) all
point out, many different varieties of masquerade balls and costumed balls were popular
practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in France. Turkish costumes, as
Landweber explains, enjoyed particular popularity among French women starting with
the early 1700s and into the late 1800s. What the author calls “exotic masquerades” had
gained so much popularity by the mid-1700s that one ball “invited both individual
participants and their collective audiences to experiment with alternative national
identities — trying them on like clothes because they were clothes — without political or
psychological threat” (Landweber, 2005, p.186). While this extensive history is outside
of the scope of this chapter, it is important to note that the normativity of these “exotic
masquerades” were supported by European colonialist and imperialist expansions on the
one hand, and the prevalence of world’s exhibitions on the other. Linda Nochlin (1991),
for example, observes that nineteenth century Orientalism,
13
a direct consequence of
European colonialist expansion, was reflected in the works of many writers and visual
artists, like Eugène Delacroix. At the same time, the French Exposition Universelle, held
for the first time in 1855, began to slowly incorporate representations of colonized
populations into its exhibition as the century went on (Hale, 2008). In this context,
images of an Odalisque, a Geisha, or an Ethiopian Queen became commonplace

13
I am referring here to Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism, which I define and discuss in more detail in
the next chapter.
66

signifiers of an exoticized feminine sexuality, frequently depicted in visual art and
literature, and more importantly, often donned as a costume by French women at masked
balls (Beaulieu & Roberts, 2002; DelPlato, 2002; Marien, 2002; Nochlin, 1991; Gilman,
1985).
According to the biographical texts that recorded her public appearances,
Countess di Castiglione participated in the masked balls at French court frequently during
her youth in Paris. Unlike her contemporaries who also donned these costumes, however,
Castiglione not only commissioned photographs of herself in the racially-marked attire,
but also circulated them to individual suitors, friends and admirers. As McQueen notes in
her description of the Empress Eugénie’s relationship to the arts, French women of this
time were often painted or photographed as costumed racial others. The visibility of these
depictions, however, was strictly policed by class designations and fell primarily into two
categories. Images of French women aristocrats and nobility were intended for private
eyes only; those like Empress Eugénie never circulated their racial depictions of foreign-
born queens, concubines, and noblewomen (McQueen, 2011). Images of French women
actresses, dancers, and sex workers, on the other hand, were reproduced widely and
circulated for commercial profit (Hickman, 2003; Shteir, 2004; Solomon-Godeau, 1986).
In this scheme of social organization, Countess di Castiglione’s photographs of
exoticized and Orientalist racial otherness occupied an uncertain space. She was of noble-
birth, with a title to match. At the same time, as her biographers note, her reputation
preceded her. She was often accused of being a courtesan and mythologized as much in
popular fiction (Apraxine & Demange, 2000).
14
It is in this uncertain, unclassifiable

14
For example, four years after her 1899 death, the novelist Henri de Régnier wrote Le mariage de minuit
in which he turned Castiglione into a courtesan.
67

space of in-betweenness that Castiglione cultivated her celebrity and her legend, using
race to make her image mobile and portable. She did this with the help of cartes-de-visite
photographs that became popular in the mid nineteenth century.
Cartes-de-visite were invented by the French photographer Andre Adolphe
Disdéri in 1854 and were at the height of their popularity from 1860 to 1866 (Charnes,
2004; Plunkett, 2010). At its most basic, the new format consisted of a photographic
calling card or visiting card, measuring 2-1/2 by 4 inches in size. As Georgen Gilliam
Charnes (2004) explains, these photographic calling cards were intended as a replacement
for traditional calling cards. While they never matched traditional calling cards in
popularity, however, photographic cartes-de-visite distinguished themselves from earlier
forms of photography by being much cheaper to reproduce. Disdéri’s patented process
produced eight identical images from one negative, making the cartes easier and cheaper
to create. “They were also less delicate, requiring no velvet-lined cases” (Charnes, 2004,
para.4). These qualities made individual cartes-de-visite and albums of collected cartes-
de-visite ideal for exchange and circulation, either by mail or in-person. The advent of
this photographic practice coincided with Countess di Castiglione’s burgeoning
photographic commissions and according to biographers, she took full advantage of the
newly available format.
While scholars like Apraxine, Demange, Loliée and others all note that
Castiglione frequently sent photographs of herself as both individual cartes-de-visite and
in albums of selected cartes-de-visite to admirers and suitors, this information is typically
disregarded as yet another manifestation of her vanity and narcissism. Apraxine, for
example, mentions that “the body of her work reached only a very restricted audience.
68

Only a few favorite images were circulated; a kind of mystery hung over the rest” (p.44).
Despite providing an extensive list of close friends and lovers who were the recipients of
Castiglione’s photographic cartes-de visite and albums, the curator, like others, is hesitant
to make anything of Castiglione’s gifting practices. The photographs were, after all,
mostly created for personal use; they were never sold for promotional purposes or
displayed in either galleries or museums, all practices that could have been evidence of
her celebrity strategies. The mediated circulation that she did engage in, consequently, is
not typically regarded as testimony of anything. And yet, images of the Countess,
including many images of her in racial costume, did circulate in an unorthodox manner.
An easy point of comparison, as I noted earlier, is Empress Eugénie. While images of
sexualized and racially exoticized femininity were, as I explained, normative during this
period in France, few women outside of the working classes (dancers, actresses, and sex
workers primarily) took photographs costumed as racial others (McQueen, 2011).
Castiglione and Empress Eugénie sitting for these photographic portraits of racial
otherness were both cultural anomalies (McQueen, 2011). The major difference between
the Countess and the Empress, however, is that photographs of Eugénie in racial
masquerade never circulated:
None of Eugénie’s contemporaries mentions these photographs during the Second
Empire, there are few extant copies, and the only time they were made available
publicly was when they were published in the Femina article more than forty
years after the end of her reign. (McQueen, 2011, p.135)
Castiglione, on the other hand, sent cartes-de-visite as well as full albums to her lovers,
her doctor and close friend, to members of the French and Italian royal families, to her
69

family in Italy, and to her old political “co-conspirator” Constantino Nigra, among
several others. One anecdote has her sending a photograph of herself, dressed as the
Greek Queen Etruria and wielding a knife, to her husband in Italy (Apraxine, 2000).
Another album of cartes-de-visite, which she gifted Constantino Nigra, includes some of
the Countess’s “first attempts at role playing” (Apraxine, 2000, p.29). While scholars
have, for the most, overlooked this relationship between role-playing, including extensive
racial role-playing, and the careful, liminal circulation of the photographs as cartes-de-
visite, I propose that the relationship between racial performance and mobility is more
than just a cursory outgrowth of her narcissism.
To begin with, if Shawn Michelle Smith’s reading of Castiglione’s identity
construction through photographic representation can be made useful for understanding
the Countess’s authorship of womanhood, then the racialized femininities she deployed
cannot simply be folded into the range of her feminine subject positions. She is, after all,
donning the deeply Orientalist costumes of racial otherness in order to, to follow Smith’s
logic, suture together the multiplicities of her own identity on the space of her body. One
way to understand the significance of these racially marked photographs is that they
allow her subject mobility with regard to sexuality. As scholars of this era’s racialized
femininities frequently note, depictions of geishas, odalisques, African queens and many
more racialized feminine others correlated closely to a range of assumed sexual practices.
Given the fact that Castiglione herself was a noble with the reputation of a courtesan – a
complex subjectivity that demanded of her both “propriety” and the continuation of
sexual mythology – appropriating the masks of racial otherness could be seen as allowing
her to safely inhabit the range of sexual subjectivities that she needed in order to sustain
70

her fame. At this point in her life and career, she could not have accomplished the same
delicate balance without the racial masquerade. The violently stereotypical sexualities
ascribed to racial others operate like permissions for a noble woman to simulate a range
of sexualities. Consequently, developing Shawn Michelle Smith’s argument further, we
can read the photographs of Castiglione in racially-indexed costumes as dramatizing
those subject positions that were otherwise unavailable to her in the space of sexuality.
15

Subject mobility, however, is not the only mode of movement present in
Castiglione’s story. There is also the fact that, as I have been arguing, she endowed her
photographs – those photographs of costumed transformation and racial role-playing –
with physical mobility, by sending them into select circulation. One aspect of
Castiglione’s pathology that scholars seem to agree on is that she engaged in a constant
production of her own self and her own image in order to sustain her novelty and her
celebrity. While none of the scholars connect this practice directly to race, it would be
remiss not to mention that for Castiglione novelty was in part, judging by her
photographic archive, indexed through race. Another way to read her photographed racial
masquerades, then, is to consider racial novelty in conjunction with the physical mobility
of the archive. Castiglione used racialization as a repository of novel femininities at the
same time that she used selective cartes-de-visite circulation to guarantee the continued
visibility of those changeable, novel femininities. The Countess rendered herself a racial
exotic, inside the racial architectures of colonialism and imperialism, and then used those
visual renderings as currency for a mediated mobility that existed somewhere between
the formal display of noble-women and the commercialism of actresses and dancers.

15
An important caveat to this argument is that eventually, as her fame began to wane, she did commission
photographs of herself as a “courtesan.” Additionally, the later images of her feet are frequently discussed
as pornographic (Solomon-Godeau, 1986).
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Without a doubt, what I have described here is one of the more egregious
examples of a privileged body, racially marked white, mobilizing systems of racial power
and its regimes of representation in order to grant herself mobility in terms of both
subjecthood and geographic circulation. It is an example of white bodies gaining
positions of articulation at the expense of the racially-othered bodies whose subjugation
they both reify and rely on in the process; it is an example that resonates with histories of
blackface and minstrelsy in the U.S. Different inflections of the blackface minstrelsy
tradition have been addressed by a host of scholars, such as Constance Rourke (1931),
Ralph Ellison (1953), Eric Lott (1995), Robert Cantwell (1996) and Michael Rogin
(1998). What stands out as particularly resonant with the racial masquerades performed
by Castiglione however is the work of Michael Rogin, who writes about the prevalence
of blackface minstrelsy among Jewish American performers of the early 20
th
century. On
the one hand, as Rogin argues borrowing from Irving Howe,
16
Jewish singers donned the
minstrel mask in order to express their woes through those offered by the mask of
blackness, expressing “Jewish solidarity with another pariah group” (Rogin, 1998, p.99).
On the other hand, and quite in contradiction to the first function, “blackface, by
penetrating to the movie jazz singer's soul, provides him with a way out of his communal
body... playing a person of color instead of being confused for one. By painting himself
black, he washes himself white” (Rogin, 1998, p.102). In this second instance, the mask
becomes a way to shed immigrant identity and consequently identify with whiteness by
disidentifying with blackness. The Jewish performer passes as a white man by
demonstratively donning a mask that announces and spectacularizes his inability to pass

16
The Irving Howe (1976) quote that both Rogin and Robert Cantwell import for their arguments is from
World of Our Fathers: “Black became a mask for Jewish expressiveness, with one woe speaking through
the voice of another” (p.563).
72

for a black man.
17
At the same time, that same performer articulates his own racialized
anguish by passing it off as the racialized anguish of blackness. The two functionalities of
the mask here are mutually-constitutive, relying on a racial passing that unfolds the mask
in opposite directions.
As I have argued in this chapter so far, racial masquerade operates through similar
functionalities in the photographs of the Countess as it does in the masks Rogin
discusses. Performing racial otherness allows Castiglione to claim an affective register of
sexuality that is otherwise unavailable to her as a French noble-woman, usurping subject
positions and making her identity travel across those subjectivities. At the same time, she
reifies her own racial privilege by exercising the power to temporarily sample racial
otherness through costumed representation, without being subject to the abjection that
accompanies racialized power. Where Castiglione surpasses the work of Rogin’s Jewish
blackface performers is in the arena of physical mobility. By using racial performance as
novelty, she is able to continually renew her visibility through the physical circulation of
cartes-de-visite, securing her celebrity through the mobility of her image. Importantly, the
landscape that she operates in is neither the closely guarded, formal visibility of noble-
women (like Empress Eugénie), nor the commercial industry of actresses and dancers.
Castiglione occupies an economy that lives between those two worlds. It is the symbolic
economy of celebrity, where sustained visibility is the currency and stardom is the
sought-after accumulated ‘profit’. Unlike the rest of the case studies discussed in this
dissertation, therefore, Castiglione’s racial performances are neither motivated nor

17
I use “man” here in reference to the male Jewish performers that Rogin focuses on. However, as Rogin
notes, the tradition of Jewish performers in blackface was prevalent among female Vaudeville performers,
like Sophie Tucker, as well.
73

conditioned by a financial economy; her story illuminates a symbolic economy of
representation and gift exchange.
Despite the absence of a financially-governed industry, I have included Countess
di Castiglione here in order to demonstrate one of the ways in which racial performance
has been historically harnessed for mobility by artists, even outside of the confines of
what we understand as entertainment or arts industries. For the Countess, working outside
of the restrictions of industry still meant wedding mobility to a measure of racial
performance. It is a relationship that this chapter’s next case study renders on non-
symbolic terms. Princess Indita also harnessed racial performance in order to gain a kind
of mobility. She, however, did it in order to be mobile inside the parameters of the
Vaudeville industry, which puts her squarely in conversation with this dissertation’s
forthcoming contemporary case studies.

Princess Indita: Travels of a Hopi Princess
As much as Countess di Castiglione, despite popular myth and a sizable
photographic archive, remains mostly a myth, Princess Indita eclipses that mystery in
every way. Indita was a traveling performer on the circus and Vaudeville touring circuits
throughout the U.S. and Australia in the 1910s. What little legacy she left behind is
contradictory and mercurial, existing primarily in census reports, travel logs (ship
manifests), performance advertisements, a handful of newspaper articles from all over the
U.S. and Australia and just one piece of sheet music. Across these documents, her
identity is variable and inconsistent.
74

She was a Hopi princess, sometimes the daughter of a Sioux chief, or maybe
French, Irish, Jewish, or possibly, Hawaiian-born. She was sometimes raised by Hopi
tribesmen and other times by adopted English parents. She was a snake charmer, a
Vaudeville star, a filmmaker, and an aviatrix. This changeability is exactly why I have
included her as the second case study of this chapter. Unlike Countess di Castiglione,
who maintained one static “authentic” identity as an Italian and French noble-woman and
then sampled racial otherness for her own ends, Princess Indita wore each one of her
identities as a racial truth. It is partly why, from the perspective of historical research, her
legacy is so difficult to string together into anything resembling a biographical sketch.
Indita, in fact, can only be found in geographic mobility, which requires matching the
maps of her physical travel to the maps of her identity transformations. In comparison to
Castiglione, Indita offers another way to look at the historical intersections of mobility
and racial performance, this time incorporating a financial industry (Vaudeville) rather
than a purely symbolic one. The presence of a financially-motivated industry is an
important element in the Indita story; it is an element that the Castiglione story did not
have and an element that functions as a transition between historical deployments of
racial performances and the contemporary ones I address in this dissertation’s
forthcoming chapters. Princess Indita’s endless racial alchemy was in part compelled by
the endless mobility and touring that the industry demanded of her, outlining one version
of the relationship between racial performance and geographic mobility in the context of
industry structures and economic demands.
The longest name Indita ever used was Princess Indita Rivola Hinodi Bennessee
Meaning, which according to her translates to “Little-Indian-Maiden-With-An-Empty-
75

Stomach” (Squier, 1917, p.II7). According to official census records, she was born in
either 1891 or 1892, either in Arizona to Hihoda Bennessee and Rivola Denee, or in
Ireland, or in France.
18
While there are no remaining independent records of her parents
(or, the parents she claims), she often listed her father’s birthplace as Arizona and her
mother’s as France. Indita described her heritage and racial identity as either “Indian,” bi-
racial, Hawaiian or white. As I mentioned, census records would add Irish and French to
this list.
The first remaining mention of Princess Indita is from 1911, when in May of that
year Indita ended routine performances of her snake act at Oklahoma’s Overholser
Theater, donated her snakes to the Oklahoma zoo and went off to marry the treasurer of
the immensely popular Sells-Floto Circus, which was at its height at the time (Stephens,
2006, p.28). There is no marriage on record in the U.S. Instead, this moment seems to
have sparked Indita’s touring, possibly with the Circus, although she does not appear on
any bills or advertisements from the Sells-Floto Circus, Sells Brothers Circus, or the
Floto Dog and Pony Show (all subsidiaries of the Sells-Floto chain). After this Oklahoma
mention, variations of her name appear on ships coming to and from Honolulu and South
Australia. She appears in various cities for very brief periods of time, constantly
fetishized, as I will explain, by the local press as a chronically exoticized novelty act. By
the end of 1911, she arrives in Seattle, where newspapers report that she is the daughter
of a Sioux chief.
19
Her story here is both grandiose and the critical centerpiece of her
entire celebrity.

18
U.S. census records indicate that she was either born on one of these dates in Arizona or else, arrived as
an Irish immigrant of unknown age on one of these dates. At different times, Indita has claimed both of
these birth stories. Additionally, she has also listed her place of birth as France (in one ship manifest).
19
Some reports from this same Seattle stay claim the reverse, that she was the daughter of a Sioux mother
76

Indita is said to be “on a tour of the world in study of white and other civilized
races” (“Indian Beauty,” 1911). She is reported to have been commissioned by her late
father to perform this world study. Her conclusion, according to the article in the Times-
Picayune, was that civilization is “a sham.” She is quoted as likening “the pale-faced
society women of today to cats – full of deceit and hypocrisy” (“Indian Beauty,” 1911).
In fact, as The Hawaiian Star reports only a few weeks later, Indita is so repulsed by
whiteness that she is on her way to marry the Hawaiian theater manager, John Henry
Magoon, so that she could live among nature and the indigenous people of Hawaii
(“Dislikes the Whites,” 1911).
20
The paper also reports that she had arrived in Hawaii
with the Norton Comedy Company, masquerading as a ‘Miss Violet Barnetto,’ a name
that never appeared in conjunction with Indita before or after this incident (“Dislikes the
Whites,” 1911).
The elaborate tale of racial otherness and racial attitude that Indita spun between
Seattle and Honolulu catapulted her to visibility, as evidenced by the number of accounts
(and versions) of this narrative that appeared in newspapers in a matter of only a few
weeks. In context of both the Vaudeville industry’s regimes of representation and the
significations of “Indianness” in the popular American imagination of the time, the fact
that Indita’s narrative functioned as a mechanism of visibility and publicity is no surprise.
Specifically, the narrative and its flexibility can be seen as doing double duty. First, the
claim to royal Native American heritage, coupled with the disdain for whiteness
underscores Indita’s racial otherness, which guarantees her visibility and legibility as a
novelty act in a very crowded and competitive industry. As scholars like Frank Cullen

and Frenchman father.
20
The marriage to Magoon never happened. According to the Hawaiian Gazette, Magoon married a woman
named Juliet Carroll two years later (“Double Wedding,” 1913).
77

(2007), Andrew L. Erdman (2004), Robert M. Lewis (2003), Anthony Slide (2012),
Robert W. Snyder (1989) and Mark Winokur (1996) all point out, this early mass
entertainment industry was highly competitive, with performers constantly touring the
official Vaudeville circuit, the Orpheum Circuit, the Keith-Albee Circuit, and various
circus company circuits. The density of competition required performers to constantly
produce their own novelty in order to continue the touring that was most often, their only
source of revenue, a topic I discuss in more detail later in this chapter. Secondly, the
narrative I described above demonstrates Indita’s strategic accommodation and perhaps
even exploitation of this historical period’s attraction to discourses contrasting “Indian”
authenticity against what was posited as the artificiality of “civilized” whiteness. Scholars
like Philip Deloria (1998), Shawn Michelle Smith (1999), William J. Schafer and
Johannes Riedel (1973) have all in different ways discussed the ways in which nostalgia
and sentimentality for a fantasy of “native” or “Indian” naturalness was often used by
white Americans in search of an anchor or stable identity “amidst the anxiety of urban
industrial and postindustrial life” (Deloria, 1998, p.7). “At the turn of the twentieth
century, the thoroughly modern children of angst-ridden upper- and middle-class parents
wore feathers and slept in tipis and wigwams at camps with multisyllabic Indian names,”
says Deloria, who traces this desire for an invented “Indian” connection to nature from
the Revolution to postmodernity (p.7). It is precisely this discourse that Indita
strategically activates when she claims to abandon this “sham” of a civilization in favor
of nature. This particular narrative – its doubled elasticity – was a successful tactic of
industry visibility and continued industry mobility for Indita. This short span of only a
78

few weeks demonstrates that the performer mobilized narratives of racial identity as a
resource in order to operate inside the financial parameters imposed by her industry.
The strategic transformation did not end there. By 1912, Princess Indita was
performing at Los Angeles’s Brink’s Café as part of a Royal Hawaiian Trio and then in
Tacoma, Washington, as part of a Royal Hawaiian Quartet. She was a ukulele player.
Reviews of both acts suggest that at this point, she was masquerading as a Hawaiian-born
woman, a move that was likely undertaken to authenticate her new act and artist identity
as a performer of “the ever popular Hawaiian airs” (Dellamore, 1912, p.III4). That Indita
hinted at a Hawaiian heritage while performing in California during this period is only
too fitting since, as Cristina Bacchilega (2011) explains, interest in Hawaii as a tourist
destination started to grow in California’s primary cities at precisely this time.
21

Accordingly, this identity lasted only as long as the West Coast act did. Having enjoyed
press visibility as a Hawaiian performer, Indita began touring the East Coast with a snake
act, as an “Indian” princess.
Over the next 4 years, Indita’s racial legend swelled. She was no longer Sioux,
but now Hopi. Specifically, her narrative now cited her as a princess of Arizona’s Moqui
tribe. She seemed to have settled on tracing her Native American lineage to her father,
who is consistently referred to as a famous chief. The newly donned Hopi identity was
undoubtedly another strategic professional move with racial identity as its primary
resource. That is, Princess Indita’s snake dance now became known as the Hopi snake
dance, a form of ritual dance that was already well documented by anthropologists and

21
Bacchilega argues that Californians’ interest in Hawaii can be traced back to roughly 1902, when the
Honolulu Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants Association funded a series of lectures about the
island and “drew packed houses on the West Coast” (p.104). Four years before that, the experience of
American soldiers returning from the Philippines after the Spanish-American War can also be seen as early
contributions (Bacchilega, 2011).
79

historians at that point in U.S. history. According to reviews and advertisements, Princess
Indita’s Hopi snake dance consisted of taming the snakes, coiling them around her body
and hands, and allowing the snakes to bite her for the show’s grand finale. During these
dances, Indita was reported to be surrounded by “her tribe of genuine Hopi Indians”
(“The Drama,” 1914). I approach this strategic adoption of the Hopi identity and its ritual
dance with some skepticism in part because descriptions of Indita’s snake dance bear
little resemblance to the actual snake dance ritual performed by the Moqui people. As
early as 1884, Captain George Bourke wrote an ethnographic study of the Moqui snake
dance. This account was followed by Charles F. Lummis (1892) and then J. Walter
Fewkes (1894). By 1900, The New York Times published a piece describing the ritual and
cementing its place in the popular national imagination of the day (“The Moki Snake
Dance,” 1900). While these narrators all agree that the ritual does see some change from
year to year, there are a few key constants. According to these accounts, the dance is
always performed by men, who hold snakes in their mouths. It does not include allowing
snakes to bite the dancers as a form of sacrifice, suggesting that the finale that was a
staple of Indita’s act was a fiction, strategically designed to cater more to the myths of
“Indian” mysticism and connection to nature than to any realities of the ritual.
In 1916, Princess Indita was spotted in Arizona, where her identity gained new
racial complexities and where her name became Indita Harter.
22
Announcing that she
was a biracial woman, Indita claimed to be “under contract to a motion-picture concern,
which [was] filming the Hopi dances” (“Indian Girl Bitten,” 1916; “State Safety News,”
1917).
23
A year later, Indita was traveling between Los Angeles and San Diego,

22
According to Indita, Colonel Charles H. Harter was at this point her legal guardian.
23
The photoplay was to be called “An Indian Princess Sacrifice.” There is no trace left of this film nor is
80

improvising on her own racial and family heritage again and fielding the press attention
and visibility that this racial narrative delivered. She was now adopted by a wealthy
English family after her mother passed and father abandoned her in despair. This tale had
never appeared in connection to Indita before but the Los Angeles Times managed to
dramatize it to its full potential, complete with a primitivist narrative about Indita’s
French mother being a wooed and “willing prisoner” of her kidnapper and captor, Indita’s
Chief father (Squier, 1917, p.II7). This particular racial narrative was apparently so
compelling that it warranted the apex of press visibility: a close-up portrait of the
Princess in (assumingly) Hopi headdress.
In 1919, Indita married Harry R. Zimmer, appearing for the very first time on a
U.S. census in 1920, as Indita C. Zimmer, a married woman of “Indian” descent living in
Los Angeles. By the 1930 census, when she no longer performed as part of any touring
entertainment industry, Indita was listing herself as a “white” woman.

Indita’s Strategic Transformations: Touring, Racial Novelty, and the Industry
Machine
As I have begun to explain in this chapter, that Princess Indita’s Vaudeville
currency was rooted in her constantly mobile and ever mythologized racial identity is not
a surprise in the context of this cultural industry. Scholars have shown that the
inconsistencies surrounding her changeable racial identity and her determination to play
with racial masks are in line with the racial spectacles that Vaudeville preferred at the
turn of the twentieth century. As Ralph Ellison (1953), Eric Lott (1995), and Krystyn R.
Moon (2005) have all pointed out, blackface minstrelsy and yellow-face were such

there any record of it actually being completed.
81

popular racial performances on the American variety stage starting with the mid 1800s,
that the donning of a racial mask on-stage “was an inseparable part of the national
iconography” (Ellison, 1953, p.48). Indita’s performances, however, resonate most
closely with what historians have called “playing Indian,” another popular racial
performance among stage performers during this time. According to historian Laura
Browder (2000), for example, Lillian Frances Smith a California huntress appearing in
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the 1880s and 1890s, transformed herself into
Wenona, a Sioux princess for the show. The Wenona character was so popular with
audiences that Smith went on to work with other shows, like Pawnee Bill’s Historic Wild
West (Browder, 2000). Philip Deloria discusses these histories as well, observing that
“playing Indian” persists in the Mohawk costumes adopted during the Tea Party, in
advertorial medicinal shows, in the costumes worn by the Boy Scouts and the Camp Fire
Girls, all sites where this specific racial performance took on deeply varied meanings.
It is in the context of these robust and complicated traditions of masking up that
Indita made her identity travel and transform: from a Sioux Princess to a Hopi one; from
Hopi to Hawaiian; from Violet Barnetto to Indita Harter to Indita Zimmer; from a Sioux
woman who despises whiteness to a woman who claims whiteness. In examining her
strategic racial transformations, I am not interested in deducing any kind of authentic
racial truth in Indita’s identity. In line with the previous case study of Countess di
Castiglione as well as this dissertation’s overall investment in understanding identity,
including racial identity, through the performative lens, Indita can be seen as crafting her
own racial identity through her mobility across varying racialized femininities. While I
do not speculate about her “real” racial identity or the way that it manifested on her
82

racialized body, it is important to emphasize that the Princess’s access to a variety of
racial identities and her strategic mobilization of those identities speaks to a degree of
racial privilege. Like Castiglione, Indita exercised her own racial privilege by
strategically donning racial identities like costumes, worn to accommodate the needs of
each particular moment and location and without regard for the racial violence those
racializations manifest both on and off the stage. This privileged movement across racial
subjectivities bought Indita enough renewed novelty and visibility to continue touring the
entertainment industry circuits. Unlike the Countess’s more outwardly theatrical racial
performances, however, each of Princess Indita’s racial performances alleged a racial
truth, often correlating the particularities of that racialization to the novelty required by
her location at the moment. These racial calculations that Indita managed far surpass the
Countess in strategy. Both women sought to gain and continually renew their visibility
through the mobilities afforded them by racial performances. While Castiglione’s
visibility existed in a symbolic economy, Indita’s visibility was both compelled and
conditioned by the financial structures of the entertainment industry. Juxtaposing the
mobilities and racial transformations of the two historical figures suggests that the
increasing financialization of arts and cultural industries corresponds to increasingly
strategic, varied and narrowly tailored racial performances.
Princess Indita’s racial performances, as I have argued, force us to view
geographic mobility and travel in the context of the mass entertainment industry. When it
comes to Indita, that industry was Vaudeville, which was at the time (in the early 20th
century) undergoing a measure of centralization and unprecedented mobility. Scholars
like Arthur Frank Wertheim (2009) and Andrew L. Erdman explain that in the 1910s,
83

Vaudeville theater managers were embroiled in territory wars and motivated by the needs
of regional theater chain monopolies, while the performers were contracted for constant
travel in an industry that had quickly become very crowded and equally competitive.
Describing Vaudeville performers’ antitrust strike against the United Booking Office’s
(UBO) Vaudeville Collection Agency, Erdman provides what is a telling response from a
set of Vaudeville theater owners, B.F. Keith and Edward Albee.
24
As a rebuttal to the
antitrust request from performers, the two owners depicted “the vaudeville industry as a
highly competitive one in which agents, produces, and performers were all free entities
subject only to the laws of economic contest and free enterprise” (Erdman, 2004, p.56). It
was this free-enterprise logic in the nascent mass entertainment industry that would
ensure first, that performers would have to “travel the circuits in order to work” and earn
a living wage (Erdman, 2004, p.57). And second, that performers would be beholden to
the UBO for work, since only this organization could provide an “uninterrupted work
schedule” (Erdman, 2004, p.57). Consequently, as historians like Lewis, Winokur, and
Snyder all show, stars and their acts put up with demanding travel schedules, touring
wider and further than ever before, attempting to capture all possible markets in the
nation.
25
Additionally, as performers traveled, they had to become aesthetically flexible,
tailoring their acts to comply with varying regional standards, particularly in the space of
sexuality (Erdman, 2004).
26

24
Benjamin Franklin Keith is often regarded as the father of Vaudeville. He and Albee operated one of the
largest Vaudeville theater chains in the country, eventually consolidating into the Keith-Albee-Orpheum
Corporation (Wertheim, 2009).
25
Acts routinely toured for more than 40 weeks a year, for example.
26
Erdman argues that despite these minor tweaks, the Vaudeville circuits should be considered national
mass entertainment.
84

What the industry’s economic arrangement meant for a performer like Princess
Indita, participating in this competitive industry that prioritized mobility and portability
as the main domains of stardom and economic survival, is that constantly generating her
own novelty became the key to her travel and sustainability in the industry. Racial
reinvention, however scripted inside the grammars of racial otherness, became her way of
“making-do” inside a working environment that exploited her body through mobility. As
I discussed in the Introduction to this dissertation, Michel de Certeau’s (1984) “making-
do” is an “art of the weak,” used by those without access to strategies that could formally
alter the social organization of power. For those who are making-do, the practice is a way
of making their predetermined, oppressive conditions more habitable. Faced with an
increasingly exploitative mass entertainment industry that operates along the lines of
free-enterprise and consequently treats performers like commodities of exchange,
Princess Indita made-do with the help of constant racial reinvention, guaranteeing the
profitability of her labor inside these conditions. Her visibility and celebrity at each new
destination was purchased by her newly fashioned racial identity. She did this to
guarantee interest, to respond to the economies of novelty in each destination, to racially
authenticate her newly developed act and to secure her own return to that geographic
location. Press reports fixated on her racialized body and her ability to perform the
expectations of that racialization through costume, habit, the arts, and of course, a
dramatic personal family history.
27

27
While the following additional thread would constitute a significant detour for the present chapter, I
would argue that there is a case to be made that Indita’s frenetic racial reinvention, in the end, actually
worked in excess of the industry. The racial transformations that she compulsively took on in order to keep
traveling the circuits obliterated both her historical (archival) legacy and her ability to be continually
branded by the industry, ultimately (symbolically) releasing her from that industry’s economic regimes.
85

Indita’s racially-indexed “making-do” reminds us that racial transformation has
been an operative domain of arts economies and cultural industries from the start. As
cultural and arts economies congealed into industries and specifically, capitalist free-
enterprise industries, the demand for artists’ mobility, portability and visibility all
increased concurrently. The case of Princess Indita suggests that one of the ways in
which this trifecta (mobility, portability, and visibility) has been sought by artists and
performers is through racial transformation and reinvention. Like Castiglione, she
borrowed from the existing scripts of racialized power and racialized scopic regimes,
using the grammars of racialization to produce herself as an ‘exotic.’ Unlike Castiglione,
however, she did this in order to deal with the travel and mobility that her industry
demanded of her. And it is precisely this aspect of the industry structure that the rest of
this dissertation takes up in contemporary contexts. If Castiglione and Indita remind us,
each in her own way, that the economies of mobility have long been wedded to racial
performance, then the contemporary moment and its arts industries demand our attention.
Contemporary global cultural and arts industries, as I explain in each following chapter,
have cohered into neoliberal industries in the last twenty or so years, making the
contemporary moment an unprecedented one. The demands of geographic mobility
exceed anything that Vaudevillians could have imagined and the visibility (and
availability) of hybridized racial subjectivities exceeds anything the Countess might have
wanted. As I demonstrate in each chapter, the financial structures of these contemporary
industries condition not just travel and touring, but also the bodies that undertake travel,
and the aesthetics and ideologies that are produced in the process. This arrangement urges
us to ask about the fate of racial performance in this contemporary picture. What are the
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correlations between racial performance and mobility in contemporary global
entertainment industries? What does this relationship mean for the aesthetic articulation
of racialized structures of feeling? And importantly, what does it mean for artist of color,
often heralded as the victorious new (global) entrants into industries that previously
ignored them? How are their racially-marked bodies conditioned by the encroaching
economic structures of each industry?

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CHAPTER TWO: PERFORMING MODERNITY AND RACE ON THE
RUNWAY: PAKISTANI FASHION WEEK AND THE AESTHETICS OF OFF-
CENTER INDUSTRY
In 2009, colorful abayas, embroidered hijabs and jeweled face veils made their
way down fashion catwalks in Karachi, Pakistan. Saturated, busy color palettes and
volumes of billowing silks were weighed down by delicate but plentiful embroidery and
bead work. Chains from traditional Jhoomer head ornaments held models’ hair in place.
These were the scenes of Pakistan’s first official fashion week (PFW). The pieces on
display at that 2009 event were created by designers who, nearly uniformly, attribute
their textile designs, fabric inspirations, patterns and preferred cuts to their shared
Pakistani heritage. These aesthetics were also heavily informed by what can be
understood as the parameters of Islamic fashion – saris were accompanied by chaddors;
shawls hung casually but reliably on models’ heads; scarves covered shoulders and often,
faces; variations of hijab were as plentiful on the catwalk as they were in the audience.
Through exhaustive photography and press coverage, images and representations of these
collections gained transnational circulation, simultaneously introducing Karachi as the
newest claimant to high fashion’s creative geography and catapulting the aesthetic
sensibilities of Karachi’s designers into global visibility.
Since 2009, Pakistan’s fashion week related efforts have multiplied significantly.
The country now hosts two competing, back-to-back fashion weeks, one in Karachi and
one in Lahore, as well as an annual Pakistani fashion week in London. The 2009 PFW,
however, marked the first time that the Pakistani fashion industry showcased on a global
scale during the normalized international fashion show calendar. In fact, that event was
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the celebrated highlight of a fashion industry that has been in cultivation for over thirty
years, coming into full global view on the heels of a deregulated global trade industry and
local government support. While this industry’s designers and merchandisers have touted
“internationalism” as the industry’s goal and economic destiny, the global visibility
realized by these efforts has produced a complex arrangement that forces us to ask what
the conditions of “internationalism” and its attendant circuits of visibility might be. It is
an arrangement wherein designers and their aesthetics are compelled to both compete for
visual significance in fashion’s Eurocentric, geographically-rigid symbolic imaginary and
to accommodate that imaginary’s rhetorics of race, nationhood and citizenship.
But in 2009, Pakistani designers were not the only ones making their initial entry
into the international fashion circuits. They were also not the only designers to be making
this entry with aesthetics that adhere to Islamic customs. That same year, the Chechen
designing duo, sisters Laura and Medni Arzhiyeva emerged onto the international fashion
landscape, state-backed and determined to become internationally portable. Like many of
the Pakistani designers at that debut event, the Chechen sisters also showcased
elaborately embroidered layers of colorful hijab, donned by models who routinely gazed
down in a display of gendered ‘modesty,’ as they emerged onto the show floor.
When the Arzhiyeva sisters showed at Moscow Fashion Week (MFW) in 2010,
these traditional Islamic costumes appeared in a program alongside designers like the
French Thierry Mugler, who showed, among other pieces, a transparent strapless mini-
dress, molded out of plastic. In the Russian context, where leading political discourse
vilifies Chechnya and its Muslims as easy antitheses of Russia’s democratic progress and
modernity (Evangelista, 2002; Giuliano, 2005; Lieven, 1999; Wilhelmsen, 2005), the
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juxtaposition of Chechnya’s Islamic aesthetics alongside the more Western and
European-market oriented cuts from France and Russia creates an inescapably politicized
visual environment. In this context, the visual coexistence of these aesthetic
commitments – hijab and head scarves alongside transparent mini dresses – renders a
relationship that is often positioned as incompatible and impossible in Russia.
1

Furthermore, Chechen and Pakistani designers’ new global visibility in fashion’s
Eurocentric annals of creativity and innovation comes in a geopolitical moment when
Islamic symbolism is inseparable from the U.S. war on terror and growing anti-Muslim
sentiment across Europe. That is, both Pakistani and Chechen designers dedicate creative
energies to what is considered and marketed as Islamic dress. This includes veils, hijab,
head scarves, chaddor and in some cases, niqab, all of which appear on the runway as
objects of fashion, muddying their usual semiotic connections to racial otherness, at best,
and the threat of terror, at worst. In fact, these pieces appear on the global fashion stage
as works of art at the same time as European states pass legislation to ban face veils
precisely because of their assumed links to global terror and what is consistently
positioned by critics as both anti-feminist and anti-modern practice. The presence,
circulation and visibility of these designers and aesthetics then is, as I will argue, a
logical development of neoliberal capitalism and its policies of liberalization and
deregulation, but also, potentially ideologically disruptive to the architecture of global
fashion and the visual cultures its hierarchies engender.

1
In a 2005 essay discussing Russians’ popular perspectives on “politicized Islam” (p.196) in the North
Caucasus regions, Elise Giuliano notes that “many Russians are utterly convinced by Samuel Huntington’s
claims about civilizational divides” (p. 216), making a reference to Huntington’s work The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
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Disruption, in fact, is readily apparent in the press coverage of the first PFW as
journalists scrambled to reinsert the rogue aesthetics into the familiar rhetorical
parameters of fashion’s race and place. Journalists openly marveled at the modicum of
visible flesh, with one popular US-based fashion website proclaiming: “Oh Snap!
Pakistan shows off its style... More color and less skin filled the runways... during the
first day of Pakistan's Fashion Week” (“Oh Snap! Pakistan,” 2009). Similarly, after the
Arzhiyev sisters’ debut, Russia Today (RT) ran a video segment entitled “Chechen
Couture: A Little Less Flesh Please!” Tirelessly focusing on the collections’ concealment
of skin rather than aesthetic innovations, this brand of coverage routinely reduced the
aesthetics on display to an Orientalist novelty (“Chechen Couture,” 2009).
Furthermore, nearly all those who covered these shows from the perspective of
fashion’s Western institutions tried desperately to yoke aesthetic sensibilities to region.
Seemingly unable to reconcile the governing memory-images of Pakistan with creativity
or growing creative industry, journalists as well as designers alternated between
discussions of the Taliban and the aesthetics on display. So significant, in fact, was this
focus on regionalism and an aesthetic bound visually to place, that the mere mention of a
specific collection led both the collection’s designer and the journalist to narrativize its
regional inspiration and its use of uniquely local fabrics and manufacture styles. Pakistani
designers’ complicity in the discourse that is cultivated around these fashion shows and
the aesthetics they showcase is the focus of this chapter.
This chapter explores the ways in which designers perform their own racialized
presences on the global stage in order to mitigate the racial and cultural threat their
bodies and their aesthetics produce. I examine the strategic racial transformations these
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designers pursue in order to purchase their own global visibility and movement, both
symbolic and literal. Using the framework of pop-up performance outlined in the
Introduction, this chapter asks: what racial performances do the designers privilege in
order to position themselves in the global market and what must be veiled or modified in
the process? What racial permutations do the designers employ in order to make their
aesthetics globally mobile and what kinds of racialized bodies do these strategies produce
in the process? Finally, what do these strategic pop-up performances tell us about the
racially-inflected requirements of a global creative citizenship that is underwritten by
neoliberal economies of visibility? The last question is a critical one as it gestures to the
larger formations at the heart of this study. This case study provides some insight into the
conditions under which off-center cultural and arts industries gain symbolic citizenship as
creative global citizens as well as actual financial currency as visible participants of those
industries. The case of Pakistan’s fashion industry and its newly visible fashion weeks
reminds us that it is not enough to celebrate this industry’s existence in the global fashion
industry. On the contrary, it is necessary to consider the economic and legislative
conditions that both make that existence possible and that contain its racially-marked
articulations and operations. In this way, this chapter examines one particular aspect of
the relationship between global mobility, race, and cultural industries: the racial
performances that facilitate the off-center popping-up in the annals global visibility.
In this chapter I suggest that designers and their aesthetics are compelled into
strategic racial performance – pop-up performance – as a result of visibility and mobility
gained through paradigm shifts in the neoliberal global fashion industry. If the operation
and expansion of neoliberal markets and trade policies enable the existence and global
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visibility of PFW and Chechen design studios, then how do these global markets dictate
the consumption of Pakistani and Chechen fashion? And how do Pakistani and Chechen
designers accommodate those regimes of visual and commercial consumption? To
understand these pop-up performances and their imbrication with the global fashion
industry, this chapter proceeds in four steps. First, I describe the current state of the
global fashion industry, its changing maps and its management of racial difference.
Secondly, I explain the history of the Pakistani fashion industry and its growth as a
specifically neoliberal, globally-oriented cultural industry that has been enabled and
propelled by the global fashion industry’s neoliberal turn toward deregulation and free-
market policies. The third section of this chapter looks at the pop-up tactics that Pakistani
designers and industry executives use in order to become globally mobile. I outline the
three main areas where we can see strategic pop-up transformations, arguing that these
(both aesthetic and narrative-based) transformations are a glimpse into the racially-
indexed circumstances that underwrite mobility and visibility for the off-center. Finally,
in the fourth section, I consider the visibility of the Islamic veil in terms of what I call a
“hegemonic leak,” exploring how performative encounters can temporarily implode
economically-motivated pop-up performances from within.

Mapping the Terrain of Global Fashion
That Pakistan and Chechnya’s 2009 forays into the international fashion calendar
represented a perceptible shift in the maps that govern the global fashion industry’s
typical distribution of value and visibility is undeniable. Not only was Karachi the “least
expected entry” into the 2009 fashion week calendar (Waraich, 2009, para.2), but even
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the country’s subsequent 2010 and 2011 appearances both elicited similar nervous
excitement. In 2011, a fashion journalist for the UK Guardian announced: “Forget the
catwalks of London, Paris, New York and Milan. This year, there's only one fashion
week making history: the world's very first Islamabad fashion week” (Qureshi, 2011,
para.1). According to this headline, Pakistan’s third year in the fashion week calendar
still qualifies as socio-historic novelty. Additionally, Huma Qureshi’s listing of London,
Paris, New York, and Milan is a significant gesture to the shifting geographies of fashion.
Global cities synonymous with fashion innovation and haute couture have undergone a
multiplication, so much so, that this famous four-some has now expanded to include
Tokyo, with Moscow closely on its heels (Gilbert, 2006; Vainshtein, 2006). Karachi’s
(and recently, Lahore and Islamabad) entry into this network is only the latest of similar
feats performed by global cities; cities that have traditionally fallen outside of the scope
of fashion’s official creative geographies. In the past several years, owing in part to the
establishment of off-center industrial manufacturing and production sites, as well as the
deregulation of the global garment industry, the locations from which fashion's aesthetic
creativity has traditionally emanated have shifted, enabling creative visibility for
previously uncovered cities.
2
Indeed, global fashion weeks have popped up in places like
Mumbai, Mexico City, Johannesburg, and Sao Paulo, testifying to those cities' growing
fashion industries as well as their new visibility as creative centers.
This multiplication of global fashion’s centers is a shift some sixty years in the
making and finally energized by neoliberal global capitalism and its bodies of legislation.
The map of global fashion’s world cities has been steadily (if also, slowly) swelling,

2
Here, by “uncovered” I mean uncovered as origins of creativity. This does not mean that they had no role
in the discourses of the fashion industry at all. Most of these cities have, at one point in the history of the
fashion industry, been known as hubs of garment manufacturing.
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transforming into a less concentrated and more populated system of centers since the
1960’s, when the addition of London to the landscape previously dominated by Paris and
New York indicated that “the whole geometry of fashion’s urban ordering was changing”
(Gilbert, 2006, p.25).
In the mid-twentieth century, the proliferation of mass communication, increasing
social democratization, and the rise in quality industrial manufacturing, birthed a ready-
to-wear tradition that challenged haute couture’s hegemonic and centralized hold over
global fashion (Lipovetsky, 1994). Despite the haute couture system’s primary role in the
institutionalization of fashion, which included the stabilization of its rhythms, the
normalization of collection renewal and planned obsolescence, the use of live models, as
well as the introduction of the fashion celebrity in the 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries, “after
the two world wars […] the ‘right’ to fashion gained a real foothold and won mass-
market legitimacy,” democratizing the rigid landscape of global fashion (Lipovetsky,
1994, p.63).
3
What followed was a “large-scale reconfiguration of the system,” which
included, among other notable developments, the emergence of new fashion centers
(Lipovetsky, 1994, p.88). Florence held its first fashion week in 1951, London in 1958,
Milan in 1971, and Tokyo in 1985 and then after a brief pause, again in 2000
4
(Gilbert,
2006; Kawamura, 2006). Significantly, the addition of these global fashion centers did
not ease the rigid hierarchy that has always characterized both the couture system and its
normalized calendar of bi-annual shows. Fashion historians argue that this expansion

3
Gilles Lipovetsky argues that it was the codes and organization of the haute couture system that “trained”
the masses in the culture of fashion as we understand it today. It is this training and exposure that then led
to the democratization of fashion and the forced restructuring of the haute couture system.
4
Tokyo’s first fashion week was held as part of the 1985 inauguration of the Council of Fashion Designers
Tokyo. The event was intended for international consumption but failed to bring in the expected audiences
and was therefore stopped in 1991. Shows began again in 2000 (Kawamura, 2006).
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constituted a critical break in the systems of value of global fashion, leading to a
restructuring of the traditionally Parisian system of haute couture (Gilbert, 2006;
Lipovetsky, 1994; Weller, 2004).
5
Instead of broad-scale democratization and
decentralization however, the global fashion industry oversaw a redefinition in the
relationship between mass-market fashion and high fashion, a process that according to
Weller “proceeded in three distinct phases: first, Haute Couture’s expansion into
licensing activity; secondly, its integration with an Italian-based mass production sector;
and finally its incorporation into an emerging luxury goods sector” (Weller, 2004, p.98).
Through the expansion of brand licensing to goods like perfume, makeup and
accessories, the traditional couture design houses were able to retain their symbolic
dominance in the global fashion industry, despite the concurrent multiplication of visible
fashion centers (Lipovetsky, 1994; Weller, 2004).
Consequently, in the contemporary moment, a growing cohort of global cities,
including Karachi and Lahore, host international fashion weeks every year. Staged
fashion weeks are proven revenue generators and their organizers are often as concerned
with the immediate economic impact of these internationally visible shows as they are
with their promotional potential, public diplomacy and their role in the long-term
projections of the tourism industry (Emling, 2006; Skov, 2006). For example, in 2006,
Mapihi Opai, chief executive of Fashion Industry New Zealand told the New York Times
that fashion week represented New Zealand’s "ability to compete in a global creative
economy [which] is critical to New Zealand's future economic growth” (Emling, 2006,
para.10).

5
While restructuring did indeed follow, Dorinne Kondo (1997) reminds us that Paris has maintained a
symbolic stronghold in the system of value and legitimacy that dominates the fashion world: “even as the
fashion world proliferates and disperses, a strong centripetal force draws designers to Paris” (p. 58).
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Gaultier and Cavalli Visit: The Rise of the Off-Center
Locating PFW in this genealogy of fashion’s historical centers and their recent
transformations however, must also consider the larger context of global cultural
production that serves as the backdrop to fashion’s economic and political geographies.
The proliferation of fashion weeks described here can also be seen as one of the
manifestations of the shifting flows of global cultural production, of what Nicolas
Bourriaud (2009) and Okwui Enwezor (2009) have called the “jagged maps” of
contemporary cultural flows and their geographic circuits. Bourriaud and Enwezor are
both interested in the modes of artistic practice that emerge from the cultural logic of
economic globalization, a logic that traffics in the polyvocality of global cultures as well
as an assumed multiplicity of historical temporalities (Bourriaud, 2009). Of its historical
perspective, Bourriaud says that this mode of production traces “lines in all directions of
time and space,” rendering the past as a territory ripe for necessary exploration, dressing
subjects that move across these temporalities in registers inflected with geopolitical
power and affect (Bourriaud, 2009, p.3). Under the auspices of increasing economic
globalization, this creative production performs a kind of temporal magic trick, tracing
disorienting loops across time periods and their resident ways of knowing, with works
“unravel[ing] themselves along receding lines of perspective, the course they follow
eclipsing the static forms through which they initially manifest themselves” (Bourriaud,
2009, p.3).
Perhaps most significant for the present discussion, however, is the geopolitical
face of this creative production mode. According to Enwezor’s reading of these
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processes, the artistic practice that dominates the contemporary global moment is
characterized by “jagged maps,” wherein the off-center rises to global visibility,
registering on the political maps that determine global value and legitimacy, and
therefore, fracturing previously centralized circuits of perceived artistic presence and
visibility. However, the newly visible off-center does not actually displace spaces
understood to be the centers of cultural production. Instead, “the off-centre is structured
by the simultaneous existence of multiple centers,” signaling “the breakdown of cultural
or locational hierarchies, the absence of a singular locus” (Enwezor, 2009, p.5).
Importantly, the emergence of the off-center is far from a celebration of democratized,
parallel existences. Inside this aesthetic nomadism, economic and cultural asymmetries –
along with their racial grammars and conditions of visibility – persist and often expand
despite the multiple centers' coexistence. Nevertheless, this artistic practice's privileging
of movement as its primary mode of aesthetic articulation promises that the various
centers – their economies, regimes of representation, temporalities and ideological
commitments – will inevitably come into encounter, if only momentarily. These
encounters happen on the terrain of visual culture, bringing the visual morality of the off-
center to bear on the hegemonic visual regimes of the traditional center.
This rendering of contemporary artistic practice and importantly, the mobility and
coexistence that are functions of economic globalization’s “jagged maps,” constitute a
useful lens for the investigations of PFW, the travel of Chechen aesthetics, as well as
newly emerged fashion weeks in general. Inside the circuits of fashion’s cultural
production, Karachi, Mexico City, Grozny, and Lagos are not simply the newest
additions to the growing fashion week roster; they are the fashion world’s off-center.
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Their design sensibilities’ entries into the landscapes of the global fashion industry’s
visual circuits performs the jagged maps that Enwezor and Bourriaud suggest, forcing an
equally fractured (indeed, jagged) gaze on the part of the consumer and the producer
alike. Press coverage of the 2009 international fashion week season lays out the
complicated landscape of visibility and presence that marks global fashion’s jagged
maps. In 2009, lending the new, local fashion weeks and their markets global fashion
currency, the UK publication The Guardian published a photographic essay of “Fashion
Shows Around the World” (“Fashion Shows,” 2009)
6
. Images from Thailand, Lebanon,
and Russia claimed their position in the fashion press, alongside London, Paris and New
York fashion weeks. Claiming to shed light on international fashion events “taking place
out of the spotlight,” the photo essay trades in spectacle and theatricality. The focus is on
vibrant colors, bridal couture (collections that are typically the most elaborate and
steeped in fantasy), performative glamour, and the dramatic staging of the shows. There
are photos of Russian models arriving on a float of flowers in front of a government
building in Moscow; an extreme close-up of a Palestinian headdress, complete with a
mask of coins; Swiss models on horseback; red-clad beekeepers in front of The Hague;
and in later coverage, a photo capturing a row of Bangladeshi eunuchs. This photo essay
both includes the off-center in global fashion’s visual imaginary but also, simultaneously,
reifies it as the off-center through the implosion of legible racial markers and
foregrounding of performative modes that are inherent in any fashion presentation. The
isolation of spectacle and theatricality as the only domains of value in these international

6
The Guardian offers a photographic essay of “Fashions Shows Around the World” at least once a year,
sometimes twice, corresponding with the bi-annual shows.
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off-center shows mitigates the ideological threat that surfaces when the off-center
encroaches and must be accounted for.
In a more direct invocation of the state of fashion’s global creative power, this
type of press coverage is nearly always uneven. While designers from London, Paris,
New York and rarely, Tokyo enjoy individual and exhaustive coverage in the fashion
press, images of fashion weeks from newer centers are lumped together in the quick
visual tourism of an online photo gallery. When press coverage refers to the international
fashion show calendar, it is in reference to Paris, Milan, New York, or London. The
“around the world” moniker, on the other hand, almost always captures the shows staged
in the off-center. Despite the multiplicity of centers, then – and the markets those centers
inevitably imply – creative power is distributed as unevenly as its economic handmaiden,
mapping directly onto geopolitical distortions. As George Yudice (2003) has argued, here
too culture continues to be used as a resource for capital. The off-center and the kind of
investment in regional culture that happens through global visibility and the emergence of
newly visible creative centers, is also made functional for the expansion of neoliberal
capital. With the help of off-center fashion weeks, racially-marked local and regional
cultures become the resource, according to Yudice, “for capital development and tourism,
as the prime motor[s] of the culture industries” (Yudice, 2003, p.3). For Yudice, cultural
identity and its performances, by way of visual spectacles like fashion shows that are
touted as 'local' but made for global consumption, are especially “expedient” for
neoliberal capitalism and the economic globalization it propels (Yudice, 2003).
Yudice's argument gains very specific salience when it comes to global fashion’s
visual grammars of race. Take, for example, Jean Paul Gaultier's Spring 2010 Couture
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collection, which debuted at Paris Fashion Week on January 27, 2010. The legendary
French designer's entire collection was inspired by Mexico, complete with, as Fashion
Wire Daily reported, “Incan femme fatales and Aztec sacrificial maidens... Mexican 'Day
of the Dead' tragic heroines and Hollywood's Latino movie stars” (Deeny, 2010, para.2).
In an interview with Paris Modes TV, Gaultier explained that the collection was actually
a reflection of his trip to Tahiti, since he hadn't been to Mexico in some thirty years
(“Exclusive interview with Jean-Paul Gaultier,” 2010). Nevertheless, both in the
designer's own descriptions and in press coverage, the essentializing, racially-marked
codes of legibility that govern Western understanding of both Tahiti and Mexico, were
easily transposed. The uninhabited vegetation and exoticism ascribed to Tahiti replaced
the images of political warfare and violence that make up the Western and Northern body
of discourse about Mexico. In Gaultier’s hands, Mexico became a place of ritual
exoticism and of course, the Aztec civilization. Echoing Yudice's argument on the uses of
diversity and perceived difference in neoliberal capitalism, here racial difference and
culture are recognized only in so far as they function to perpetuate Western creativity and
the economic capital that creativity accrues. Mexico, imagined through the lens of an
already racially othered Tahiti, only appears in the discourses of global fashion when it
inspires a European designer and contributes to his economic capital. In fashion’s jagged
maps then, racial otherness becomes a part of fashion’s discourse when it nourishes
contemporary Western talent.
7

7
Simon Gikandi (2006) makes this argument in his discussion of Pablo Picasso's relationship to the African
continent. Gikandi argues that the Western art establishment has typically depicted Africa as no more than a
“source of new energies” for the legendary artist (p. 35). He suggests that the governing Western narratives
about Picasso's creativity have contained Africa as an inspiration for the artist rather than his central
“artistic model” (p. 47) in order to preserve the ideology of a pure high modernism.
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However, as Bourriaud and Enwezor suggest about economic globalization’s
artistic production, this harnessing of racially-coded culture towards neoliberal capital
exists alongside more complicated domains of aesthetics and visuality. In October 2009,
a telling photo enjoyed heavy circulation in fashion blogs: Italian designer Roberto
Cavalli, a stalwart of the Western fashion world, is positioned in front of three,
unidentified women in full Islamic burqas. Cavalli, it seems, was visiting Chechnya's first
fashion design studio, started by Laura and Medni Arzhiyev. A Russian publication
observed that the sisters “are inspired by Chechen national costumes, taking into
consideration the Islamic dress code” (“Roberto Cavalli,” 2009). The photo is an
interesting foil to Gaultier’s cavalier use of an exoticized, touristified and racially othered
Mexico, because it captures a moment of European fashion, symbolized by Cavalli, not
only acknowledging the presence of the off-center as a space of creativity but also
physically traveling to encounter that aesthetic creativity on its own symbolic and
geopolitical terms. The two anecdotes demonstrate just some of the contradictory and
ambivalent ways in which the fashion industry manages the visible presence of the off-
center in global creative production; the anecdotes remind us of the “jagged” nature of
fashion’s geographies of power. At the same time that Jean Paul Gaultier freely exploits a
mythologized and vague trope of Mexico, harnessing an exoticized otherness for his own
ends, another of his cohort, Roberto Cavalli pays tribute to local aesthetics and the
designers who both sustain and develop them.
This contrasting of the two European designers is not at all to celebrate one's
political ethics at the expense of the other. Instead, the purpose of these seemingly
oppositional anecdotes is to demonstrate the complicated landscape that marks the
102

contemporary fashion industry’s visual culture and its management of the off-center.
These wildly varied usages of otherness unravel simultaneously in contemporary creative
flows. The juxtaposition of Jean Paul Gaultier's rendering of a Mexico and Roberto
Cavalli's symbolic sanction of Chechnya’s Islamic fashion aesthetics speaks rather
poignantly to the conditions that underwrite the emergence of various off-center fashion
weeks – the two visually emerge alongside one another, forced to account for each other's
presence as well as each other's economic might, rubbing nervously against each other's
markets and racial hierarchies.
It is in the context of this messy coexistence, born out of the expansions of
neoliberal capitalism and forced to accommodate the mandates of those expansions that
PFW steps into the global fashion spotlight. With the arrival of its first fashion week,
Pakistan’s fashion industry enters a terrain that is at once highly visible, yet also one that
others; that trades in racial performances approximating what Marta Savigliano (1995)
has called “autoexoticism” but importantly, one that is also rife with hegemonic leaks and
contradictions. Understanding Pakistani aesthetics’ presence in the global landscape of
fashion however, necessitates first looking back to the industry’s socioeconomic
inception and institutionalization.
The histories of Pakistan’s fashion industry are linked to the global garment trade,
local Pakistani textile manufacturing, neoliberal trade policy, as well as domestic
discourses on the role of fashion with regard to both political and religious ambitions.
Because this chapter’s primary concern are the racially – indexed pop-up transformations
that creative bodies (designers and aesthetics) undergo through global circulation, the
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industry’s tightly woven network of influence is best broached by first looking to the
history of the Pakistani fashion industry’s creative domain.

Pakistan’s Fashion Industry: Sociocultural Growth and Institutionalization
Frieha Altaf, former model, CEO of Pakistan’s Catwalk Productions, and most
importantly, one of the pioneers of the Pakistani fashion industry, traces the
institutionalization of the industry to the early 1980s. Maheen Khan, one of the country’s
premier designers, agrees, citing some of the country’s first official fashion shows and
structured organization of models into agencies with management (Rashed, 2005). In an
interview with Fariha Rashed, Altaf describes her fashion-oriented career
8
in the early to
mid-1980s as primarily “charitable work,” wherein the industry sustained itself through
an informal economy and system of labor, with personal connections between models,
designers, makeup artists, and event producers being critical to the operation of the
industry. Furthermore, during the late 1980s event organizers and designers abstained
from using the title of “fashion show,” opting instead for “cultural show” in order to
mollify the conservative and fundamentalist regime of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq
(Ali, 2007; Rashed, 2005).
9
Consequently, some of the first fashion shows staged in
Pakistan were referred to as “cultural shows,” a legacy that is still referenced by both
supporters and detractors of the Pakistani fashion industry. Several contemporary
industry leaders note that this inclusion of “culture” into an event intended as a trade
show has been historically detrimental to the proper growth of the Pakistani fashion

8
During this time period, Frieha Altaf was a model and an early fashion event organizer.
9
The Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq regime was one of the few in the history of Pakistan to impose Martial Law.
Zia-ul-Haq ruled as president from 1978, when he overthrew Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to 1988,
when he died in a plane crash.
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industry. Designer Deepak Perwani, for example, has criticized this enduring tradition in
the Pakistani fashion industry for exactly that: “we have treated fashion like
entertainment so far… [like] a cultural activity,” he said on the TV morning show
Breakfast at Dawn (Dawn News, 2009). Pakistani conservative religious forces, on the
other hand, as recently as 2004, have denounced this usage of “culture” in place of
“fashion” as trickery and deliberate evasion of Islamic law.
Issues of nomenclature aside, the industry underwent a period of maturation in the
late 1980s and 1990s, especially under the rule of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who
sponsored fashion shows in the early 1990s. In 1989, making use of her fashion industry
experience throughout the 1980s, Frieha Altaf started Catwalk Productions and Cats
Modeling, which organized both event management as well as the modeling industry.
The country’s largest design institute, The Pakistan Institute of Fashion and Design
(originally called The Pakistan School of Fashion Design) opened in 1995, with the help
of the Trade Development Authority and the Ministry of Commerce. The annual Lux
Style Awards began in 2002. This period of flourish and institutionalization suffered a
pause under the rule of Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali
10
who outlawed fashion
shows in 2003, citing the events as “un-Islamic.” On October 25
th
of that year the Prime
Minister issued an Interior Ministry Order, stating:
It has been observed that different functions are organized under the garb of
fashion shows at leading hotels of the provinces and the federal capital, which
militate against our national culture and Islamic values. Such activities are not
reflective either of our culture or heritage… The Prime Minister has taken serious

10
Zafarullah Khan Jamali was the 13
th
Prime Minister of Pakistan, from 2002 to 2004. He was a member of
the Pakistan Muslim League.
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notice of such undesirable activities… which are not in consonance with Islamic
values and norms of decency (“Pak PM orders ban,” 2003, para.3-5).
However, the industry continued to grow soon after Zafarullah Khan Jamali’s
2004 resignation. In 2006, the Pakistan Fashion Design Council, responsible for the
country’s fashion week events, was established, with the aim of “institutionaliz[ing] the
fashion industry in order to create and maintain industry standards in conformity with
global market standards” (PFDC). Soon after its establishment, the PFDC opened The
Boulevard, a luxury “concept gallery” department store, first in Lahore (2007) and then
in Karachi (2009). Xpozé Monthly, one of Pakistan’s premier fashion magazines,
launched in 2007, just in time to offer comprehensive coverage of what Ayesha Tammy
Haq, CEO of Fashion Pakistan, has called the “nascent fashion industry taking its first
baby steps” (“About” Xpozé, 2009). From both a political and economic standpoint, these
“baby steps” during the early 2000s coincided with the Pakistani government’s efforts to
stabilize what had been, at the beginning of the century, a rapidly failing economy, and to
reinforce the nation’s global reputation, at the same time that Pakistan was gaining
political visibility as a U.S. ally in the war on terror. According to Ishrat Husain (2004),
the Pakistani state took steps to “to bring about macroeconomic stability, the restoration
of confidence among domestic economic actors and overseas Pakistanis and
reestablish[…] credibility among international financial institutions” (p.11).
11

Considering that these efforts were, among other concerns, focused on renewing
relationships with international financial institutions and investing domestically in “key

11
Some, particularly U.S.-based, political economists argue that the efforts at economic stabilization from
1999 to roughly 2008, were aided in part by Pakistan’s participation in the U.S. War on Terror and the
“windfall” that resulted from it (Husain, 2004). This is the official explanation embraced by the U.S. State
Department (Kronstadt, 2005).
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public sector institutions” (Husain, 2004, p.11), this period’s subsidized growth and
institutionalization of the fashion industry, which was, as I will show, intended to go
global, is unsurprising.

Pakistan’s Fashion Industry: Textile, Trade Liberalization, and Global Ambition
The increasing institutionalization of fashion creativity however, has also been
propelled by the needs of the Pakistani textile industry, which contributes more than 60%
to Pakistan’s total exports and is the eighth largest exporter of textile products in Asia
(Mukhtar, 2008). The PFDC reports that over 90% of embroidery on the subcontinent
originates in Pakistan (PFDC). As one of the world’s leading cotton producers, the textile
industry makes up 8.5% of the country’s total GDP (Mukhtar, 2008).
Yasin Ahmed of Horizon Securities reported in 2009 that the “textile and clothing
industry has been the main driver of the economy for the last 50 years,” with a significant
“investment boom” in most of its textile industry segments from 2003 to 2007 (Ahmed,
2009, pp.2, 3). This investment boom can be traced back to the massive deregulation that
began in 1995 and was brought to full fruition in 2005 in the global textile and garment
trade industries. From 1974 to 1995 the global trade in textiles was regulated through the
Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA), which imposed quotas on textile exports for WTO
nations. Scholars have argued that the MFA was “originally created to protect European
and U.S. domestic industries from low-cost production sites in developing countries”
(Nguyen Tu, 2011, p.10). Consequently, the restrictive quotas produced a highly
concentrated industry, which saw “a limited number of significant new market entrants
from Third World textile producers” (Mytelka, 1991, p.117). The MFA phase-out, or The
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Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC) began in 1995 and was intended to gradually
lift these quotas over a ten-year period, culminating in what was intended to be complete
deregulation and liberalization of the textile trade and garment industry by 2005.
12
The
end of the ATC transition period was expected to benefit developing nations, with the
cheapest manufacturing costs (Nordas, 2004).
13

It was precisely this global post-quota climate of liberalization and deregulation
that produced the investment boom in the Pakistani textile industry through 2007,
ultimately leading to the rapid growth and institutionalization of the nation’s fashion
industry, the establishment of PFW and the subsequent mobility of Pakistani aesthetics
inside the circuits of global fashion. The relationship between the textile industry and its
fashion design counterpart, however, is not an easy one. The global economic crisis led to
significant losses for the textile industry in 2008. Compounding this global crisis,
according to Abida Mukhtar, a Lahore-based consultant, Pakistan’s textile industry also
suffers from outdated technology, lack of investment in Research and Development, as
well as an unpredictable power supply from the Water and Power Development
Authority,
14
which has “resulted in low quality of cotton in comparison to the rest of
Asia” (Mukhtar, 2008, para.5). Because “there is no alternative industry or service sector
that has the potential to benefit the economy with foreign currency earnings and new job

12
As Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu and others point out, full liberalization did not, in fact, happen as nations
signed bilateral and regional agreements in order to regulate exports.
13
In fact, the growth of China’s U.S. market share from 2005 to 2011 led David Birnbaum, a garment
industry analyst, to speculate that China would soon take over the entire garment industry. “Everyone
competes to make the easy stuff, with the result that the price keeps on falling” he wrote in his January
2011 report, “However, the profit is in the difficult stuff which we have all left to China” (Birnbaum, 2011,
p.4).
14
In fact, Tammy Haq told an interviewer on a morning talk show that power outages occurred every day
of Pakistan’s first fashion week in 2009 (Dawn News, 2009).
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creation… efforts are made to aggressively grow the Ready-made Clothing Sector”
(Ahmed, 2009, p.2).
It is little wonder that this commitment to the ready-made clothing sector and the
growth of the textile industry is made in the same year that Pakistan’s first fashion week
appears on the global stage. As the discussion of racial transformation later in this chapter
demonstrates, despite the fashion industry’s determined tradition of divorcing the
discourses of creativity and its fantasy of magic from those of manufacturing, garment
workers and trade, fashion’s creative face is deeply imbricated with the global garment
industry. Sally Weller points out that fashion “is instrumental in the formation of
consumer preferences and at the same time leads the ever-changing character of the
design-based inputs to the world’s garment manufacturing structures” (Weller, 2007,
p.41). Accordingly, the development of Pakistan’s fashion industry has been, at least in
part, a function of the nation’s economic re-investment in the domestic textile industry.
The Pakistan Institute of Fashion and Design includes the demands posed by the cotton
and textile industries as primary drivers of its own origin story. At its inception, the
institute’s objective was to furnish the textile industry with the professionals it required in
order to compete in the global fashion industry (PIFD). The Pakistan Fashion Design
Council takes a slightly different but still parallel view of its role in growing the textile
industry. The council vows to “work closely with textile mills in Pakistan to develop
fabric and manufacture value added garments… [which] will help in promoting value
added exports in the textile sector,” ultimately leading to national economic growth
(PFDC). These pronouncements of both symbolic and literal investment in the nation’s
textile industry suggest that the Pakistani fashion industry is not only enabled by the key
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processes of neoliberalism and economic globalization (deregulation, trade liberalization,
etc.), but also function as a cultural mechanism through which the nation enters and
competes inside the economic structures of globalization.
The presence and visibility of the Pakistani fashion industry and indeed, its
fashion weeks, is part of an ever larger move toward neoliberal policy. A critical
precondition to Pakistani designers' presence in the global fashion industry is the
cultivation of markets. Before the fashion industry could begin its processes of
institutionalization, before PFW could be staged, much less covered in the fashion press,
an amenable consumer market had to be honed in Pakistan. Pakistan's consumer public
needed to have overseen a maturation not just of its fashion industry, but also a neoliberal
consumer culture inside its national economy. Similarly, describing the three trajectories
of popular fashion styles in Egypt, Mona Abaza (2007) has observed that it was Egypt's
1970's “boom in consumer culture” that gave rise to the popularization of “Islamic chic,”
“Western chic,” and “ethnic chic” (Abaza, 2007, p.282).
Regionalism and neoliberal capital constitute global citizenship in part through
the creation of local markets, as Inderpal Grewal (2005) has observed in her discussion of
transnational consumer cultures. Speaking of the fate of Mattel’s Barbie in the Indian toy
market, Grewal explains that the toy’s success in India relied on the alteration of her
image in accordance with local aesthetics and customs of dress.
15
Perhaps even more
importantly, sales increased when advertising practices were deployed to create “a
transnational consumer culture within India,” the kind of culture that spoke to both local
and diasporic formations (Grewal, 2005, p.93). Alexandru Balasescu (2007) observes

15
This alteration of dress produced a Barbie in a sari, which sold considerably better in India than its
original, marked Western, counterpart (Grewal, 2005).
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similar patterns in the development of the haute couture market in Iran (specifically,
Tehran). Tehrani designers, according to Balasescu's study, “rework or reinterpret
traditional Iranian aesthetics” to cater directly to Tehran's own higher-income consumers
as well as those living in the diaspora (Balasescu, 2007, p.302). In fact, aesthetic
practices are so openly guided by the consumption practices of the target market and their
timelines, that Tehrani designers present their Spring and Summer collections in early
March, right before Iranian New Year, which is traditionally when well-to-do Iranian
consumers do much of their shopping. Additionally, Parissa, an Iranian designer
Balasescu interviews, has a large clientèle in the Iranian diaspora. They visit most often
in the month of August, the designer notes, which in turn dictates her annual patterns of
design (Balasescu, 2007).
To map this significance of a local consumer market onto the discussion of PFW
means that the mode of visibility available to Pakistani designers, must account for the
ways in which aesthetics racially marked as 'regional' or 'local' only become legible on a
global scale when neoliberal capital creates amenable consumer markets both
domestically and abroad. PFW then is the result of an expanding neoliberal industry but
also significantly, the concurrent cultivation of a neoliberal consumer market in Pakistan.
Current conditions in Pakistan seem to suggest a socioeconomic landscape that is rather
conducive to this cultivation. The India Pakistan Trade Unit (IPTU) boasts that Pakistan
has roughly 174 million domestic consumers, with “an ever-growing middle class”
(IPTU, 2011). To make the nation attractive for foreign investment, the IPTU cites the
Pakistani economy's determined “modernization,” which amounts to “consistent...
liberalization, de-regulation, Privatization” as “cornerstone” policies (IPTU, 2010). That
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the “modernization” practices proudly listed by the IPTU – liberalization, deregulation,
privatization – are also the hallmark processes of neoliberal capitalism is a governing
element of what makes the Pakistani market ripe as a cultural resource.
In addition, to follow Grewal’s argument, the consumer citizens who both
populate this market, meaning both designers and would-be fashion consumers, are
interpellated as neoliberal subjects with a commitment to the progressive nature of the
neoliberal, democratic state. Through the ethos of consumer citizenship, Grewal argues
that this move makes symmetrical, global citizenship seemingly available across national,
racial, and gendered lines (Grewal, 2005). To wit, as this chapter will explore, the
positioning of PFW as an event whose very existence is a challenge to the Taliban as well
as the heralding of individual female designers as singular heroes of this ethos, is a
gesture towards what is always read as Western style democracy, individualism and
achievement. In order to produce themselves as global citizens – participants of fashion's
international creative network – Pakistani designers must generate their own difference
and then neutralize it through racial transformations, in part by publicly vowing
allegiance to a symbolic creative democracy. These are the stakes that bind global
creative citizenship. Nevertheless, the presence of an event like PFW, enabled by the
maturation and growth of neoliberal ethos and intended for global visual consumption,
maps out its own contradictory and potentially dissonant presence. To say that the staging
of this fashion week became possible and legible on global scales as a consequence of the
cultivation of markets on the one hand and the interpellation of a neoliberal creative
producer subject on the other, does not foreclose the possibilities that the aesthetics on
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display or as I will show, the strategically performing and compulsively transformative
subject can enact.

Performing Global Visibility: Tradition, Tactics, and Transmutations
Propelled to the forefront of fashion’s visual imaginary by these economic
practices, PFW nevertheless arrives as an othered representative of the off-center, forced
to manage its own threatening presence on the global stage. And it is precisely the
Pakistani designers' racialized performances of tradition and nation, their frequent
adherence to familiar tropes of Orientalism, as well as their strategic racial transmutations
that demonstrate this compromised and uneasy global visibility best of all. The racial
pop-up performances that designers and their collections undertake in the global fashion
industry come into full view when we consider the differences between, on the one hand,
the industry’s performances of race, modernity, and nation domestically and on the other,
abroad, in movement, participating in the circuits of the global fashion industry.
Juxtaposing their domestic discourses on the role of fashion, the aesthetics that appear on
Pakistani catwalks, their treatment of manufacturing and garment production with those
that become globally mobile, a persistent strategy of global mobility becomes readily
apparent. In this chapter, I am interested in the aesthetics and design discourses that
Pakistani designers select for international travel, keeping in mind that these selections
happen concurrently with the choices that the international press makes about which
aesthetics to isolate as representative of Pakistani design. These practices of selection,
conducted by both designers and the Eurocentric industry press, generate a system in
which Pakistani design looks quite different domestically than it does in its traveling
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form. An important caveat here is that the nature of transnational industry networks,
global connectivity and the mere fact that much of the fashion press now lives online
would suggest that these discourses could not be so hermetically sealed and site-specific.
However, as this chapter demonstrates, the combination of the designers’ transformations
and the Orientalist practices of the mainstream international fashion press mean that the
governing discourses on Pakistani design are in fact distinctly and site-specifically
policed according to strategies of mobility. In other words, what I call the designers’
strategic pop-up performances of race outline the parameters of creative global mobility,
demonstrating what racial permutations are permitted to travel – indeed, to visually pop
up – inside the circuits of the global fashion industry and its visual imaginary. The pop-
up performances in the case of Pakistani designers can be seen in three specific
permutations of racialization: (1) international ambition and public diplomacy, (2)
treatment of garment manufacturing and its gendered labor, and (3) the aesthetics of the
collections on display.

International Ambition: Remaking Industry and Public Diplomacy into ‘Culture’
In line with the Pakistani fashion industry’s deeply imbricated relationship with
the local textile industry and state initiatives to promote that industry, the story at home in
Pakistan is one of public diplomacy, international expansion and importantly, symbolic
global projection. That is, for discourses originating from Pakistan – discourses authored
by members of the fashion industry – fashion is transparently and unmistakably political.
There is little confusion here. The fashion weeks as well as the global visibility granted to
designers, models, and in some cases, organizers from fashion councils, are no less than a
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tool of public diplomacy. It is a tool that, for all involved, must be exploited through the
cultivation of the fashion industry’s economic face.
In her interview with Naveen Naqvi, host of the Pakistani television show
“Breakfast at Dawn,” Ayesha Tammy Haq, CEO of Pakistan Fashion Council and chief
organizer of the first fashion week opened the show with her delight at the global press
coverage that the fashion week received. “I got a call from Islamabad,” she followed up,
“and they said ‘thank you for changing the headline on Pakistan’” (Dawn News, 2009).
Haq is suggesting that the institutionalization of a cultural industry like fashion has the
power to change the global narrative about Pakistan. Change it, that is, from discourses of
terrorism and increasing fundamentalism to that of fledgling – importantly, neoliberal –
cultural industry. Other designers express similar sentiments. Designer Deepak Perwani
opined that a mainstream, international fashion event like a fashion week “could put
Pakistan on the map,” adding that government support of the fashion industry indicates
the state’s acknowledgment of fashion’s promotional capacity (Dawn News, 2009).
Meanwhile, designer Fahad Hussayn expressed the same hope more vaguely. “There is so
much that only fashion can do for Pakistan’s image,” he told Pakistani Fashion Central
(“Fahad Hussayn Interview,” 2010, para.14). These re-imaginings of national image on
the global scale are also frequent in discussions of Chechnya’s first design studio. After
Laura and Medni Arzhiyev showed at MFW in 2009, Ziyad Sabsabi, Member of the
Chechen Federal Council, told a Chechen television station that the fashion show
“demonstrated that the Chechen people have gone from rebuilding a broken Chechen
infrastructure, to the rebuilding of a Chechen soul among [their] people… this shows that
Chechens can wage war and build and show fashion” (Djigit Media, 2009, trans.).
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Naveen Naqvi puts it most plainly when she says that “fashion is fiercely political”
(Dawn News, 2009).
These sweeping pronouncements about fashion’s function as a tool of public
diplomacy, however, belie the strategies of economic development that lay at the heart of
these hopes, especially in Pakistan.
16
Certainly, the use of culture as a resource to
perform a discursive re-inscription of a national image and thereby, accrue a measure of
soft power is nothing new in international relations (Nye, 2008; Yudice, 2003). If,
according to Joseph Nye (2008), culture is a particularly useful resource for public
diplomacy because soft power is “the ability to entice and attract…. [it] is attractive
power,” then the fantasy of spectacle and renewal that fashion peddles with every new
collection fits the public diplomacy bill rather well (p.95).
What is striking however is that the Pakistani fashion industry’s potential for
public diplomacy is measured in its degree of maturation as a neoliberal industry. Over
and over again, designers as well as fashion council members plead that there must be
investment in fashion as an economic industry, instead of a cultural one. “Fashion is not
about entertainment, it’s about the business,” Deepak Perwani explains; PFW must
follow the model of trade shows (instead of cultural shows), focusing on international
buyers, de-emphasizing all the “frills” (Dawn News, 2009). Domestic discourse on the
role of fashion and fashion weeks for the global image of Pakistan then, is one that seeks
to re-invent the global narratives of Pakistan through the lens of neoliberal industry.

16
It is important to note that unlike Pakistan, Chechnya’s fashion circuits do not yet meet the standards of a
global industry. Consequently, while Pakistan seeks to position its fashion industry as a cultural tool and
resource for public diplomacy, Chechnya’s use of fashion falls in a far more symbolic, less immediate
realm.
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While global visibility for PFW and its creative population are touted as an
effective publicity exercise, the global movement of these bodies is privileged above all.
In 2009, designers Maheen Khan, Deepak Perwani, and Rizwan Beyg were invited to
show at Milan Fashion Week, marking the first time that Pakistani designers participated
in a mainstream, global fashion week event outside of Pakistan. The three designers were
met with critical acclaim abroad and celebration at home. “We were there projecting a
completely different view of Pakistan,” said Deepak Perwani (Dawn News, 2009).
Throughout the designers’ interview on “Breakfast at Dawn,” the term “projection” was a
recurring theme. Fashion’s projection into the global visual imaginary is significant,
Perwani continued, because fashion is not only descriptive, but also definitive of the
contemporary moment. His seemingly banal observation is actually a critical one. The
global circulation of fashion, its design structures and its creative bodies demonstrates the
conditions under which creative entities gain mobility in the global moment.
Where Pakistan favors “projection,” Chechnya speaks of “emergence.” In an
interview after their MFW debut, the Arzhiyev sisters told the Chechen television station
Djigit, that their presence in Moscow “shows that [they] can emerge at the level of
Europe and at the international level” (Djigit Media, 2009, trans.). Chechen
commentators and businessmen added that the show marked the emergence of Chechen
style onto the world’s stage. “We’ve already been invited to show in Dubai,” one of the
sisters continued, “and if everything goes well, they want to send us to London and
Milan” (Djigit Media, 2009). In the case of Chechnya, fashion becomes an export, more
significant for the symbolism it can carry than for its potential as an industry.
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Accounting for the differences in the nations’ intentions, both the Pakistani and
Chechen fashion worlds privilege global mobility as the primary condition of global
visibility and ultimately, industrial growth. Popping up in the fashion world’s circuits of
visibility is understood as a tool of industrial investment and expansion. That is,
neoliberal capital both enables this global movement and requires it for the cultivation of
industry. The Chechen case demonstrates the early stages of this process – mobility is an
instrument of global visibility. Pakistan however, with a more developed and formed
local fashion industry, maps out the entirety of the process, positioning mobility as
critical for the growth of an international, neoliberal industry. And “internationalism” is
the oft-repeated ambition among Pakistani designers and fashion week organizers alike.
Throughout the 2012 seasons, designers Ayesha Farook Hashwani, Saim Ali, Nida Ali,
Monica Parach, and Madiha Ibrar, among numerous others, all explained their
internationalist aspirations in interviews with local Pakistani press (Fashion Central PK,
2012). They spoke about the future of the Pakistani fashion industry as an exclusively
international one, waging arguments in favor of the strategies that could yield success in
the international market, providing insight into the best international markets for
Pakistani aesthetics, and applauding PFW organizers for providing the fashion week
events as vehicles for the international enterprise.
In stark difference from the focus on industry and the cultivation of business that
dominate the domestic discourse on Pakistan’s fashion, when staged for global
consumption, this discourse and its design traffic in a culture isolated from all ambition
of industry. When entering the global circuits of visibility, these ambitions undergo a
significant pop-up transmutation: instead of industrial growth, public diplomacy, and
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internationalism, the narratives about Pakistan’s fashion industry and its PFW transform
and this time, pop up as economic timidity. Instead of ‘industry,’ the focus shifts to
‘culture’, with the latter becoming a vague and innocuous signifier of difference and
harmlessness. And the presentation of the fashion shows contributes to this transmutation
rather significantly. On the first day of Pakistan’s 2011 fashion week, an event that is
organized for international exposure and intended for visual circulation, Sufi folk singer
Sain Zahoor performed in celebration of the first day’s close. Models making their way
down the runways were frequently accompanied by folk artists and Pakistani singers in
the background and even guitarists strolling alongside them. It is these cultural, folk
elements that the international fashion press focused on. In their coverage, journalists
from media outlets in Europe and the U.S. plucked these aspects of ‘culture’ out of the
fashion week events and amplified them as representative of the Pakistani fashion
industry. What is important to remember here is that despite their own domestic
ambitions to minimize ‘culture’ and emphasize capitalist industry, when it came to
constructing the metaphoric pop-up for international eyes, PFW organizers actually
prioritized these ‘cultural’ elements.
At their first fashion show in 2009, the Arzhiyev sisters employed the same
strategies, spectacularizing tradition, yielding the same results in terms of coverage. In
this fashion show, dance groups and traditional Chechen singers performed during the
intervals. Both of these examples mobilize exactly those “frills” that Pakistani designer
Deepak Perwani implored the Pakistani fashion industry to leave behind. For him, these
cultural elements detract from the function of trade that the shows are meant to facilitate.
Yet, Perwani himself participated in the fashion week displays, making his collection
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globally visible on Pakistan’s catwalks inside the parameters of traditionalism and as I
will discuss later in this chapter, safely contained anti-modernity.
To become globally visible and mobile, these pop-up transformations suggest, an
off-center industry like Pakistan’s fashion industry must don the unthreatening costume
of economic innocuousness. This performed economic timidity – the minimizing of
global economic ambitions as a way of participating in fashion’s circuits of visibility – is
haunted by what Edward Said (1978) has famously called the practice of Orientalism, a
concept that I return to frequently in this chapter. Said argues that the traditions of
colonialism and imperialism divided the world both ontologically and epistemologically
into the Orient and the Occident, a division that is imbued with systems of domination.
This notion of the Orient is imagined but also a critical component of Europe's material
and cultural civilizations, making Orientalism “a distribution of geopolitical awareness
into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; an
elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction...but also of a whole series of
'interests'” (Said, 1978, p.48). That this distribution of interests, as Said puts it, proceeds
along racialized and gendered lines has become a well-accepted fact among scholars.
Orientalist discourse relies on the production and normalization of racialized systems of
domination, which then map onto the geopolitical, cultural, and ideological distributions
of power, generating both colonial and postcolonial subjects in the process. Given Said’s
explanation of the ways in which geopolitical power is always underwritten by the
architectures of normalized racial formations, the Pakistani designers’ downplaying of
their own economic and geopolitical interests becomes an explicitly racialized strategy.
They are reinforcing their own racialization – as harmless entertainment, as inferior in
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terms of competition, as valuable to the extent that they are exotic, as novelty – on the
terrain of transnational markets. Moreover, the designers are relying on this precise
racialization in order to enter fashion’s circuits of visibility. It is the embrace of this
racialization of their industry, designers, and aesthetics that makes them visible within the
annals of global creative citizenry.
So self-reflexive, in fact, are the pop-up performances that Pakistani designers
construct, that in erecting their ‘international’ pop-up, they participate in the production
of their own novelty; novelty that connotes a novice industry steeped in traditionalism
and culture rather than capitalist (and international) aspiration. When Rizwan Beyg,
Maheen Khan, and Deepak Perwani made their inaugural trip to Milan Fashion Week, all
three showed in the New Upcoming Designers category, despite their extensive
experience in the fashion industry. Maheen Khan, for example, has been designing since
the 1960s, a history in fashion that hardly qualifies her as a newcomer. Yet, despite some
domestic challenges to what was often interpreted as a slight by Pakistani television hosts
and bloggers, all three designers defended Milan’s rendering of them as novelty. Beyg
and Perwani justified this move in interviews, explaining that despite their local success,
they are indeed new to the international market and ultimately, “if you look at it, you’re
showing along with the likes of Giorgio Armani” (Syed, 2009, para.14). This last
addition suggests that these designers understand that neutralizing their international and
economic ambitions through the production of their own novelty is a precondition to the
participation in the global fashion industry, in becoming visible next to the validating
presence of Giorgio Armani. Maheen Khan, in this case, went a step further. Her
collection, as the Italian media constantly reminded consumers, was inspired by “Murder
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on the Orient Express.” Neither interviews with Khan nor the international coverage of
her show elaborate on whether it is Agatha Christie’s work of fiction, the radio program,
any of the film adaptations or the graphic novel that inspired the designer. Indeed, that
specificity does not matter. The strategy here, much like for Beyg and Perwani, is to
produce their industry as economically timid and their collections as racialized spectacle,
devoid of any potential threats for market competition; a strategic transmutation that
guarantees designers entry into global fashion visibility and mobility; a kind of rent
payment made to lease a space for their symbolic and temporary pop-up.

Gendered Labor: Garment Workers and Artisans
To speak of the Pakistani fashion industry’s ambitions of internationalism and
neoliberal expansion necessarily implicates the manufacturing and production face of the
nation’s fashion industry. As Andrew Ross (1997), Angela McRobbie (1997), Ellen Israel
Rosen (2002), Ethel C. Brooks (2007), Sally Weller (2007) and others have argued, the
creative face of fashion does not exist outside of its manufacturing and garment industry
counterpart. Here, the latter is not only a critical element of the industry’s overall picture,
but is also subject to its own pop-up transformation.
As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, Pakistan is one of the world’s leading
cotton producers and the chief manufacturer and exporter of embroidery on the
subcontinent, making local textile manufacturing fundamental to Pakistan’s GDP and
even more significant to its growing clothing sector and fashion industry (PFDC).
Importantly, the clothing sector’s primary geographic clustering is dictated by the
availability of “sufficient ladies labor” (Ahmed, 2009, p.2). Indeed, women make up the
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majority of the Pakistani garment industry’s labor force, subject to the injustices of an
industry that operates seasonally, by contract, and by piece rates. Cotton pickers’ wages
in particular, are de-associated from the actual price of cotton. Instead, they are paid by
the mound, leaving their wages stagnant as the price of cotton rises. Karin Astrid
Siegmann and Nazima Shaheen (2008) call these laborers the “weakest link in the global
textile chain” (Siegmann & Shaheen, 2008, p.628). The conditions that female Pakistani
garment workers face are neither new nor exclusive to this nation. Scholars have written
about the gendered labor that shores up the continual expansion of the global apparel
trade at length. Ellen Israel Rosen (2002), for example, argues that women have made up
the majority of garment workers since the industrialization of the industry. As the
sophistication of technology de-skilled the production process, jobs in the global garment
trade have been increasingly “designed specifically to employ women, often women who
are young and unmarried” (Rosen, 2002, p.240). Writing about the racialized and
gendered character of late capitalism’s strategies of accumulation, Grace Kyungwon
Hong (2006) adds that, “Racialized women – often very young – are the preferred
workforce for transnational capital in the contemporary era, as corporations deliberately
exploit and thereby reproduce racialized and gendered difference to more efficiently
extract profits” (p.108). Hong goes on to describe these women workers as
globalization’s “new proletariat” (Hong, 2006, p.111).
17

That female garment workers are the most vulnerable link in this chain, as
Siegmann and Shaheen describe, is only exacerbated by the Pakistani industry’s rapid

17
Hong’s “new proletariat” is a reference to the “racialized immigrant female labor” that she is writing
about specifically in this work (Hong, 2006, p. 111). While the Pakistani garment workers I discuss here are
not immigrant laborers, the system of transnational capital that governs their working conditions also
produces them as racialized and gendered subjects available for labor exploitation.
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deregulation. Because the industry’s growth and global participation have been
accelerated by global neoliberal trade policies and economies, as I discussed earlier, the
industry has been modeled in neoliberalism’s vision. Local labor deregulation has been
pursued relentlessly. For example, the 2003 Punjab Industrial Policy abolished labor
inspections
18
in several industries, including textile, in order to make those industries
more attractive to business investment. A September 2012 garment factory fire that
ultimately killed 289 garment workers in Karachi is a fitting example of the conditions
that the Industrial Policy and other tactics of deregulation and liberalization have
produced for predominantly female garment workers in Pakistan.
In accordance with the Pakistani fashion industry’s pop-up performances aimed at
global mobility, however, this aspect of the industry also undergoes some transmutation.
The realities of Pakistani garment workers and cotton pickers’ labor conditions are
instead envisioned as crafts, artisanal manufacturing, and hand embroidery. This kind of
transformation invokes images of local artists carefully and diligently embroidering
unique pieces, rather than garment workers laboring in deregulated neoliberal industries
that exploit their labor in order to compete in the global garment trade. The UK-based
company Fashion Compassion, which often works with Pakistani designers, is a good
example of the ways in which the labor of garment workers in Pakistan, as well as other
participating regions, transforms into a myth of artist craftswomen and traditional,
regional skill. Ayesha Mustafa, the company’s founder, has said that the “consumer is
told that each order placed is handled with love and care by artisans possessing immense
ability. From the artisans angle they are trained to give the product their heart and soul

18
The Punjab province covers Lahore and according to Samira Shackle (2012), Karachi has since gone on
to abolish the same regulations.
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and when it comes out for delivery it is unique and exquisite and a brand” (“Ayesha
Mustafa of Fashion Compassion UK,” 2012, para.4). More to the point, the Pakistani
brand Inaaya is described as “a Pakistani socially responsible brand which creates limited
edition pieces made entirely by women artisans in rural communities” (Fashion
Compassion).
Furthermore, Pakistani designers, taking their cues from the international press,
which is primarily interested in where in the “war-torn” region the craftsmanship occurs,
openly participate in this particular transformation; a transformation that harnesses an
obscured female labor to purchase global mobility. In the aftermath of Pakistan’s first
fashion week in 2009, for example, Western press typically focused on the threats posed
by the Taliban and the event’s constant security issues. In light of this discourse, and
attesting to the types of performances that globalization demands of the off-center,
designer Sonya Battla took the opportunity to align her own collection with the
empowerment of women. “I'm a very brave woman," Battla told the UK Telegraph, "I'm
not going to be scared and no one's going to judge me" (Allbritton, 2009, para.3). Here,
Battla is unproblematically positioning her own design sensibilities in opposition to the
Taliban and therefore, in close alliance with the Eurocentric and Western-oriented
fashion world.
19
And Battla was not alone. Female designers, speaking to the foreign (and
particularly the U.S. and European) press frequently cited vague liberal feminist
principles as the force driving their decisions to participate in the fashion week. The
designers, in other words, produce themselves as what Chandra Mohanty (2003) calls
“The Third World Woman.” Mohanty argues that this trope, favored by Western

19
Ayesha Tammy Haq, CEO of PFW, was quoted by the UK Telegraph as saying that the entire event
should be viewed as a “gesture of defiance to the Taliban” (“Taliban defied by Pakistani models,” 2009,
para.4).
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feminism, consolidates the experiences and identities of all women from the global West
and global North into a singular mode of common oppression and dependency. Inside this
discourse, women of color are defined in terms of “object status,” universally described
as victims of violence (male and capitalist), as powerless and exploited (Mohanty, 2003,
p.23). “The Third World Woman” seeks to centralize Western feminism and white
women by racializing women of color into a monolithic subject and by insisting that
women of color require political saving from the West (Amos & Parmar, 1984; Mohanty,
2003; Spivak, 1988). It is precisely this discourse that Battla and other designers enter
when they publically pledge their visibility to Western feminism, producing and
positioning themselves as successful “Third World Women” subjects who have already
learned the lessons of Western feminism, and who have already acknowledged that they
need saving from the “brown men” of the Taliban.
20
This shift of positionality that Battla
and others perform is an ideological one. Consolidating their political positionalities into
this particular pop-up permutation allows these Pakistani female designers to become
legible as creative bodies in the discursive structures of fashion’s geographic and racial
hierarchies. In other words, re-organizing their ideological investments and identity
performances into an improvised, site-specific pop-up performance allows these
designers to visually pop up. That their initiation into legibility as creative subjects
requires their adoption of Western liberal feminist sensibilities, wherein their own bodies
are made to work towards capital’s racially asymmetric structures, is a telling
characteristic of the requirements for global creative citizenship.

20
This is in reference to Gayatri Spivak’s famous formulation of the gendered nature of the colonizer/
colonized relationship as “white men saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak, 1988, p.92).

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What is critical in these examples is that the pop-up transformations from factory
garment worker to rural artisan and then to brave, feminist, Taliban-fighter happen on the
symbolic bodies of women laborers. Consistent with the rubric of pop-up performance,
the fundamental pieces that make up the bulk of the discourse remain constant, only
shifted, re-framed and re-mounted in a different vision to accommodate the mandates of
global travel. While it is hardly surprising, per Karl Marx’s reading of capitalist labor
practices, that labor conditions and laborers themselves would be obscured from the final
fantasy of fashion, the pop-up performances that this particular narrative undergoes
suggests a more nuanced transformation. There is no denial here that the garment workers
are predominantly female; that there is, in fact, significant labor involved in the
production of these garments; or even that the religious violence in Pakistan is deeply
gendered, which is what Battla alludes to. Instead, the racial performance that pops up
here is a theatrical production of an adaptive, chameleonic permutation of these
conditions. Importantly, this process is not straight-forward obfuscation; it is
transformation that rearranges the same fundamentals into a more site-specific pop-up
arrangement. Consequently, when it comes to the Pakistani industry’s global mobility,
the transformations that designers and their aesthetics undertake produce a system of
tripled labor for the industry’s female labor force (garment workers and designers). Their
bodies become responsible for both production, physically supporting the nation-state’s
global neoliberal ambitions, and for symbolic mobility, performatively invoked in the
traveling narratives of artisan craftswomen. Finally, in producing their own bodies as
contestations to fundamentalist Islam and the Taliban, these designers’ and garment
workers’ bodies also labor to validate the U.S war on terror, drawing on the West's long-
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standing discursive tradition of using tropes of oppressed women to validate invasion and
foreign policy (Mohanty, 2003).

Aesthetic Performances of Modernity: Heterogeneity and Mysticism
The third racialized permutation that becomes apparent in the Pakistani fashion
industry’s pop-up performances is in the realm of design. The aesthetic domain of the
Pakistani fashion industry’s pop-up transformations is dominated by two parallel,
imbricated practices: the industry’s treatment of the “pret-a-porter” market and the
strategic selection of particular aesthetics for global mobility. To begin with, in line with
the domestic push for industrial expansion and internationalism, designers and executives
of the Pakistani fashion industry have, since the first fashion week in 2009, prioritized the
development of the industry’s “pret-a-porter” market (ready-to-wear). The concept of
“pret-a-porter” is typically understood in relationship to haute couture (and now, also in
relationship to “fast fashion”), where the former “hinges on the concept of luxury, seen as
a distinction of class” and emphasizes higher price-point, custom-made clothing, while
the latter “focuses on the concept of modernity of ‘life-style’” and offers a more
competitive, more retail-friendly, lower price-point (Reinach, 2005, p.47).
21
The “pret-a-
porter” market is the hotbed of the global fashion world’s commercial and retail
competition. In Pakistan, the local fashion industry’s destiny is not just imagined as an
international one, but also one where the nation’s designers are specifically competitive
in the pret-a-porter market. The “pret” objective, as these designers call it, is a frequently
invoked strategy for expansion and for cultivating ever widening scopes of global

21
Fast fashion , as the third of these models, “is centered on versatility, considered as the immediate
gratification of new ‘temporary’ identities” (Reinach, 2005, p.47). This model is also understood to be low
price-point, quick copies of the pret-a-porter model.
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demand. Echoing the interview answers many Pakistani designers offer, one designer’s
pret-oriented strategy is explained as follows: “Monica Couture’s strategy is to introduce
it in more popular, middle ranging lines with rapid turnover to create demand for the
work” (“Fashion Designer Monica Paracha,” 2012, para.2). Furthermore, the designer’s
plan to “operationalize this strategy” hinges on aesthetic heterogeneity, combining
“traditional patterns and motifs inspired from Ottoman and Mughal periods” with the
“latest trends and cuts” (“Fashion Designer Monica Paracha,” 2012, para.2).
Aesthetic heterogeneity, in fact, is the centerpiece of the Pakistani fashion
industry’s pret strategy. This heterogeneity is a particular one; it refers specifically to the
mix of what is understood as Western and Eastern aesthetics. Indeed, inside these rigid
parameters of place-based creativity, this juxtaposition is difficult to miss. Designs on
display at Karachi's PFW in 2009 represented a combination of traditional Pakistani
fabrics and styles, designs embodying what has been called “ethnic chic” as well as entire
collections that made no references to the traditional at all. Consequently, some designs
adhered closely to the full Islamic dress code that is currently tacit law in Pakistan, while
others flaunted skin in open defiance of what is possible on Karachi's actual streets. This
preference for aesthetic diversity has only grown since the fashion-week events began in
2009. For example, the Zaheer Abbas collection at the 2012 PFW was exclusively white,
with asymmetrical hemlines, peter-pan collars, plenty of sheer pieces, delicate pleats and
wide-brimmed straw hats, all modernist design elements that are prevalent on
contemporary catwalks across Europe. The Abbas collection and its aesthetics, in other
words, would not have stood out at London or New York fashion week. Rising young
designer Misha Lakhani’s first collection (“Colonial Transgression”) at the 2012 PFW,
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encapsulates the kind of aesthetic diversity that the Pakistani industry prioritizes. For this
collection, she combined high-waisted skinny pants, narrow belts, and simply draped
monochromatic silk tops with heavy, entirely embroidered dupattas as jackets. The
designer used a large range of fabrics and included screen prints and digital prints into the
textiles. She told Pakistan’s Daily Times that the collection is about “refining the
extravagance of old India by fusing it with the lexicon of international chic” (Agha, 2012,
B8). Showing again at the 2013 PFW, Misha Lakhani opted for limited ornamentation,
minimalist cuts, and tailoring that, in some cases, cited European menswear. Similar to
Abbas, she stuck to a subdued color palette and in two pieces, showed dresses in stark
black and white, a color combination that rarely appears in traditional Pakistani clothing.
Meanwhile, in addition to showing petite pleats and peter pan collars that are
associated with French fashion and streamlined, geometric tailoring typically ascribed to
Japanese designers, Pakistani designers have also consistently offered variations on
Islamic dress (silk head scarves, volumes of layers, trousers with tunics, turbans etc.). At
the 2009 PFW, designer Athar Hafeez sent traditional yellow and orange gowns,
complete with head coverings down the runway and at one point, a model encased in
layers of heavy bright pink and green hijab made her way down the ramp. During the
same event, Zarmina Khan's costumes included traditional jewel-embellished head
scarves, worn like loose hijab. Finally, a model for Rizwanullah's show wore a
completely white ensemble, covering everything but her face (she even kept her hands
tucked firmly in her pockets as walked down the runway). These collections are only a
handful of examples of the kind of aesthetic diversity that reigns at both PFW and in its
domestic market.
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As the quote from Misha Lakhani demonstrates, designers often point to this trend
of aesthetic heterogeneity in order to explain their artistic inspirations. Ali Xeeshan told
Pakistan’s Sunday Plus Magazine, for example, that his collection The Paradox was
inspired by “a combination of two extremes… creating a harmony between traditional
and the avant-garde style” (Kunwar, 2011, p.10). The collection he showed at the 2011
PFW was a combination of chaddors with face veils in some cases and brightly colored
short shorts, in others. Designer Saim Ali understands her aesthetic as a mix of the same
categories, remarking: “I work on Western cuts while the embellishments are pretty
Eastern so I have a lot of fusion in my designs” (“Showbiz Pakistan – Interview Saim
Ali,” 2011, para.12). And Nosheen Rana of NSR (the label is named after designers and
sisters Nosheen and Shabnam Rana) defines her own sense of style as “an amalgamation
of the East and West, and of traditions and modernity” (Deen, 2012, para.15). These are
just a few examples of a consistent narrative that permeates the Pakistani fashion
industry’s descriptions of its own design sensibilities. Designers not only present a wide-
range of aesthetic sensibilities, borrowing from diverse design traditions and cultural
dress norms, they also consistently envision these aesthetics as fusions of ‘East’ and
‘West’.
What is note-worthy in these discussions of aesthetics is that Pakistani designers
frequently employ the Orientalist strategy of reifying the East and the West as mutually
exclusive,
22
autonomous categories that can be juxtaposed but are in no way constitutive
of one another. The notion, for example, that Ali Xeeshan combines the “traditional and
the avant-garde” is a barely disguised euphemism for combining the East and the West.

22
As Edward Said argues, accepting the East and the West as starting points for theorizing is a form of
Orientalism (Said, 1978).
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Here, ‘tradition’ is consistently Islam and the avant-garde is simply a reference to
Western cuts and patterns of dress. The aesthetic heterogeneity these designers embrace,
even domestically, operates along the same ideological scripts that manage Orientalist
discourses of otherness and reminds us that cultural hybridity and in this case, aesthetic
heterogeneity in the global are “power-laden and asymmetrical” (Shohat & Stam, 1994,
p.43). The differences in perspectives – between the Pakistani designers and an
Orientalist treatment that emanates from more overt positions of geopolitical power – are
contained in the value the designers ascribe to that heterogeneity: the Pakistani designers
view the East as an insurgent in the existing narrative of Western design, while the more
Eurocentric fashion industry views the East as the mainstream fashion world’s necessary
exotic (Shohat & Stam, 1994).
Furthermore, domestically, this cohort of designers unilaterally imagines their
aesthetics as the re-invention of modernity. Rarely does an interview with a designer
proceed without mention of an aesthetic that reroutes modernity through traditionalism, a
notion that mimics Bourriaud and Enwezor’s suggestions about the historical
temporalities of contemporary artistic practice. Ali Xeeshan’s collections are said to be
“mystic yet restrained, ornate yet elegant” (Kunwar, 2011, p.10). The designer Rizwan
Beyg has described his 2009 collection as an aesthetic that travels “from the rural to the
runway,” making direct gestures to this intersection of modernity and tradition (Beyg
quoted in Syed, 2009). The Pakistani fashion website Fashion Central PK describes
designer Rabia’s 2010 collection of veils as “mystical modernity” (“Rabia at Fashion
Pakistan,” 2010, para.1). The modern, as it is imagined by designers, is an aesthetic mode
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that is simultaneously oppositional and constitutive of tradition and that accompanies the
cultivation of cultural industry.
This domestic emphasis on aesthetic modernity demonstrates a complicated
tension with the concept’s usual connotations, since modernity, on its own terms,
23
most
often connotes European narratives of progress and liberal humanism, including Western
democracy and the growth of capitalist industry. As many scholars (Chakrabarty, 1992,
2007; Gilroy, 1993; Hayes Edwards, 2003; Mbembe, 2001; Mignolo, 2000; Said, 1978,
1993; Spivak, 1988) have explained, the concept of the modern is inseparable from
histories of colonialism and the racial difference that it has produced. The modern is a
cornerstone of those Eurocentric discourses of history that would render the postcolonial
subject and the non-European subject (indeed, the Pakistani subject) ahistorical and
antimodern, foreclosing the possibility of that subject’s speech. While Pakistani designers
do frequently invoke ‘modernity’ as an explanation for their design parameters, their
usage of the term is more complicated, suggesting that designers imagine their own
participation in modernity as inseparable from traditionalism and history. While the
designers, as I mentioned, do maintain the East and the West as mutually exclusive
spatiotemporal concepts, their vision of modernity is neither exclusively Eurocentric nor
historically linear. ‘History’ and ‘tradition’ are, for these designers, not the foils of a
disconnected place and time; they are present and currently active in what is seen as
modernity. These self-representations are the off-center’s reinterpretation of modernity
through the traditionalism that is constitutive of the present moment. It is a vision of the

23
I emphasize modernity on its own terms here as a way of referring specifically to the ways in which the
concept of ‘the modern’ has typically been deployed, despite many scholars’ efforts to reroute narratives of
modernity, to offer histories of counter-modernity and alternative frameworks for understanding the
modern as it is situated with relationship to what Mignolo calls the colonizing practices of a
modern/colonial world system.
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modern that is in conversation with its historical legacies; that, borrowing from
Bourriaud, sees those temporalities as constitutive loops, rather than linear trajectories.
In line with the pop-up transformations performed by Pakistani designers and
aesthetics in their efforts to purchase global mobility and circulation, this messy and
complicated rendering of ‘modernity’ only exists domestically. When it comes to
traveling, aesthetics endowed with the temporalities of a complicated and hybridized
modernity are subjected to the pop-up’s mechanisms of improvisation and site-
specificity. Subsequently, these aesthetics transform into simple reflections of an
ahistorical, static regionalism; tribalism, steeped in tradition alone. The pop-up
transformation is accomplished through the strategic selection of collections intended for
travel and by designers’ self-(re)positioning with relationship to the international market
and press. Designer Madiha Ibrar says that in order for young Pakistani designers to be
recognized internationally, they must use their Pakistani culture as a “tool” and “focus on
more traditional outfits” (“Fashion Designer Madiha Ibrar,” 2012, para.6). As the
Pakistani industry grows and expands internationally, she worries that “there are certain
areas where one feels that the fashion industry is fast leaving its traditional roots that had
made it exotic and appealing in the first place. There is a need to hold onto those ideas”
(“Fashion Designer Madiha Ibrar,” 2012, para.7). While a complicated modernity is the
staple of fashion aesthetics domestically, this designer urges the industry to err on the
side of the “exotic” and “traditional” in order to manage international growth and global
visibility. Others in the industry follow suit. Tariq Amin, Pakistani stylist and TV
personality working at the 2011 fashion week in Islamabad, told U.S.-based Vice
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Magazine that the models’ “waist-length tribal braided black extensions [were] inspired
‘by a fusion of Rasta and northern Pakistani tribal dress” (Duboc, 2011, p.41).
Following in this mandate, the aesthetics selected for international travel tend to
reproduce exactly the requirements cited by those like Ibrar. It is not only the narrative
and self-representation that undergo a strategic transformation when the image of
Pakistan’s fashion industry is being produced for an international audience, the aesthetics
transform as well. First, despite the domestic market’s heavy and increasing focus on
pret-a-porter collections that feature primarily separates, lower price points (than
formalwear), less ornamentation, and fabrics more appropriate for daily consumption, the
Pakistani collections that travel to international fashion weeks are almost exclusively
formalwear and bridal wear. Reminiscent of what I have labeled as the racialized pop-up
transformation into economic timidity, Pakistani designers make mobile those collections
that obscure the industry’s market ambitions for increased international competition.
Furthermore, the aesthetic diversity that is so cherished on catwalks in Karachi and
Lahore does not travel well. The collections selected for international visibility are those
that prioritize Islamic dress and traditional ‘Pakistani’ formalwear, including plenty of
beading, inlays, layered embroidery and only a select few cut patterns: kameez suits,
dupattas, midriff-baring gowns with draped saris, and of course, veils. Sonya Battla’s
collection for London’s 2012 PFW is a great example of this. Every look in this
collection was either a vibrantly colored silk gown with beading details, or else, a flowing
knee-length, silk chemise (also vibrantly-colored and beaded) worn over trousers, in the
style of the kameez suit. Also showing at the London 2012 PFW, Waseem Noor’s
collection followed very similar guidelines, with predominantly dresses and saris
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rendered in bright colors, with considerable touches of beading and matching chiffon
overlays. Even Misha Lakhani, who so embraces aesthetic heterogeneity domestically
(per my earlier description), altered her “Colonial Transgressions” collection before
taking it to the 2012 Paris Bridal Fashion Week. For her too, formalwear, increased
ornamentation, with newly added hair jewelry and voluminous scarves became the way
to make her aesthetics mobile. Designer Hsy’s collection at the 2012 Paris Bridal Fashion
Week showed nothing but entirely embroidered gowns in magenta pinks, deep oranges
and dark blues. Every model wore traditional Pakistani gold head ornaments and most,
finished off the look with head scarves.
24
The headscarves at Hsy’s show are a crucial
element of these traveling aesthetics because, despite the design diversity that
characterizes Pakistan’s fashion industry, its traveling collections are an
overrepresentation of Islamic dress. Much like traditional formal wear, beading, and
embroidery, head scarves and hijab are far more plentiful in the collections that travel
than they are domestically.
25
Importantly, the international fashion press also prefers to
isolate and emphasize the Islamic aesthetics from Pakistani design. It is the photographs
of models covered in veils, hijab, and abayas that enjoy the highest amount of circulation
in the mainstream fashion press, with journalists from the U.S. and the U.K. making
nearly obligatory references to the Islamic robes and headscarves on display. When it
comes to aesthetics then, Pakistani designers produce aesthetic pop-up permutations in
order to make their collections mobile (to make the collections pop), re-assembling

24
While a fashion week dedicated to bridal wear might suggest that formal wear and gowns would be most
appropriate and therefore, would dictate Pakistani designers’ choice of formal gowns as well, the actual
Paris Bridal Fashion Week is not so strict. The aesthetics often found at these shows are a wide range of
designers’ interpretations of bridal wear.
25
An important reminder here is that I am referring to the representation of Pakistani and Islamic design
and aesthetics in mainstream, Eurocentric circuits of the fashion world. There is a very large, parallel global
market for Muslim fashion that is estimated to be worth $96 billion. Nevertheless, what I am concerned
with in this chapter is the visibility of Pakistani and Islamic aesthetics in the dominant fashion world.
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aesthetic components into an arrangement that transforms from aesthetic diversity and
pret-a-porter ambitions into Islamic fashion and an emphasis on the far less economically
threatening formalwear category.

Beyond Autoexoticism: The Industry’s Pop-Up Performances
In reviewing the strategic transformations that Pakistani designers undergo in
order to become visible in the fashion industry’s asymmetrically-powered global circuits
of visibility, it is tempting to understand the traveling performances of designers and their
aesthetics inside the theoretical frameworks of autoexoticism or self-Orientalizing. Marta
Savigliano (1995) says that autoexoticism is the practice “of looking for identity through
the Western mirror” (p.179) or as Dorinne Kondo (1997) explains, it is the “appropriation
of Western gazes” by the subjects of Orientalism (p.57). Worldwide imperialism and
colonialism, according to Savigliano, “has had the power to establish Eurocentric
exoticism as a universally applicable paradigm,” wherein “peoples exoticized by
Eurocentric colonialist discourses and technologies … reproduce, subvert, and
reappropriate Western stereotyping as they relate to one another” (Savigliano, 1995,
p.169). Kondo locates this technology of self-Orientalizing among creative producers in
the Japanese fashion industry, arguing that identity construction in this space is, in part,
marked by this practice of racial indexing. Similarly, Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-
Young (2003) discuss the measure of self-exoticism in dance productions originating in
North Africa and the Middle East. The authors argue that new middle-class populations
in these locations necessarily self-Orientalize their nations’ popular cultures of dance as a
way of articulating their own status and preference for European forms of dance.
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Insofar as these descriptions of autoexoticism discuss the production of identity in
a postcolonial context, it is not surprising that they often refer to Homi Bhabha’s (1994)
notion of “mimicry” as the mode of performance that characterizes the relationship
between the colonizer and the colonized. According to Bhabha, the colonized do not
represent; they mimic a negotiated – what would be considered 'tainted' – version of the
appropriate, introducing ambivalence into the colonizer/colonized relationship. The
subjects (and the texts) that emerge from this relationship are inflected with the clear
articulation and exercise of colonial power, but also transformed through mimicry and the
disloyal renderings that it implies (Bhabha, 1994). The resulting hybrid subject position is
neither “the noisy command of colonialist authority” nor “the silent repression of native
traditions” (Bhabha, 1994, p.160). It is this formulation of tainted and productive
mimicry that scholars turn to when explaining the mimetic reproductions of the West that
occur during autoexoticism. The appropriation of the Western gaze by subjects who are
already exoticized in Orientalist discourse produces narratives and identities of difference
that are “almost the same but not” or “not quite/not white” (Bhabha, 1994, p.122, p.131).
While the concept of autoexoticism and its relationship to Bhabha’s mimicry and
ambivalence are certainly in conversation with the kinds of racial mutations that the
Pakistani industry selects in order to travel, these particular transformations are better
explained by the framework of pop-up performance that I laid out in the Introduction to
this dissertation. The economic conditions that compel designers and industry executives
to undertake these strategic, temporary transformations in order to become mobile and
visible as global creative citizens, exceed the relationships laid out by both autoexoticism
and mimicry. Autoexoticism produces ambivalent (colonized) subjects who adopt the
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Western gaze and take on the cultural traditions of the colonizer, performing them, but
not loyally. This formulation, while including complicated ways in which the constructed
identity becomes hybridized and tainted by both the colonizer and colonized, does not
account for the strategic selections that these Pakistani designers make when it comes to
racial identity. The designers are not simply internalizing an imperfect and partial
Western gaze and sometimes adapting its systems of domination to their own identity
(and survival) needs. These designers’ strategies of temporary transmutation demonstrate
that they are making active choices to comply with the fashion world’s circuits of
visibility in order to ultimately contribute to the neoliberal growth of their own fashion
industry. Like pop-up shops, racial performances are mounted to take advantage of a
leased space (global visibility) and then taken down when their time and profitability has
expired. There is little ambivalence in these transformations; they are entirely tactical –
congealing around one set of racial performances domestically and another set of racial
performances when mobile – and underwritten by the global economies of creative
visibility. The pop-up framework enables us to consider these transformations not as
psychic absorption of colonial violence, but as the entrepreneurial deployment of
strategic, site-specific pop-up racialization that is both authored and demanded by the
neoliberal logics of global arts and cultural industries.
The pop-up performances that the Pakistani fashion industry engages in these
circuits of visibility in some ways gesture to the dilemma that Kondo poses in her own
work on fashion: “how to play on someone else’s field as a racially marked, artistic,
capitalist, geopolitical rival” (Kondo, 1997, p.61). In other words, the Pakistani fashion
industry’s complicity with the performances of racial otherness – through their own
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aesthetics and through the bodies of designers and laborers – point to the racialized
transmutations that are the precondition to this industry’s visibility and mobility in the
global circuits of fashion. Designers rent their symbolic international pop-up store space
and pay for it by complying with a specific pop-up racialization. Their complicity is not
only compelled by the racialized structures of domination that make-up the fashion
world, it is also in a constant syncretic relationship with the racial othering that is taken
up by reviewers and various authorities of the global fashion industry. For example,
deploying the language of regionalism and tribalism, a reporter for Time observes that
Maheen Khan’s show featured hats, done with Swat Valley-based embroidery,
constituting "a colorfully elegant tribute to the people of the once-Taliban-ravaged Swat
Valley... tastefully tweaked versions of those worn in Chitral, in the northwest's
mountains" (Waraich, 2009, para.8). While this invocation of regionalism may only be a
vague gesture towards Orientalist rhetoric, responses to the Arzhiyev sisters’ showing at
MFW were far more direct. The collection generated a medley of Orientalist adjectives:
magical, mystical, fairy-tales, 1001 Nights. Having listed some of these attributes, an
executive of MFW added: “it is exactly how we imagine the East” (Djigit Media, 2009).
What the case studies of the Pakistani fashion industry and Chechnya’s fashion
debut demonstrate is that encounters in the global marketplace compel all participants to
perform inside the confines of the kind of Orientalist discourse that fixes a static East in
histories, without access to modernity. The market demands it in order to purchase global
visibility and designers as well as fashion industry executives oblige, performing pop-up
transmutations that accommodate this demand. Fashion display becomes their
opportunity to perform global compliance with the unyielding colonial residue of identity
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formation. This compliance (its presence and visibility), however, is unmistakably waged
both as a result of the growth of neoliberal, global industry and as a way to shore up that
growth. Designers and their designs’ performances of “tradition,” “mysticism,”
“tribalism,” liberal feminism, and economic timidity brings the creative bodies of the off-
center into the fold, allowing them to be neutralized inside the regulations of global
visibility. Their pop-up performances deliver a measure of safety, avoiding the
ideological risk that would implode a moment of illegible racial encounter.
If, as scholars like George Yudice and Ian Condry (2006) have suggested, the
global movement of bodies, industries, aesthetics and cultures is facilitated by the
performative dimension, then Pakistani designers manage that dimension as a way of
purchasing continued mobility and visibility. Yudice argues that globalization “brings
different cultures into contact with each other, it escalates the questioning of norms and
thus abets performativity” (Yudice, 2003, p.31). The case study of Pakistani designers,
their tactical usage of aesthetic transformations as well as identity transformations,
further argues that global visibility and recognition in these moments of contact requires
performances to produce a mediated racial difference, wherein designers construct
themselves as authentically local, novel, eternally regional, stably and reliably othered,
but also pro liberalism, Western ideology, and capitalism.

Considering the Veil: Hegemonic Leaks and Performative Excesses
While designers’ strategic identity performances, compelled by the neoliberal
economy that makes them visible in the first place, suggests that the off-center’s
conditions of visibility are rigidly reproductive of Orientalist discourses and far from a
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domain where global visibility or self-representation can warrant celebration, designers’
use of Islamic dress creates moments that implode these performances from within and
are worth exploring. For Pakistani designers complying with the requirements of
fashion’s global creative visibility has meant, in part, accentuating the traditional and
Islamic influence of their designs to ensure global mobility, both in terms of the physical
travel of collections and in terms of visual circulation through photography in the
mainstream, Western press. While these pop-up performances certainly fit squarely into
the practices of racial domination that structure fashion’s Orientalist discourse, these
practices also yield an excess visual domain surrounding the Islamic veil. In these racially
policed circuits of visibility, the veil not only gains visibility, but is also re-scripted as an
object of art. However contaminated and conflicted its route to this compromised
visibility might be, the veil nevertheless becomes visible in a context of sanctioned
Western artistic practice, destabilizing the very idea of Western artistic practice from
within some of fashion’s most hallowed catwalks. If the pop-up performances described
in this chapter accommodate the fashion world’s racial and geographic hegemony, then
the presence and visibility of the veil is that hegemony’s unintended leak.
As an aesthetic object, the veil reflects both the limitations and possibilities laden
in artistic production as it is facilitated by the practices of economic globalization.
Paradoxically, the veil's visual presence as an aesthetic object included in the
articulations of the emergent off-center is both made possible by a widening neoliberal
ethos and in some ways, resistant to neoliberal capitalism's most traditional schemes of
appropriation and acceleration. At the same time, the veil also works to symbolically
recast the terms of global Islamic citizenship, by offering a de-centered visual imaginary
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that deposits itself into discourses of cultural futurity. In short, the veil's compromised
visibility is what I think of as a hegemonic leak that betrays the static Orientalism, which
its designers are compelled to mobilize, offering its’ would-be consumers a different way
to visually travel through time and space.
When it comes to Pakistan's fashion weeks and to a greater extent, Chechnya’s
appearance at MFW, the most notable articulations of Islamic fashion were the different
interpretations of the face veil, which appeared in numerous designers' collections. Nomi
Ansari's 2009 collection, for example, included black gauzy veils, reminiscent of bridal
veils, but significantly, black. At the 2011 fashion week, Ali Xeeshan showed a variety of
richly colored chaddors as well as face veils in jewel tones and heavy embroidery.
Showing at the 2010 fashion week, the designer Rabia was the first Islamic designer to
take the stage and she presented an array of veils. Designer Fahad Hussayn's 2009 line
included a veiled black bridal gown. Hussayn's collection also included a costume with a
golden brown, jewel-embellished, gauzy veil, fixed at the top by a hat, covering the
model's entire face. The photo of this look reveals that the model's face was visible
through the fabric, but only ambiguously so.
This adherence to the reality of Islamic dress codes is reminiscent of what Jenny
White (1999) has called “Islamic chic,” or the wearing of “distinctively urban Islamic
garb” as a way to demonstrate affiliation with the nation's political Islamic elite (White,
1999, p.80). “Adopting Islamic dress,” White agues, “has become a sign of status, more
than a marker of personal devotion, but less than a political statement” (White, 1999,
p.80). The direct correlation to economic privilege is not incidental here, as Islamic chic
functions by normalizing “its interest in wealth and consumption, against Islamic
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principles of anticonsumerism and social justice” (White, 1999, p.89). Falling in line with
the aesthetic practices of Islamic chic – updating conservative Islamic dress for urban and
upper-class milieus through the use of bright colors, expensive fabrics and ample jeweled
embellishments – the veil is nevertheless a far more conservative addition to that which is
positioned as 'traditional' Islamic wardrobe. Fittingly, many of the women in the shows'
audience were also dressed according to conservative Muslim custom, revealing little,
some even in full hijab. The designers contributed too. At the end of the 2011 Saai
collection, the brand’s two designers emerged to take the typical celebratory walk on the
runway. They emerged in matching abbayas, fully covered in loose pants, long-sleeved
tunics and a cowl around their heads, reminding viewers that the Islamic garb on display
at these particular shows is not intended as fashion’s theater, but rather, as consumable,
practical clothing.
While the veils that are used by designers during PFW are typically far from the
traditional Islamic burqa, other forms of head and face coverings prevail. Examples of the
hijab and niqab, in fact, are plentiful. At the 2009 PFW, some of these examples were
loose cowls, framing models’ faces; others were tied tightly so as to encase the model’s
face completely. The veils, while transparent, did nevertheless cover the model's face and
upper body in large, ambiguously shaped fabrics. Perhaps most importantly, at PFW,
these variations of Islamic dress are not novelty, but functional. The practical
functionality of these veils is critical here. That is, veils have of course been used by
Western designers in numerous collections as theatrical accoutrement, meant to cultivate
a particular, temporary climate for the show. The Maison Martin Margiela Spring 2013
Couture collection, for example, wrapped the models’ heads in dark, sometimes beaded
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balaclava, shaped to resemble candy wrapping. Armani Privé’s Fall 2012 Couture
collection showed a few models in cropped, completely transparent, lightly beaded veils.
And Jeremy Scott's Spring 2013 collection, which the designer says was inspired by the
Arab Spring, featured an opaque gold, leopard-print veil, among other veil-like items
paired with mini-dresses and shorts. What differentiates these Western examples of the
veil from those shown by Pakistani designers is that designers like Maison Martin
Margiela, Armani, and Jeremy Scott use these objects as styling elements; they are
intended as theater, not commodities that are manufactured and offered to consumers.
The hijab, niqab, and veil offered by Pakistani designers however, are consumable
objects, meant to enter the marketplace.
Furthermore, these veils and head scarves are a stylistic element that is hard to
divorce from the notions of Islam and regional politics in this socio-historic moment.
Leila Ahmed (1992) has argued that the veil served as a key signifier of “Muslim
backwardness” during colonization, and Saba Mahmood (2005) has added that it has,
“more than any other Islamic practice... become the...evidence of the violence Islam has
inflicted upon women” (Mahmood, 2005, p.195). Mahmood's invocation of the veil as
signifier of the violence against women resonates with the theorizations offered by
Mohanty and Spivak and isolates this fact as a particularly significant component of the
rhetoric that positions all Islam as fundamentally violent and consequently, in need of
overthrow.
26
Dana Cloud (2004), for example, has shown that the West's depiction of the
veil has predominantly served to position the women of Islam as victims of an
oppressive, backward society and in turn, justify Western (Cloud is concerned primarily

26
I am referring to my earlier discussion of Mohanty’s and Spivak’s works and their explanations that the
notion of “third world woman” is a Western discursive construct that works to validate Western foreign
policy (Spivak, 1988; Mohanty, 2003).
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with U.S. visual rhetorics of the veil) intervention into local political processes as well as
war. For Cloud, the image of the veiled woman is an ideograph that activates the rhetoric
of “the clash of civilizations,” naturalizing that image as an authentic narrative but also
asking the (Western) consumer of the image to disidentify with what is framed as
abjection (Cloud, 2004).
In the West, the veil functions as an easy and normalized point of disidentification
with what is rendered as senseless (and thus, antithetical to modernity) terror and
oppression. In fact, one need only look to the enduring legacy of banning veils in
Western nations, to see that the Islamic veil is synonymous with fundamentalism,
terrorism and antimodernity in contemporary Western discourse. On May 10th, 2010,
after lengthy legal proceedings, France passed a resolution making face-covering veils
illegal in public. The resolution was passed unanimously (434 to 0) and constituted the
first step towards what President Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative administration pursued
as law. Andre Gerin, who served as the head of the information panel in these
proceedings, opined that “veils transform women into 'phantoms,' 'walking coffins' and
represent the 'barbarism' of Muslim extremists” (Ganley, 2010, para.9). That same month,
a Muslim woman was fined nearly 500 euros for wearing a burqa in Italy (Squires, 2010).
Earlier that year, Belgium banned the wearing of burqa and niqab on its streets. In the
meantime, Britain has been debating the ban, occasionally polling its public, since 2006
(“Survey finds support,” 2006). Significantly, the list of nations that deploys the trope of
the veil as incontrovertible sign of terror is also the list of fashion’s global capitals (with
the exception of Belgium). New York, Milan, Paris, and London fashion weeks are, as
previously mentioned, the institutions that dominate the global fashion industry.
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These Western mobilizations of the veil constitute the critical context for the pop-
up performances that the Pakistani fashion industry and its designers engage. As I have
shown, despite the aesthetic diversity and reimagining of “modernity” that dominates the
Pakistani fashion industry’s domestic climate, the fashion industry’s global circuits of
visibility privilege Orientalist aesthetics and discourse. In the end, what circulates, thanks
in part to the selections made by Western media and in part, to Pakistani designers’ pop-
up compliance with those selections, are objects of Islamic fashion. The international
press plucks out images of hijab, burqas and ornate face veils as the governing,
spectacularized and racialized representations of Pakistan’s fashion industry. The
Pakistani industry, in turn, takes its cues, sending similarly narrow aesthetics to
international fashion weeks as a way of guaranteeing their own participation in the global
fashion world. Despite these tightly controlled, racially-marked practices of Orientalism
in the service of neoliberal creative economies, however, the visual presence of these
veils and Islamic aesthetics as aesthetic objects warrants some analysis. The veils,
presented by Pakistani designers as commodities, sent down the runway at an artistic
event intended for global visual consumption, take on a symbolic currency that intervenes
in the regimes of both global neoliberal capital and representation on the terrain of
fashion.
To begin with, the veil is not an easily consumable object of fashion. The very
same connotations that render it proxy for terror also arguably work to prevent its
seamless appropriation in the global fashion market. As a signifier, the veil cannot be
neutralized, like so many objects before it (like the bindi, the Keffiyeh scarf, the tikka
head jewelry etc.). It cannot be stripped of its geopolitical baggage in this socio-historic
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moment and therefore, cannot be harnessed by global capital in the traditional manner.
That is not to suggest that the veil, recast as aesthetic object, cannot be mobilized as a
capitalist consumer good in any fashion industries at all. In fact, the discussion of Islamic
chic as an aesthetic dedicated to delineating class hierarchies in Islamic countries is an
example of the ways in which an object like the veil can indeed become functional for
certain fashion industries and their economies. However, because of what Cloud has
called its ideograph, the veil is not easily harnessed as a commodity resource for the
global fashion industry and its economy.
In the contemporary moment, the veil cannot be neutralized enough to allow it
circulation in major transnational retail outlets, the same ones that McRobbie argues
dominate the global networks of the fashion industry (McRobbie, 2002). McRobbie lists
retailers like Kookai, Debenhams, and Top Shop, but the likes of Zara, Uniqlo and H&M
can be added to that list.
27
What is notable about this list for the present discussion is that
nearly all of these retailers are unsurprisingly based in Western capitalist nations (with
the exception of Uniqlo, which is a Japan-based company); more specifically, European
nations that have been wrestling with anti-Islamic discourses and subsequent veil bans.
To use but one example with urgent resonance for current geopolitical developments, it is
unlikely that the French retailer Kookai will stock veils – in a variety of shapes and colors
– in its stores at the same time that the French parliament is mobilizing the trope of the
veil as a signifier of terror and validation for anti-Islamic legislation.
28
The Islamic veil,

27
In 2008, for example, the Spanish company Zara became the world's largest fashion retailer. As of 2012,
Zara, H&M, Gap, and Uniqlo are the four largest clothing retailers in the world (Chu, 2012).
28
The exception here is the U.K.-based department store Harrods, which started selling abayas in 2010.
However, this development was a direct result of the fact that Qatar’s sovereign-wealth fund bought the
store a month before and the situation remains an anomaly. Two years later the UK Guardian’s Sara Ilyas
reports that mainstream brands and stores are still “reluctant to target Muslim women” (Ilyas, 2012).
Furthermore, Harrods is not a major chain with global reach, like Zara or H&M.
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whether paraded down Pakistan’s catwalks or mobile inside the fashion world’s circuits
of visibility, is not quite conducive to the work of the global fashion industry. To lean on
Yudice, its' cultural connotations resist its easy mobilization as a resource for global
corporations and global capital.
This is no small feat since one of the chief motivations for the representation of
otherness in the global fashion industry has been appropriation and commodification.
Scholars like Meenakshi Gigi Durham (2009), for example, have discussed this
consumption of otherness through fashion aesthetics as the commodification of “ethnic
chic,” a fashion industry strategy that “operates in relation to global capital and racialized
power,... inextricably bound up with the mobilization of capital” (Durham, 2009, p.504).
Appropriation is key here as it underscores Western capital's essentialized marking and
subsequent commodification of otherness (specifically for Durham, South Asian
femininity).
29
Significantly, these visual signifiers of what is both contained and sanitized
as South Asian femininity, gain meaning in global capital on the bodies of white, Western
women, ensuring that “in some instances, the exotic becomes American and in others
banal” (Moorti, 2006, p.293). Referring to the processes of commodity multiculturalism
that the notion of “ethnic chic” invokes, Sujata Moorti (2006) observes that “the use of
the bindi,” to take just one example of the visual markers of otherness plucked by
Western fashion, “permits Western women to perform an enlightened, multicultural
appreciation of other cultures, but when used by Indian women, it continues to point to
the residues of a primordial, primitive culture” (Moorti, 2006, p.304). In fashion then,
signifiers of what is rendered exotic otherness have traditionally been both imbued with

29
A recent example of this fashion world practice is Chanel's 2012 Pre-Fall collection, which included a
sequined gold and silver sari and showed models wearing Indian Tikka head jewelry for styling purposes.
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value and distilled on the bodies of Western women, necessarily denying the source of
these aesthetics as well as the murky complexity of their socio-historic and cultural
contexts. Given the current geopolitical climate, the veil is not conducive to that fluidity
of appropriation that the global fashion industry often relies on to produce novelty. It
simply cannot be made functional for that particular work of global capital.
Furthermore, the veil, as the most conservative manifestation of Islamic chic
aesthetics, fails the economic schedules of global fashion in yet another way. Balasescu
points out that the Iranian designer Parissa finds herself “at a commercial disadvantage”
since her aesthetic sensibilities are not fitting with the “commercial logic of fashion”
(Balasescu, 2007, p.314) that necessitates a never-ending regime of planned
obsolescence, where clothes constantly go out of style and invite further consumption.
Because the aesthetics of Islamic chic are both atemporal and invested with the
discourses of memory and nostalgia, especially when it comes to clients living in the
diaspora, the clothing that designers like Parissa produce “never get out of fashion, [and]
people don't keep buying them” (Parissa quoted in Balasescu, 2007, p.315). That which
Parissa considers an economic disadvantage for her own business practices is evidence of
the ways in which Islamic chic aesthetics and certainly, the fashionable veil, operate in
economies alongside those of global capital.
30
In addition to being burdened with
inseverable racially-marked visual rhetorics, an aesthetic object like the veil cannot
participate in the global fashion industry's anesthetized and accelerated processes of
production and trade.

30
These parallel economies are made of proliferating Muslim-oriented fashion shows around the world
(like the London Muslim Woman Show), Indonesia’s Islamic Fashion Consortium, and Muslim model
agencies (like New York’s Underwraps).
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Symbolic Futurity and the Veil as Global Citizenship
The work that the veil can do in fact, registers mostly in the symbolic realm.
Following in the cultural logics of contemporary artistic practice and its jagged maps, the
veil works to articulate the terms of its own presence, performing its own temporality and
shifting the terms of what it means to be a global Muslim citizen. As earlier discussions
have shown, in the Western imagination the veil is inextricably linked to both spirituality
and what is often dismissed as backwardness, antithetical to a teleological, progressive,
linear view of historical movement. For those who consume the veil as daily, fashionable
object, it is also a “depository of memory” (Balasescu, 2007, p.314). Furthermore, for
consumers living in the diaspora, it is an object that ritualizes and animates symbolic
connections to a homeland. In all three instances, the affective and economic
temporalities that the veil's presence initiates becomes a sort of shadowy weight on the
accelerated, progressive temporalities that inform the global fashion industry.
The global fashion industry’s accelerated temporalities are deeply imbricated with
a symbolic futurity, with designers’ primary task consisting of aesthetic speculation:
constantly reinventing and re-envisioning fashion’s relationship to a future as well as to
an imagined modernity. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that a notion of a futurity
accessible through aesthetics is constitutive of the work fashion designers lay claim to.
Partly due to its historical commitments to the avant-garde, and partly because the
capitalist production of fashion fads mandates a near obsession with novelty, fashion
aesthetics are always in conversation with futurity (Lipovetsky, 1994; McRobbie,
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2002).
31
Fashion's very currency in the traditional global fashion market is its ability to
foretell the aesthetic future, even if that often means reinterpreting the past.
In light of this fundamental process of the fashion industry then, the presentation
of the veil as fashion, inserts the veil and the Islamic subject it inadvertently drags along
into the grammars of aesthetic futurity. Despite designers’ conservative pop-up
performances, securing ideological safety, continued visibility and mobility for their own
designs, their use of the veil constitutes a leak in this constructed hegemony. On the one
hand, the veil, hijab and niqab all labor to communicate the Orientalist tropes of
‘mysticism’ and ‘antimodernity’ that designers and their aesthetics must perform in order
to participate in global fashion’s spotlight. On the other, that veil’s presence as an
aesthetic object at a creative event estranges the Western gaze that informs global
fashion’s circuits of value.
In the Western imagination that informs global fashion practices and rhetorics, the
ideographs of the veil and the future are irreconcilable. If the veil is short-hand for
backwardness, operating in its own stagnant economy of desire and consumption, then it
has no place in the Western fashion world's temporalities. Consequently, the veil's
presence on a global fashion stage unleashes its connotations onto the congealed
understandings of what a future global citizen embodies, prying that signification open
and dwelling in the dissonances that result. The veil, by depositing itself into aesthetic
futurity, into a landscape that refuses to account for its presence outside of the norms of

31
Consider, for example, that designers present their season collections at least one calendar season in
advance of the target time period. Fashion publications follow suit, close on the heels of the global couture
calendar of shows. The conditions of neoliberal creative production that McRobbie describes rely on its
“association [with] newness and youthfulness” (McRobbie, 2002, p.525), leading the fashion industry to a
near intoxication with futurity and importantly, with dressing the future global citizen.
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Orientalism, insists on an expanded present that critiques the conditions of its own
existence.
Okwui Enwezor has said of artistic practice in the age of economic globalization,
that its cultural productions are not only aware of history but, in marked departure from
the postmodern, engage in a deliberate play with its narratives (Enwezor, 2009). In some
ways, the veil articulates that very play. Islamic chic clothing, according to Balasescu, “is
a prompter for times past, and spaces lost” (Balasescu, 2007, p.314). Its play with
traditional attire is committed to “adapting the clothes to a mobile body that needs to
move continuously, a modern body circulating in an urban environment” (Balasescu,
2007, p.313). The author's quote is especially urgent here as it references movement and
a re-inscription of the modern, a process that Pakistani designers are forced to abandon to
purchase their own visibility and mobility. As the Pakistani model, whose face is covered
by one of Fahad Hussayn's light, brown, and bejeweled veils, glides down the runway,
she recasts the terms assigned to global Islamic citizenship. For a moment, the veil
intervenes in global fashion's economic and visual regimes, insisting that the realities of
conservative Islam cannot simply be relegated and affixed to history's “backwardness.”
Instead, the veil as fashionable object reminds the viewer that Islamic global citizenship
is not only salient in the present, but also mobile. In the context of fashion’s speculation
on futurity, as a fashionable object, it becomes the costume of the future global citizen.
The veil reasserts Islamic citizenship in the present by routing it through a figuration of
an aesthetic future. Presented as a fashion object on a global catwalk that stretches into
the aesthetic future, the veil deposits the colonial violence of the past into the present, the
neoliberal violence of the present into the future. It muddies progressive, linear
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temporalities, the kind that leave Islamic citizenship to the annals of history. The
Pakistani veil, moving in the fashion world’s circuits of visibility, insists that there is no
clean future global citizenship without sustained accountability for the violence of
economic globalization, without a wrestling with history.
Most importantly, the Pakistani veil contains within its folds the memory of its
contaminated and contradictory existence in a pop-up on the global stage. Its Orientalist
mobilization as an aesthetic that purchases travel and global circulation for Pakistani
designers coexists with the symbolic work that its presence manifests in fashion’s visual
culture. It is both testament to the rigid pop-up performances required of the off-center
and a visual insurgent within that context, pulling apart the conditions of its own global
visibility. Those conditions, as I have argued in this chapter, are simultaneously marked
by the fashion industry's neoliberal logics of deregulation, liberalization and global
expansion and Pakistani creative producers' economically-compelled transformations of
their own discourses of modernity, internationalism, and gendered labor. For the off-
center, as the Pakistani fashion industry has demonstrated, globalized visibility is deeply
compromised by the racial performances that neoliberalism engenders. But these
performances, however tactical and consistently scripted, remain performances, leaving
room for temporary moments of symbolic intervention inside the jagged maps of
fashion’s geography.

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CHAPTER THREE: WANDERING BODIES, WANDERING IMAGINARIES:
HERITAGE AND COSMOPOLITANISM IN VISUAL ART
The 2009 Venice Biennale was utopic and impetuous in scope; both globally-
oriented and obsessed with particularity; interested in travel, but not in its destination. It
was called Making Worlds
1
and the artists who created these worlds were wrapped up in
an endless wandering across both time and space. As part of his performance for
"Twentytwo less two," the Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto used a wooden hammer
to break 22 large-scale mirrors, creating pockets of literal and temporal black voids in a
sea of overwhelming reflection. The newly created world, its jagged edges and empty
blackness refusing the translatability of reflection, became a kind of unknowable
constituent at the heart of reflection. The Argentine artist Tomas Saraceno presented a
spider web installation that consumed an entire room in its fragile and ominous
construction, trapping its visitors, confusing and stealing time by making visitors wander
the maze, making them confront what the artist has called the reality of being “tangled
up” in the contemporary world (“Interview: 53 Venice Biennale,” 2009, para.5). Pascale
Marthine Tayou’s “Mankind” installation juxtaposed village huts with video screens
inserted as windows.
2
The village landscape of the installation, brought into immediate
confrontation with scenes from contemporary urban life streaming on the window-
screens, rendered a world where scenes of modernity rest on the foundations of what was
suggested as “tradition”; the two worlds made simultaneous and mutually constitutive,
writing one another out of their visible histories but also, unable to exist without each

1
The exhibition was curated by David Birnbaum.
2
A reviewer for initiArt Magazine remarked that Tayou’s work was “a huge installation featuring an
African ghetto with wooden houses whose walls are projecting videos of daily life in modern cities such as
Tokyo, Taipei, London, etc.” (“Interview: 53 Venice Biennale,” 2009, para.4).
155

other. Making worlds in the global, these visual artists seemed to suggest, is about
collapsing historical temporalities, about revealing a coexistence of geographically-bound
cultural experiences, and wandering that new terrain.
While the 2009 Venice Biennale provides a useful example of the ways in which
global visual artists are preoccupied with cultural simultaneity, complicating historical
temporalities and their attendant truths, these themes extend far beyond this particular
exhibition. In 2011, for example, after living with the Crow Tribe Nation in Montana, the
French photographer and mixed-media artist Delphine Diallo released a series of
photographs, showing members of the tribe in traditional dress and ornamentation, often
posed in conjunction with contemporary commodity objects and visible brands. The artist
calls this series “The Vision,” for its exploration of the dialectic between looking and an
internal vision. In his 2009 work “The Rape of Africa,” the U.S. photographer David
LaChapelle shows a familiar Renaissance landscape, updating the battle between love
and war to render capitalism’s pillaging of Africa, complete with a window burnt into the
background, revealing industry and machines. Like Diallo, LaChapelle asks the viewer to
consider the coexistence of these political realities in the making of the global; he is
asking the viewer to traverse time in order to understand the global’s space.
This heterogeneous cast of artists and artworks has been assembled here as a
snapshot of the methods and recurring themes that contemporary artists – from architects
like Saraceno to photographers like Diallo – employ in staging visual conversations about
globalization and the ideologies it has brought into contact. The artists I discuss in this
chapter grapple with the violent ruptures the global, a term that conjures up a grab-bag of
economic and cultural realities, has produced on the one hand, and the potentially
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productive juxtapositions it makes us confront on the other. Importantly, these works of
visual art both participate in and attempt to examine the manner of vision those dialectics
and their new grammars invite. David Birnbaum, curator of the 2009 Venice Biennale,
envisioned the exhibition theme as one that would cite the significance of disappearing
languages, the rising preeminence of translation, their impact on imagination and cultural
identity (“Interview: 53 Venice Biennale 2009,” 2009). Echoing Birnbaum, Nicolas
Bourriaud, taking his turn at that year’s Tate Triennial, has said that contemporary artists
respond to globalized culture as passers-by, through an ethic of ‘wandering.’ According
to Bourriaud, meaning in this emerging artistic modernity is created through layering,
translation, the organization of connections and systems of meaning (Bourriaud, 2002;
Morton, 2009).
While the resonances between the two curators’ visions of artistic practice in the
global art world are hard to deny, they beg a discussion of what is at stake when
translation and wandering become the primary modes of artistic production in an art
world industry that increasingly defaults to the free market logics of neoliberalism
(Byrne, 2005; Findlay, 2012; Joselit, 2013; Salmon, 2012; Viveros-Faune, 2013). The
aspects of the global art world that Birnbaum and Bourriaud describe, as I argue in this
chapter, demand an emphasis on legibility; on the strategic production of artistic objects
that makes them available for translation and mobility inside the industry in the first
place. In visual art, after all, the prerequisite to translation is a legibility of stylistic forms,
ideologies, and the bodies on display. And if the global art world’s visual artists are
wandering, then we must consider both the economic and cultural conditions that enable
their movement and the ways in which these artists’ aesthetics secure that movement
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through their own legibility. Wandering, as the artists discussed in this chapter suggest, is
an aesthetic sensibility, born out of the simultaneity of drastically different realities that
the global has brought into encounter. But wandering is also physical, through global
exhibitions and ever-widening scopes of touring that the neoliberal global art industry
requires of its artist citizens (Joselit, 2013). Wandering also happens in an art world
landscape that is increasingly corporatized, where museums model themselves after
multinational corporations and the sale and exhibition of objects of fine art happens
according to neoliberal trade practices (Findlay, 2012; Viveros-Faune, 2013).
Consequently, in addition to an aesthetic mode, wandering is also an economic necessity
for artists who participate in the global art world, forcing us to ask how an economically-
compelled mobility conditions the aesthetics that visual artists embrace.
This relationship between the economies of the global art world industry and the
aesthetics that emerge and circulate in that industry are the subject of this chapter.
Specifically, I am interested in the ways in which artists’ formulations of racial
knowledges and racially-marked bodies become strategies in guaranteeing a necessary
wandering; how artists use racially-indexed transformation in order to participate in the
global art industry. If legibility of cultural forms and ideologies are the economic
precondition to an increasingly normative physical mobility, then artists’ curations of ‘the
global experience’ are necessarily tethered to conversations of race and racial
embodiment. To explore this topic, I focus on art works produced by artists of color who
participate in the global art world. I have narrowed my subject of inquiry specifically to
artists of color in order to understand the complicated power dynamics that underwrite
and accompany racial logics – as they are rendered through artistic aesthetics – in the
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global art market. The ways in which artists of color are compelled to engage and, as I
argue, transform their own formulations of racial aesthetic discourses, using their own
racialized bodies to anchor those discourses, provides some insight into the ways in
which racial structures of feeling actually operate in a market that is often touted as
racially inclusive, aesthetically democratic and ripe with productive wandering. As
Carolina Ponce de Leon (2002) reminds us, the potential geographic, ideological and
importantly, racial democratization that ‘wandering’ implies is not without its rigid
economic structures and attendant hierarchies. “The center has not been displaced,” she
says, “it has just gotten bigger. Globalization has led to the recolonization of the art
world” (Ponce de Leon, 2002, p.148).
3
The global art industry and its economy, in other
words, have not torn down their borders; they have only expanded the space of
wandering according to economic free-market principles. For artists of color, this has
meant that the international exhibition circuits have expanded, but the racial grammars
that govern those circuits have largely maintained their asymmetries of power,
compelling the visual artists who travel the circuits to comply with those grammars. To
lean on the pop-up metaphor, there are more global vacancies to erect pop-up shops, but
the rules for racial performance inside those shops are as entrenched as ever.
The foundational question for this chapter, then, asks not only what ‘global
worlds’ look like according to artists, but how race is used to make that signification
legible and compliant with both site-specificity and global mobility. How do
contemporary artists transform the racial epistemologies embedded in their works in

3
Carolina Ponce de Leon (2002) is primarily concerned with Latina American art worlds and the U.S.
Latino art worlds, a topic I will engage more fully later in this chapter. However, her point about
globalization and its geographies of racial power is applicable beyond Latin America.
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order to make those works portable and legible in specific geopolitical and economic
contexts? And what is the role of the artist’s own racialized body in this arrangement?
In order to address these questions, this chapter will unpack examples according
to a four step approach. First, I offer an explanation of the ways in which the global
industry of fine arts has, over the last thirty years, transitioned into a neoliberal industry
that prioritizes museum franchising, a ballooning free-market for the sale of artistic
works, and artist branding. Second, I examine how contemporary art aesthetics have been
impacted by these changes in the global art industry. I rely on the works of art historians,
journalists and curators to explain that the art industry’s global economy has led to a
demand for a simultaneous homogeneity and site-specificity among artists. Third, I argue
that contemporary visual artists toggle between these economically-informed demands of
the global arts industry by playing with racial codes. Artists like Sofia Maldonado,
Máximo González, and Pascale Marthine Tayou, whose works I discuss in detail in this
section, submit their artistic aesthetics to what I have called pop-up performances, in
order to ensure those works’ visibility and mobility in the global art industry. Fourth, I
begin with the existing idea that in the current economy, artists’ identities have congealed
into brands. Using this as critical context, I propose that artists have become not just
brands, but racially-indexed brands, mobilizing diasporic identity as stabilizing anchors
of their aesthetic pop-up performances.

The Art World Market: Financing Exhibitions, Expansions, and Creative Travel
“That art is, increasingly, a synonym for capital is inarguable,” says art critic
Christian Viveros-Faune (2013), “the top of the art market looks like a subsidiary of the
160

NYSE” (para.12). The scholar David Joselit (2013) agrees, arguing that the neoliberal
mode of fine art circulation in the global art world is a “currency of art” that can be
likened to currency in “hedge funds in the metropolitan West” (Joselit, 2013, p.23). Art
dealer Michael Findlay (2012) proclaims the contemporary moment’s dominant art
movement to be Commercialism. These statements on the contemporary global art
world’s (and its practices’) imbrication in the logics of neoliberal economics position the
existence of the global art world as an industry that has been made rhythmically, to
borrow from Sassen,
4
and congruently from the logics of finance capital. Bourriaud’s
transient artists and their wandering aesthetics, then, are wandering the global roads laid
by their neoliberal industry. What is more, they are wandering in the first place, because
that industry at once makes it possible and requires it of its artists.
Explaining some of the effects of visual artists’ and scholars’ new style of
mentorship and education, Angela McRobbie (2002) remarks that “the new relation
between art and economics marks a break with past anti-commercial notions of being
creative” (p.521). McRobbie’s larger point is about artists’ normalization of
entrepreneurialism, a subject I take up later in this chapter. However, her suggestion that
the contemporary moment marks a new paradigm in the visual art industry, wherein
demands of the industry become – transparently and unproblematically – the governing
principles of artistic practice is an important one.
Heilbrun and Gray (2001) observe that this shift, what they call an “eminent art
boom” began to take shape in the mid to late 1980s, when both the primary and

4
As I discussed in the Introduction to this dissertation, Saskia Sassen (2001) explains that the “temporal
features of finance capital empower it to subject other forms of capital to its rhythms,” agreeing with
scholars like Arjun Appadurai (1990), Jodie Dean (2009) and others, that the cultural and economic
dimensions of the global must be viewed as inseparable dimensions of the global’s “social thickness”
(Sassen, 2001, p.268, p.262).
161

secondary markets
5
in works of fine art began to organize along more formal lines of the
finance sector, and transactions in arts objects increased significantly (p.169). The
authors attribute this shift partly to the increased access to information in the secondary
market. As technology increased and democratized access to the magazines and
informational literature on fine art, the consumption potential democratized as well. Since
“information costs in secondary art markets have fallen” (Heilbrun & Gray, 2001, p.172),
art dealers had fewer opportunities to markup existing works of art, leading both to
reduced prices and equally tempered exclusivity.
6
While art prices have since
skyrocketed, a subject I will address in this chapter, Heilbrun and Gray’s description of
the ways in which innovations in technology produced enough transparency to yield a
temporary democratization in the market is an important transition in this history of the
art world’s neoliberal expansion and growth. A great example of this move towards
information and transparency, inviting more potential consumers into the fine art market,
is the development of ArtPrice, a website that was started in 1997 to offer art market
statistics, trend digestion, and general intelligence to interested art investors.
This trend toward transparency in pricing manifested in other ways, as well. In
1988, Dwight Gast reported that New York art dealers were now being required to price
art works and McAfee and McMillan (1987) made the same observation of auction
houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s. These developments, according to Heilbrun and

5
Heilbrun and Gray differentiate between the primary and secondary markets for objects of fine art. “The
primary market is one in which original works are sold for the first time” (Heilbrun & Gray, 2001, p.169).
Artists’ studios, galleries, festivals and art fairs constitute the sites of this market. The secondary market is
one where existing works of art are exchanged. Importantly, the secondary market for fine art operates on
existing knowledge about the artists’ value.
6
To say that exclusivity was in some ways tempered by these developments is of course a matter of
gradation. Consumption of fine art objects nevertheless largely remained the purview of the financially
privileged: not only did (and still do) prices for these objects exclude most of the population, but the
calculated risk on the rate of return for investment was (and still is) very high and consequently, can only be
absorbed by wealthy investors (Heilbrun & Gray, 2001; Lee, 1988).
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Gray, were “felt by some to protect potential buyers from possible ‘gouging’” (Heilbrun
& Gray, 2001, p.172). Consequently, Sotheby’s reported an overall downward trend in
prices through most of the 1990s (Heilbrun & Gray, 2001). As prices fell, purchasing
trends changed as well. As of 2010, while Modern Art still accounts for the majority of
global annual art action revenue (50.78%), Contemporary Art, traditionally the most
speculative and volatile sector of the global art market, has grown nearly ten-fold in the
last ten years alone (ArtPrice, 2010).
To return to the chronological description of developments in the global art
market, it is necessary to emphasize that the industry-wide shifts toward pricing
transparency were also accompanied by concurrent changes in museum operations and
acquisition structures. In the early 1990s, some of the world’s major museums undertook
arrangements that are not unlike global franchising. Perhaps the most famous of these
examples is the international expansion of the Guggenheim Museum
7
(Iglesias, 1998;
Johnson, 2009; Heilbrun & Gray, 2001). What is now commonly cited as the
“Guggenheim Effect,”
8
refers to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s franchising
of the Guggenheim Museum as a way to ensure increasing international expansion and
therefore, increasing sources of revenue for the foundation. Locations for the new
Guggenheim franchises are selected largely based on that locality’s willingness to finance
the project, as these foreign locations bear the cost of construction in exchange for the
prestige and tourism that follows the Guggenheim brand. The Bilbao location was the
first of these franchises. The agreement went into effect in 1991 and the museum opened

7
The satellite museums established by the Louvre and the Hermitage are also frequently discussed
examples.
8
Lucia Iglesias coined the concept of “The Guggenheim Effect” in her 1998 UNESCO piece on the
construction of a Guggenheim branch in Bilbao.
163

its doors in 1997. Louise Johnson (2009) has remarked that this new organizational
scheme is “both a franchised arm of a cultural multinational and a local monument to the
arts, urban entrepreneurialism and post-modernity” (p.123).
I have insisted on a chronological unfolding of these developments because the
shifts in pricing information, increased knowledge availability, and international
expansion that the art world oversaw in the 1980s and 1990s corresponds to that time
period’s concurrent moves towards global deregulation, multinational expansion, and
technology-fueled access to information (Dean, 2009; Harvey, 2005). In fact, the global
deregulation and multinational expansion seen in the global art market is parallel to those
same shifts discussed in the fashion world in the previous chapter. And as I will show in
the following chapter, these same logics of neoliberalism (particularly the retreat from
public funding), also transformed the international dance industries. When it comes to the
global art market, these developments have resulted in the normalization of the art
industry as a neoliberal capitalist industry, where importantly, market logics dictate the
visibility of aesthetic expressions and the presence of artists as commodities. The
seeming democratization of pricing information, for example, can also be easily seen as
an expansion of consumer markets, wherein the notoriously exclusive art world
regularizes its patterns and allows greater entry for the sake of increased profit potential
and the stabilization of previously volatile sectors of the overall market. To wit: the
growth of the Contemporary Art market, which I have described here, has been anything
but democratizing. The New York art market, to offer just one example, is an $8 billion–
a-year industry. Because of its projected growth, the Contemporary Art market is also
Wall Street’s preferred recession investment, promising that what Felix Salmon (2012)
164

calls the global art world’s “art market oligopoly system” is here to stay (para.8).
9

Furthermore, the “franchising” language used by scholars to discuss the Guggenheim
Foundation’s expansionist model is far from coincidental. It too is an example of this
cultural industry seeking to introduce revenue stability and harness all of its resources
(like art works that were previously held in the museum’s archival storage)
10
in order to
maximize profit, by leasing its brand name to locales looking for global cultural capital.
A look at how this particular cultural industry responds to the 2008 global
financial crisis provides further evidence of the ways in which visual art’s visibility and
attachment to global ‘wandering’ is one that is made possible by and necessarily
structured by neoliberal logics. In 2011, looking back at this moment of global financial
crisis, an ArtPrice report explains how the global art industry responded and rebounded
from the problems in the financial markets:
During this past year (2010-2011), financial market jitters and poor economic
indicators on both sides of the Atlantic have put additional wind into sails of two
assets: gold and art. In effect, fuelled by the deepening debt crisis, the slowing
economies of Europe and the United States during H1 and the difficulties
encountered by banks, confidence in traditional financial assets has melted away
in favour of gold… and art... Contrary to standard assumptions, the crisis of 2008

9
It is important to point out that in the last year, several highly-respected art critics and curators have
staged something of a defection, arguing that the market’s trend towards astronomical pricing and a small
club of collector oligarchs is deeply detrimental to the art world. Among these defectors are critics like
Dave Hickey (Helmore & Gallagher, 2012), Sarah Thornton (2012), Felix Salmon (2012), Jerry Saltz
(2012), and Felix Salmon (2010, 2012). While it is outside the scope of this dissertation, there is an
argument to be made that these critics’ outrage is partly due to the fact that the oligarchs are now
increasingly coming from the Middle East, Russia, and China. “Amongst the biggest spenders in the art
market right now are people who have made their money in non-democracies with horrendous human
rights records. Their expertise in rising to the top of a corrupt system gives punch to the term ‘filthy lucre’”
says Thornton of the art world’s Russian, Arab and Chinese collectors (Thornton, 2012, p.83).
10
A recent UNESCO study has found that 90% of museum collections are stored in archives (UNESCO,
2011).
165

hit the art market instantaneously, without any lag. In 2011, the market has
adopted a far more philosophical approach… The art market’s new and emerging
strategies (online auction sales, accelerated information circulation, network
connection of market’s players at a global level, opening of markets, etc.) is
tending to encourage and facilitate investment in this sector, which is no longer
reserved for insiders. (ArtPrice, 2011, p.11)
Here, the report expressly names global expansion, the introduction of new
consumer markets, increased presence, and the incorporation of technology as key
solutions sought by the art industry in light of the economic downturns of the global
financial crisis. In the same document, further explanations of this phenomenon
demonstrate that part of the solution was that “auction houses stopped offering
guaranteed prices,” which is a nice illustration of the ways in which capitalist markets in
crisis resort to deregulation in order to correct themselves (ArtPrice, 2011, p.10). That the
art industry’s determined global expansion and the global movement it activates along the
way, has followed in the principles of neoliberal economies in general is evident in yet
another way. As I discussed in the previous chapter on global fashion, here too, increased
franchising, deregulation and the mandate of global circulation have produced substantial
shifts in the geopolitical power structures that have long dominated the industry. Much
like the global garment trade, the global art world has had to contend with China’s entry
into the auction marketplace, followed by Russia and countries of the Middle East,
challenging the US and the UK, both markets that were virtually unchallenged since the
1950s. At the end of 2010, China became “the world’s leading auction marketplace for
Fine Art” (ArtPrice, 2011, p.14). And it was reported in 2011 that “Christie’s and
166

Sotheby’s, who shared 72% of the global Fine Art market in 2008, [were] losing ground
to the Chinese who now [had] 7 of the world’s top 10 auction houses by revenue”
(ArtPrice, 2011, p.14).
Global expansion, however, has left what is perhaps its most obvious mark on the
traditions of group art exhibitions and international art fairs. As John Byrne (2005),
David Joselit (2013), Grant Kester (2011) and Alain Quemin (2006) have all argued, the
number of international Biennials has increased sharply since the late 1990s, both
reflecting and constituting the international art world’s increasing globalization and
sedimentation as a neoliberal industry. These biennials have functioned as “a way of
signaling that a city is willing to join in a globalising economy of commerce and culture
by using art to encourage tourism, economic regeneration and international media
profile” (Byrne, 2005, p.169). Like fashion weeks and fashion trade shows of the
previous chapter, Biennials and Triennials are huge revenue generators for the host city,
11

announcing its desire and readiness to enter the global economy but also providing some
temporary tourist revenues. Another way to look at the increase in Biennials is to
understand their function much like those of satellite, franchised museums – in the global
art world, the establishment of Biennales and museum franchises communicates the host
city’s availability for membership in larger contexts of the global finance economy. The
existence of this expanded roster of international group exhibitions has impacted not only
artistic practice in Contemporary Art, as I will explain shortly, but also underscores the
ways in which the global art world’s neoliberal model requires increased mobilities. If the
value of art congeals into currency through exchange (sales and re-sales of art works),

11
Biennials, according to Joselit, are “the stock exchanges of art where the world comes to speculate on
cultural currency” (Joselit, 2013, p.81).
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then the circulations of those exchanges is critical here. In the global art world, the
neoliberal model of circulation and exchange “privileges the unlimited mobility of works
of art,” demonstrating “the type of capital accumulation that museums speculate on
through organizing national and international traveling exhibitions, globalizing their
collections” (Joselit, 2013, p.23). What Joselit’s observation about the relationship
between neoliberal expansion and mobility reminds us is that the newly established
Biennials operate like nodules on an expanding map, indicating to artists where to drop-in
and exhibit as they wander through the industry in search of economic success and
visibility. In other words, the Biennials are not the fashion world’s jagged map; they are
glorified tourist destinations for the individual artist’s economically-fueled wanderlust.
Artists themselves are, in fact, the centerpiece of this chapter’s final discussion
of the global art world’s neoliberal economics. More specifically, I am interested in the
global art world’s increasing branding of artists as figures that we can understand
according to Sarah Banet-Weiser’s (2012) framing of “the individual entrepreneur artist”
(p.97). In the contemporary moment and inside neoliberal creative industries, the artist
entrepreneur, according to Banet-Weiser, does not just take up the identity of an
entrepreneur, but also resolves the seeming contradiction between entrepreneurialism and
artistic practice through the logics of neoliberal economics, producing what the author
calls an ambivalence that sutures together these formerly incompatible moralities. This is
how street artists like Banksy and Shepard Fairey are “similarly at home with
entrepreneurship and progressive cultural politics” (Banet-Weiser, 2012, p.95). Banet-
Weiser’s point is that this branded artist entrepreneur emerges out of a neoliberal brand
culture that brands both creativity and its primary authors as repositories of
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“authenticity.” Xiyin Tang (2012) also attributes the branding of the contemporary artist
to what she calls the cult of authenticity, tracing the early stages of this branding to the
Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, which gave artists the “moral right” to own and protect
their style (as evident in their bodies of work), thereby authenticating that style and
branding its author.
As Banet-Weiser and Tang demonstrate, to think of the artist as an entrepreneur, a
figure who participates eagerly in commerce, encourages the exchange of her art works
on the market, and sometimes incorporates that same commercialism into her aesthetic is
a development with strong ties to the contemporary global moment. I am not suggesting
that mainstream visual artists have ever existed outside of the market exchanges that
make the travel and visibility of their works possible. On the contrary, working from the
notion that artists’ self-representation has always been tied to changes in the market
economy, I am interested in the ways in which artists’ self-representation as
entrepreneurs marks a significant historical shift in the image of the artist. Furthermore,
as I argue later in this chapter, understanding the contemporary branding of the artist
figure is preliminary to examining how racial heritage and cosmopolitanism structure that
brand.
The familiar archetype of the alienated artist is a good example of the historical
co-evolutions of artists’ images and economic developments. ‘Alienation’ was originally
motivated almost entirely by market forces, when visual artists sought to distinguish
themselves from craftsmen during the Renaissance.
12
The introduction of the dealer
during this period severed the artist from the point of sale and effectively contributed to
the artist’s isolation (Wittkower, 1963). With the focus on innovation in the arts, which

12
Poets had already been granted exalted status by then (Wittkower, 1963).
169

itself drives the image of the artist as magical seer, the intermediary appeals to the
consumer’s cultural investment in the future. Once the artist and the craftsman were
successfully differentiated, income increased and the wage system turned from stable, as
for laborers, to commission-based. The artist could now “live to work,” rather than “work
to live” (Wittkower, 1963, p. 22). The fact that economics is at least partially responsible
for the archetypal identities constructed for artists also means that the image of the artist
has been far from stable throughout history.
13
Despite the image’s volatility, however
there are unavoidable, enduring narrative motifs and characteristics that inform
biographies about the life and work of the quintessential artist. The governing principle
behind the mythological artist is the old but enduring notion of divine madness, ascribed
originally to poets and rhapsodists and then to visual artists during the Renaissance (Kris
& Kurz, 1979). The artist is god-like in talent, vision and ability, effortlessly illustrating
“God’s artistic greatness” (Kris & Kurz, 1979, p. 54). Aside from divinity however, there
is the small matter of psychological madness, a theme that culminates in the image of the
Mad Genius. Two primary fixations grow out of the artist’s mania: sexuality and finance.
The artist is usually narrated as celibate or licentious (Wittkower, 1963).
14
With regard to
money management, artists are frequently imagined as wastrels and squanderers, unable
to fit the irrationality and unorthodoxy of creative production congruently with efficient
expenditure (Wittkower, 1963). This determined divorce from the rhythms and demands
of finance is only exacerbated by the artist’s reputation for “dilatoriness” (Wittkower,

13
This image of the artist has also developed with the cultural traditions of the time. The “varying fortunes”
ascribed to creative individuals stem from “changing conceptions instead of from artistic temper”
(Wittkower, 1963, p. 293). A most obvious shift occurred after the introduction of psychoanalysis, when
“surrender to the subconscious” became the critical quality of the Post-Freudian artistic character
(Wittkower, 1963, p. 294).
14
The Wittkowers make the observation that neither label is even remotely correct as “celibate” often
simply means “unmarried” and, accounting for changing cultural norms, “licentious” refers to both
womanizers and those suspected of homosexuality.
170

1963, p.40). In this formulation, the artist cannot be bothered with deadlines as work is
done purely for the love of art and only possible in moments of unpredictable inspiration.
Moreover, the artist’s oft-discussed wanderlust, regarded as the search for inspiration
contributes to the irregularity of the creative process (Wittkower, 1963).
In 1964, Allan Kaprow famously updated this vision of the artist to announce that
artists are now more concerned with occupying the safe and stable role of well-paid
middle-class citizens. Partly because “society… pursues artists instead of exiling them,”
artists eschew coalitions, become apolitical, and pursue the trappings of middle-class
existence, where the route to art world success is about inclusion, rather than failure
(Kaprow, 1964, p.49). Kaprow’s lament about the disappearance of politically-oriented,
exiled genius artists in favor of commercial artists, is both made more pointed and more
significant in the scholarship of Banet-Weiser and Tang. In the contemporary moment, as
the two scholars argue, the artist hasn’t just turned to commercialism in order to secure
lifestyle comforts; the artist has also become a product on this same market, having
consolidated her identity and body into a creative brand. Artists’ self-descriptions as
entrepreneurs who are adept at branding and who are participants in the commercial arts
sector is an important incorporation of neoliberal logics into the governing image of the
artist.
Examples of this branding trend among contemporary visual artists are abundant.
Photographer and mixed-media artist Delphine Diallo, for example, lauds her own
appearance in the famous Pirelli calendar, a space that proclaims itself to be “one of the
most celebrated icons of corporate communication, at the same level of notoriety like the
Ferrari logo or the Coca Cola bottle” (Pirelli, 2011). Not only does she champion her own
171

participation in this heavily commercial, advertising machine, but she also explains it as
part of her re-discovery and return to Africa, a racialization of her brand that I will return
to in this chapter. Commercialism is a large component of her self-narrative as she often
makes a point to underscore her own artistic versatility by recounting her work in
commercial art design, animation, and the music industry. Speaking to her own
flexibility, she told Format Magazine that “art can be something very personal but at the
same time very universal” (Diallo quoted in Henderson, 2008, para.5). Likewise, the
visual artist Sofia Maldonado often discusses her own contribution to Coca Cola, when
her art work appeared on limited edition Coke cans as well as her membership in the
automotive company Mini’s cultural initiative, where the company sponsors artists in
order to reap cultural cache from their artistic brand. At the same time, Maldonado tells
the New York Daily News that upon arriving in New York, she was disappointed by the
city’s “privatization of walls” (Maldonado quoted in Guerra, 2010, para.11). Effortlessly
and without regard for the potential inconsistencies of her ideological positioning,
Maldonado brings to life what Banet-Weiser calls the brand’s “ambivalence” but also
importantly, brands herself as versatile and flexible. This versatility works to brand both
artists as widely marketable; as visual artists who court fame and global visibility, but
this time, without the attendant madness or necessary exile.
15
In some ways, this
abandonment of madness and genius as central tropes of the artistic image, work to
position the artist as someone who is conducive and malleable to the rhythms of labor
and regimes of neoliberal industry. Deadlines, this new image promises, will be met.
Regularity of the creative process will be sustained.

15
I am referring here to artists like Andy Warhol, who incorporated the desire for fame into the image of
the artist, but also held on to the madness (the same madness, that artist image promises, that then
unraveled fame and turned into tragedy).
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Pascale Marthine Tayou expresses this shedding of traditional madness in favor of
the predictability that neoliberal industry requires of its commodities in his faux interview
with Simon Njami.
16
“I am not a suffering being, and I am not tortured by my work,” the
artist (through Njami) says, branding himself as easily manageable and psychologically
organized, all qualities that produce an efficient and productive laborer (Njami, 2010,
para.6). Borrowing the language of business strategists and marketers, he describes his
aesthetic: “Confrontation… is the only action that enables you to find the right solutions
to given problems” (Njami, 2010, para.7). This description belies an entrepreneurial
foundation to his treatment of aesthetics. The artist makes do with available objects in
order to arrive at a predetermined objective. Here, there is no more mysticism, no
pretense to discovery; only problems and solutions. Tayou, along with Diallo and
Maldonado are just a few examples of the ways in which contemporary visual artists
exhibiting in the global art industry work to make themselves available to the neoliberal
global art industry by branding themselves and their work. When it comes to artists of
color, racial markers, as I will show, operate as the foundation for these brands.
The economic face of the global art industry has been unpacked here in order to
demonstrate that speaking of contemporary artists’ global imagination, their nomadic
aesthetics, and their racial formulations cannot be examined without regard for the
neoliberal economies that commission these art works’ visibilities. To say that the
industry has undergone shifts wherein works of contemporary art and their artists are
openly and normatively understood as commodities on a deregulated market, which
enforces global mobility as a mandate to support its expansionist model, means that

16
Curator Simon Njami wrote an imaginary interview with Tayou for the Buala Cultural Association. I use
it here as evidence of the artist’s self-positioning because Njami notes in the preface to the interview that
the entire narrative has been approved by Tayou himself.
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scholarship must confront the ways in which the economic global informs the artistic
aesthetics it sends into global motion.

A Trifecta of Aesthetic Demands: Site-Specificity, Cultural Identity and
Homogeneity
The scholarship on contemporary visual art in the global context has described the
many different aesthetic traditions that characterize artistic practice in the contemporary
moment.
17
For the purposes of the present chapter, there are three particular strains of
scholarship that resonate with the questions I pose: the return of spatio-cultural aesthetics,
the exploration of cultural identity as a recurring theme among contemporary visual
artists, and the thematic homogeneity that permeates large international exhibitions.
These three bodies of scholarship are in no way linear or comparative; one addresses a
genre of art, another artistic practice, and the last, a content motif. Together, however,
these three conversations weave together the relevant debates that make up the aesthetic
and ideological environment for this chapter’s case studies. They provide some sense of
the demands that artists (and especially artists of color) must navigate and balance in
order to participate in the global art market.

17
This chapter necessarily leaves out several aesthetic strands that scholars and curators observe in the
contemporary, global moment. One artistic practice that is closely related to the ones I address here is site-
specific collaborative art, which Grant Kester (2011) argues, has become a global phenomenon. In light of
global capital’s hyper-rationalized and centralized order, this contemporary aesthetic’s commitment to
“participatory interaction” and “shared labor” as creativity, are modes of political contestation that center
on distanciation and displacement (Kester, 2011, p.9). Another important art world conversation with
aesthetic consequence concerns the central role that curating plays in the growth of Biennials, Triennials
and other international exhibitions. These relationships are examined by scholars like Paul O’Neil (The
Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), 2012) and Terry Smith (Thinking Contemporary
Curating, 2012).
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Site-Specific Art: Space and Place in the Global
In the introduction to her book The Lure of the Local, Lucy Lippard (1997)
explains that she is drawn to the local “by its absence or rather by the absence of value
attached to a specific place in contemporary cultural life, in the ‘art world’, and in
postmodern paradoxes and paradigms” (p.5). Without actually naming globalization,
Lippard is referring to the fetishism of mobility and multicenteredness that the notion of
globalization and certainly, the global art market, have produced. For her then, an artistic
aesthetic that privileges the local operates as an antidote to the alienation that frenetic
mobility inevitably produces; it drives connections to abandoned histories and grounds
the possibilities for futures that the global is constantly imagining and re-imagining
(Lippard, 1997).
18
While belonging to a local certainly does not necessitate birth or any
specified time period of residence in a physical location,
19
the very idea of the local does
have embedded in it the notion of place. In some ways, what Lippard advocates for is a
reversal of Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1977) renowned suggestion that “place is security, space is
freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other” (p.3). Here, much like the
local becomes the dialectical antidote to the global, the concept of place speaks both
oppositionally and symbiotically to space. Significantly for this chapter, Lippard argues
that the freedom promised by space has been made compulsory, activated by the global’s
economic flows. If it has delivered freedom, it has also brought with it restlessness and
rootlessness, both detrimental to belonging and to a sense of history.
20
I have sketched

18
For Lippard, looking to the local is a way to access the affective modes of belonging, reintroducing the
“memory and continuity [that] are unavailable to those who move so often” inside the global circuits set
into motion by economic globalization (Lippard, 1997, p.40).
19
Lippard differentiates between being in a place and being of a place, arguing that the latter is as viable a
route to belonging as the former since “psychological ties can be as strong as historical ones, and they can
be formed by ‘rootless’ individuals if their longing for roots is strong enough” (p.42).
20
Lippard’s argument pivots on a set of (arguably) conservative allegiances to belonging and rootedness
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out this conversation between Lippard and Tuan in order to introduce the key concepts
that scholars often deploy in discussing site-specificity in art and provide a glimpse into
the ideological commitments that energize site-specific art, which has seen a revival
roughly in the last fifteen years, driven by the global economy of the art world.
The resurgence of site-specific artistic practice among contemporary artists has
been noted by several scholars in art history (Doherty, 2009; Kwon, 2002; Massey, 1991;
Miles, 1997). Echoing Lippard, Doreen Massey observed in 1991 that the search for
place and the certainty that a relationship with place offers in the geopolitical imagination
has been the artistic response to “the geographic fragmentation, the spatial disruption, of
our times” and the time-space compression that often becomes the aesthetic and
discursive shorthand for the art world’s global economy (p.161). It is both the “longing
for coherence” and the mining of our desire for particularity and its comforts in the face
of exponential uncertainty, dislocation and necessary mobility (Massey, 1991, p.161).
Conceding that these efforts – whether by artists, arts organizations, or any other cultural
institution – can often be reactionary, nationalist and violent in their strict definitions of
heritage, she asks whether it is possible for the search for place to be progressive as well.
This theoretical move, made some 20 years ago, remains significant for the contemporary
moment since, as this chapter’s case studies will attempt to show, it is precisely this
discourse that contemporary global artists are in dialogue with.
It is little surprise that Massey’s theme has retained its attachment to the global. In
the contemporary moment, site-specific art has seen resurgence through the
multiplication of the genre. Permutations abound. There is site-determined, site-oriented,

and relies on a false dichotomy between the local and the global (what she calls multicenteredness). It
should be noted that she does not actually deny this move. Instead, she attributes it to the ironies of her own
experience of moving and relocation.
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site-referenced, site-conscious, site-responsive, site-related, but also, meditations on non-
site and non-place, as well as what Miwon Kwon (2000) has called the “wrong place”
(Doherty, 2009; Kwon, 2002). The current class of site-specificity permutations is,
according to Kwon, a return to the situationist and site-specific practices of the late 1960s
and early 1970s,
21
which were doubly inspired by minimalism and the move to resist “the
‘innocence’ of space and the accompanying presumption of a universal viewing subject”
(Kwon, 2002, p.13). For this founding group of artists, site-specific art was “based on a
phenomenological or experiential understanding of the site, defined primarily as an
agglomeration of the actual physical attributes of a location” (Kwon, 2002, p.3). In the
1980s, owing in part to critiques of the institutional role in site-specific art and its
imposition of limitations to the notion of place, specific location lost its controlling
significance for situationist artists. Consequently, during this time period, “the guarantee
of a specific relationship between an art work and its site is not based on a physical
permanence of that relationship… but rather on the recognition of its unfixed
permanence” (Kwon, 2002, p.24). Fleeting moments and temporal experience became the
ideological objectives of site-specific art as the art world’s institutions – museums,
galleries, and the art market – facilitated a commercialization of site-specific art that
rendered its place-boundedness untenable. This economic practice has expanded its
protocols and its influence on aesthetics so much so that in the early 2000s, the industry’s
mandate that works must be amenable to refabrication in order to travel between the
global franchises of major museums has imploded the very purpose of site specific art.
Now, site-specificity no longer means site-bound; instead, thanks to the neoliberal

21
Kwon cites Richard Serra as belonging to this movement in art, but we can also consider Robert
Smithson, Andy Goldsworth, Robert Barry, and Guillaume Bijl, among others.
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expansions of the art world’s museums “transferability and mobilization [are the] new
forms of site specificity” (Kwon, 2002, p.38). The global art industry, in this way, has
both resurrected site-specific art as a way to highlight (and spectacularize) the new
locations for satellite museums and international exhibitions, but has also modified it in
order to make it portable in those same museum and gallery circuits. Consequently, as
Claire Doherty (2009) observes “place-based commissioning… has come to dominate
large-scale exhibitions and public art programmes internationally” (p.14).

Cultural Identity: Finding the Bodies in Site-Specificity
As discussions by Lucy Lippard, Yi-Fu Tuan, and others at the beginning of this
section have demonstrated, the concept of site-specificity is layered with notions of
belonging, rootedness/rootlessness, and historical memory. It is little surprise then that as
the global art market has compelled the return of site-specificity, it has also dragged with
it a new focus on the cultural identity that “site” implies. Site-specific works seek to both
produce place and locality – often, through the expression of cultural and racial identity –
and destabilize that place’s parameters as they participate in the art industry’s circuit of
global exhibitions and markets. What emerges is “a new mobilities paradigm where local
identities once located in particular places are now increasingly seen as ‘hybrid’,
‘diasporic’ or ‘trans-national’” (Doherty, 2009, p.18). That this new paradigm is
necessarily in conversation with not only cultural identity, but also the envisioning of the
historical subject, as the connotations of “diasporic” and “hybrid” suggest,
22
is a
significant feature of this aesthetic’s contemporary variation.

22
I take my cue from scholars like Dipesh Chakrabarty (1992), Ray Chow (1993), Homi Bhabha (1994),
Walter Mignolo (2000), Brent Hayes Edwards (2003), and Okwui Enwezor (2009), all of whom discuss
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The aesthetic motifs that dominate the mainstream global art industry’s
productions speak to cultural identity, history, the racial formations and performances
that undergird concepts like diaspora, transnational citizenship, and hybridity. These
concepts trickle up to the surface as recurring themes while artists themselves undertake
global mobility and attempt to at the same time, address that mobility. The imbrication of
these ideas has been well expressed by Achille Mbembe, who, in a 2010 lecture at the
Tate Modern, asked art historians to think about what happens to cultural production and
artistic representation after post-colonialism and in the middle of the global art world’s
determined neoliberal practices (Mbembe, 2010). He noted that in the moment of the art
world’s economic globalization, the increased velocity of circulating bodies and ideas
also goes hand in hand with the closing of borders and with the reinvention of difference.
This moment is one when the “renewed global desire for apartheid and separateness” is
inseparable from the twin ideas that “difference is more and more understood as identity”
and that both culture and identity become commodities (Mbembe, 2010). In light of these
developments, he asks how we can think about the roles that racial essentialism and racial
authenticity play in the circulation of artistic forms. How do migration and its production
of identities – including diasporic, transnational identities as well those understood as
“hybrid” – inform artistic practice and aesthetics?
Nicolas Bourriaud too is interested in the ways in which the global art world’s
neoliberal economy impact not only artistic practice, but also, cultural and racial identity;
how artists produce a multiplicity of imagined worlds in order to adapt the global toward
their own ends. Artists now proceed in what Bourriaud calls a “radicant”
23
mode, which

hybridity and diaspora as subjectivities that always implicate the historical.
23
As Bourriaud notes, “radicant” means “belonging to the root.” Scholars often use terms that have the root
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Tom Morton (2009) reads as referring to a “form of cultural production whose roots are
not static and buried, like those of a tree, but mobile and above ground, like those of a
creeper or ivy” (para.2). Like Mbembe and other scholars, like Wendy Knepper (2006),
who takes up Caribbean artists and their use of bricolage, Olu Oguibe (1999), who talks
about the emergence of Nigerian artists, Bourriaud addresses global contemporary artists’
rendering of multiple cultural and racially-indexed worlds to account for the dialectic
between movement and stasis as well as the inextricability of the global from the local.
These artists take up the contradictions laden in the assumption that the present
sociohistorical moment brings us even, universal mobility, that the global or the
international can somehow be divorced from the racially-marked local and that the
former can be exalted, while the latter, left behind in history. Art critic Jan Verwoert
(2007), for example, argues that despite the global’s, or what he calls the
“international’s,” fashionable place at the center of the art world’s power structure, it “is
always needy and in want of the support by the local without which it can literally not
incarnate itself” (p.218). He continues that without the local, the global form can only
generate ideas, “arriv[ing] with empty hands, incapable of instantly producing the
surprises it is expected to deliver” (Verwoert, 2007, p.219). The Mexican artist Gabriel
Orozco sums up this geographic, racial and identity-oriented ambivalence and its
mandate of constant negotiation between the boundaries of what the global and the local
may mean in an interview with Benjamin Buchloh:
I never really understood internationalism or globalization, and at the same time, I
don’t understand locality itself… I have no idea who I am and who I will be in

“root” in order to describe the positionality of artists who work with an attention to place. Lucy Lippard,
for example, says that she is an “emotional nomad and a radical,” citing the latter term’s grammatical root,
which means “root” (Lippard, 1997, p.5).
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terms of what it is to be a Mexican, or what it is to be a global or a local artist or
not. What is interesting now is how the artist behaves in the world, how he lives,
what position he takes politically…I work in a context but I also work for me, out
of that context; in the context but against the context. You are working in a place
but you are also working in a macro situation… (Orozco quoted in Buchloh,
1998, pp.92-93)
Orozco’s dizzying vacillation between knowing and not knowing, questions of
transparency, national, global, and racial identity, and the notions of art’s function in the
contemporary moment performs exactly those aesthetics that the curators and scholars
mentioned here have been attributing to artists in the current, global moment. He invokes
the existence of many, nationally and racially-marked, simultaneous worlds and realities;
he challenges their boundaries, and layers them on top of one another in a way that makes
a clean division impossible. This is perhaps why Bourriaud has used the writer Jorge Luis
Borges’ description of time to talk about these prioritizations of an imbricated site-
specificity and cultural identity in contemporary art as “a garden with forking paths”
(Bourriaud quoted in Morton, 2009, para.10).

Homogeneity: Biennials, Triennials, and Thematic Cohesion
The third contemporary aesthetic trajectory addressed in this chapter is
specifically an outgrowth of the global art market’s exponential pricing increases as well
as this market’s propensity for large-scale international exhibitions, like Biennials and
Triennials. These market developments are certainly imbricated. Both pricing growth and
the proliferation of Biennial-like exhibitions are, as I have demonstrated here, the result
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of the global art industry’s free market, neoliberal logics of expansion and deregulation of
fine arts exchanges. Both are also undoubtedly undertaken as strategies of revenue
generation. However, as scholars, art critics, and curators argue, the two yield aesthetic
and thematic homogeneity for slightly different reasons.
Curators and critics in the U.S. context, for example, have been largely concerned
with the ways in which unsubstantially increased prices for works of art are leading not
just to a commercialization of the art world, but also to a specific aesthetic homogeneity
(Findlay, 2012; Viveros-Faune, 2013). As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, Michael
Findlay (2012) has argued that the latest movement in Contemporary Art can be summed
up as Commercialism, where the size of potential profits determine artistic production
like never before, ensuring that only the commercially viable will actually be made and
importantly, will be made visible (i.e. will be included in auction houses as well as
gallery and museum exhibitions). Christian Viveros-Faune (2013) provides this
phenomenon with a different name, but outlines the same basic process: “we are
witnessing the emergence of what might be called Strategic Art—pieces designed to
pierce the consciousness of a new investing class. This kind of art increasingly sees the
marketplace as a kind of focus group. Naturally, it produces what buyers like best”
(Viveros-Faune, 2013, para.28). Ed Winkelman, critic and gallery owner, explains that
“the financialization of art” has produced a system where the middle tier of galleries is
squeezed to the point of non-existence – the top and bottom tier are where investment and
speculation happen, respectively: “I've … watched experimental galleries migrate slowly
to show only the artists that sell. Obviously, that strategy only increases the homogeneity
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of what's on view," he says in an interview with Viveros-Faune (Winkelman quoted in
Viveros-Faune, 2013, para.23).
While criticisms that yoke the financialization and commercialization of art to its
homogeneity and ultimate aesthetic demise are perhaps familiar, dating back to the
famous diatribe penned by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1947), the
homogeneity that grows out of large-scale international exhibitions takes on a different
tone. Scholars and critics like John Byrne (2005), David Joselit (2013) and Adrian Searle
(2004) have all argued that the frequently staged global Biennials and Triennials often
suffer from an understandable homogeneity of displayed art works. The sheer size of
these exhibitions (a side effect of their economic motivations) requires that each Biennial
or Triennial introduce an equally wide-sweeping motif. As the introduction to this
chapter demonstrated, themes for Biennials are rather wide-reaching: the global
experience, mankind in modernity, humanity in the era of globalization, etc. The result is
two-fold. First of all, the vague theme leaves so much room for artistic interpretation that
the displayed works are questionably and loosely tied together. The critic Christopher
Knight, for example, complained that several works of art on display at the 2013
MexiCali Biennial in Los Angeles, stretched the “cannibalism” theme “pretty thin”
(Knight, 2013, para.20). Secondly, as Byrne explains, exhibitions’ lack of specificity
ensures that similar aesthetics and content motifs appear from one Biennial to the next.
24

“The key issue which Globalisation is raising for contemporary art today… [is] on one
hand, the growth of a certain type of art which one now expects to see at Biennials
everywhere whilst, on the other, a marked decrease in the ‘specificity’ of localized

24
Byrne calls these homogeneous art works bland “airport art” (Byrne, 2005, p.169)
183

cultural production” (Byrne, 2005, p.169). Using the 2004 Liverpool Biennial as an
example, Adrian Searle observes:
All international biennials try to impose a theme, a rubric or gimmick, to make the
thing coherent and relevant. The word ‘international’ in this context might make
us think not of differences - different time zones, languages, customs and art - but
of sameness, like those restaurants that serve debased ‘international’ cuisine. One
might be forgiven for thinking that the international biennial serves up a familiar
menu wherever it is held. (Searle, 2004, para.3)
Considered together, the set of consequences encourage an aesthetic homogeneity
among global visual artists who seek to be mobile and portable inside the global art
world. Put another way, given the economic conditions of the global art world, the
aesthetic and thematic homogeneity that art critics and scholars so decry, is actually what
makes visual artists mobile in their arts industry; it’s what helps them pop-up from one
destination to the next on the exhibition circuit. It is homogeneity that helps them comply
with the neoliberal demands of the global art world. However, as I have tried to show in
this chapter, homogeneity is not the only aesthetic effect of the industry’s neoliberal
practices. In order to be viable and mobile in the global art world, visual artists are
continually asked to produce homogeneity, but also site-specificity, and renderings of
cultural and racial identity, three aesthetic and ideological trajectories that are seemingly
incompatible. The question then necessarily becomes: how do visual artists negotiate
these three – in some ways, mutually exclusive – commitments?
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David Joselit offers the beginning of an answer to this question.
25
In order to
balance these demands, Joselit argues, visual artists use “cookies” or “identity tags” that
speak to an easily legible particularity or formulation of site-specific, often racial
difference (Joselit, 2013, p.81). The “cookies” are then paired with Eurocentric, Western
artistic forms, to make the object of fine art portable. “The perfect formula for success in
a global art world,” Joselit contends, looks something like the works of Chinese artist
Wang Guangyi: “they carry a quantum of native ‘Chineseness,’ but their mobilization of
familiar Western art styles makes it possible for them to communicate this unfamiliar and
even ‘exotic’ content to a broad range of audiences” (Joselit, 2013, p.20).
While Joselit offers a compelling argument – indeed, a formula – to explain the
ways in which visual artists balance the contradictory aesthetic demands of the global art
industry in their own work, this argument is not fully complete. Racial, site-specific
“cookies” are certainly a significant strategy employed by artists to communicate racial
particularity. But it is also important to remember that “Chineseness,” to use Joselit’s
own language, is not made up of the same signifiers in every geopolitical context. The
rendering of a contextually legible “Chineseness” requires a very different set of racial
codes in the U.S. than it does in Pakistan, for example. “Cookies” or “identity tags,” then,
are far more slippery than Joselit allows for. To accommodate the conditions of travel
and international exhibition in the global art world, visual artists must deploy their
signifiers in changeable ways. As I have argued throughout this dissertation, visual artists
must make the racial domain of their aesthetics mobile in order to make their works and
themselves physically mobile in the circuits of the industry. In this chapter, I argue that

25
While Alain Quemin does not use the same terminology, his 2006 essay about globalization’s impacts on
the art world’s domain of racial representation comes to very similar conclusions.
185

visual artists use pop-up performance in order to make their works speak to the varying
geopolitical and economic contexts they encounter through international travel and
exhibition. In the case of visual artists of color, pop-up performance means that these
visual artists toggle between site-specificity, homogeneity, and cultural identity by
mobilizing context-appropriate racial signifiers, by improvising the substance of their
aesthetic pop-up according to their current site. These performances do not simply yield a
flat version of Otherness (or a duality of “Chineseness” and “Westernness”). They yield
strategic racial performances that are endlessly (and entrepreneurially) variable;
performances that force us to contend with the kind of compulsory racial self-production
that the global art industry requires of artists of color.
Working with these suppositions, it is important to emphasize that this chapter’s
focus is not on the fact of movement. The travel and mobility required of contemporary
visual artists in the global art world has been established by scholars and critics alike.
Neither is my focus on the fact that aesthetics must cater to the legibility that global travel
implies. Instead, I am interested in the kinds of pop-up permutations that the artist
deploys in different locales; the kinds of racial permutations that are produced in
response to varying geopolitical and economic contexts and what is at stake in the
constant mobilization of these permutations. In some ways, I argue against Joselit’s
conclusion that global mobility only asks for a kind of “authentic” otherness. As I show,
instead of an easy deployment of a fixed, site-specific Otherness, exhibiting in the global
art world actually requires compulsory, temporary, constantly shifting and adaptive
performances of race. This chapter addresses the ways in which race is made visible and
legible in works of art that travel the circuits of the global visual art industry. How is the
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racial imagination made manifest on the globally mobile body on display? And what role
does the artist’s own racial self-representation play in this schema? To address the ways
in which racially-indexed pop-up performance constitutes the governing framework for
how visual artists navigate the global art industry and its aesthetic demands, I begin with
the work of Sofia Maldonado.

Market Visibility/Market Viability: Race and Pop-Up Performance
2010 was a busy year for Puerto-Rican American artist Sofia Maldonado. Having
been raised in San Juan, she came to the United States in 2008 to attend the Pratt Institute
in New York and has remained in the U.S. ever since. In 2010, she exhibited at CIRCA
Puerto Rico, the Witzenhausen Gallery in Amsterdam, the Magnan Metz Gallery in New
York, and completed the Times Square Alliance Mural Project in New York’s Times
Square, easily living up to her own self-positioning as a postcolonial, traveling, world
citizen. Maldonado discusses her work as depicting primarily Latina and Afro-Latina
women, engaging with the intersections of race, visibility, and globalization. Her March
2010 large-scale Times Square mural, commissioned by the Times Square Alliance, is a
good snapshot of her aesthetic, visual ideologies and range. The mural makes visible
hyper feminine super heroines, with oversized tresses, stylized nail art, and exaggerated
bodily features. They live in a world that is somewhere between pop abstraction, graffiti
art, and more traditional forms of landscape painting. Their bodies are rendered in
serpentine lines; liquid bodies that emphasize undisciplined, excessive shapes and make a
corporeal unruliness the subject on display. The women who populate this mural are in
fact the artist’s signature. She calls them her “girls.”
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The fundamentals of Maldonado’s artistic aesthetic – or what she, borrowing from
the world of street art, sometimes calls her “tag” – are an important start point here, as I
am interested in examining how she deploys these aesthetics in two specific exhibition
contexts: New York and Amsterdam. Taken together, these two exhibitions are a way to
explore how contemporary visual artists navigate global mobility through site-specific
racial performance, while maintaining a measure of the aesthetic homogeneity that the
industry requires for mobility. The way that Sofia Maldonado, for example, makes the
bodies she renders perform race provides us with some insight as to the conditions under
which racialized bodies can become visible and legible in the circuits of the global art
world. Furthermore, the ways in which those performances transform according to
geopolitical context, illuminates both the parameters and the flexibilities of that global
legibility. This case study then attempts to think through the kinds of racial performances
the artist renders and how those performances undergo transformation.
These imbricated notions of racial performance and transformation are critical
here as I suggest that Maldonado’s work adopts tactics of transformation that, like the
works of Pakistani and Chechen designers in the previous chapter, can be read inside the
rubric of what I have been calling pop-up performance. Like the designers, Maldonado
too engages a strategic play with racial codes as her work travels. The basic aesthetic
elements captured by her Times Square mural are carried over from piece to piece. These
building blocks are always there, but importantly, always remixed, strategically
organized and formalized to render an image that is legible inside the work’s projected
destinations: first New York, then Amsterdam. That these aesthetic elements congeal
around deeply essentialist renderings of femininity is hard to deny. However, the kinds of
188

essentialisms she deploys are instructive in that they point to the kinds of visual rhetorics
that are legible in the global. The artist uses the material of these aesthetics to play with
the permutations of the racialized body, calibrating the girls’ performances of race
according to varying systems of racialization, wherein the racial feeling and value
articulated through the girls’ bodies in these works of art become inseparable from the
Contemporary Art world’s site-specific political economies of race. In doing this,
Maldonado forces the girls she depicts to be in a constant state of pop-up performance,
mobilizing mechanics of the pop-up on the terrain of racial representation in order to
secure visibility for the work of art in various geographies. Each destination enjoys its
own version of the Maldonado aesthetic pop-up. One permutation of her aesthetic
expression of racial feeling is erected temporarily in New York, touted as her signature
style, then taken down, and immediately erected again in Amsterdam, in a completely
different vision, adapting to a different geography. Both aesthetic bodies are as temporary
as they are site-specific, relying on both the physical and aesthetic multiplicity that the
pop-up normalizes. The artist builds her aesthetic pop-up performance as she physically
pops up in one exhibition space and then the next, all the time relying on the same basic
building materials. Consequently, bleeding lines, forms, and even colors, cohere into
specific, formalized and strategic representations that are heavily informed by their
assumed destination. The pop-up permutations that Maldonado’s girls perform across
space are most visible when considering the exhibits side by side.

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Maldonado and González in the U.S.: The Unruly Jungle and Folk Culture
In the summer of 2010, on the heels of her Times Square mural, Sofia Maldonado
debuted her solo exhibit “Concrete Jungle Divas” at New York’s Magnan Metz Gallery.
The visual grammars of representations in many ways repeat those of the mural, steering
closely to racial codes that are, as I will show, ultimately rooted in stable, racial signifiers
particularly associated with the U.S. and its art institutions. The girls’ physical skin color
is here used as legible racial signifier, evoking the familiar essentialist renderings of
otherness, using visibly marked bodies – marked through skin color, hair, etc. – to
simultaneously perform and validate the enduring U.S. legacy of racial hierarchy.
Importantly, a legacy that, as scholars like Jared Sexton (2008) have argued, operates
primarily through discourses of biological truths, through an insistence on reading race
according to biological schemas of the physical body. Biologically-determined readings
of racialized bodies are crucial for the U.S. system of racial hierarchy as they work to
affirm racial purity, which is, in the contemporary moment the founding premise of what
is rendered as a progressive multiracial experience and agenda (Sexton, 2008). Following
this theoretical schema loyally, in Maldonado’s exhibit, racial identity is both made
legible and reified through physicality of the body. These girls are in motion: hands
gesturing, legs mid-movement, hair flinging, heads cocked, and bodies posing. And the
color palette follows suit, with dark, saturated colors overwhelming the visual landscape
of each piece, made fluid and geometrically undisciplined, seemingly gesturing much like
the girls’ bodies. The same blues, yellows, and reds the artist has used elsewhere are
deeply intensified here, scheming to create a turbulent and aggressive color palette that
refuses to allow the viewer’s gaze rest. Several of the abstracts enveloping the gallery
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walls are done in black, interspersed among the girls’ portraits like tumultuous clouds.
The onslaught of color tends to heighten the sensibilities embodied by the seemingly
insubordinate lines, the permeable shapes and excessive forms of each piece.
The abstracts in this exhibit are highly intricate, weaving labyrinths out of hair,
accessories, and even the girls’ bodies themselves. Her series of five canvases renders
this most obviously. This series magnifies her typical use of indiscernible and permeable
shapes, by slashing the figures at the bottom, dismembering them, turning them into
abstracts that at once blend into the dark background clouds that wallpaper the exhibit
and become hyper visible because of their exaggerated sexuality. This dismemberment
reminds us of what Deborah Paredez (2002, 2009) has said about Latina bodies in a
particularly U.S. system of racial knowledge: isolated body parts become the dominant
trope of Latina bodies, hyper visible objects that labor to anchor a racial reading.
Furthermore, Isabel Molina-Guzman (2010) and Frances Negron-Muntaner (2004) both
contend that specific body parts become “empirical, irrefutable evidence” of an authentic
Latina identity, proof of racial ‘realness’ in the absence of racial certainty (Molina-
Guzman, 2010, p.60).
26
These scholars agree that the spectacularization of these body
parts ultimately works to position the bodies as proof of an incomprehensible excess of
Latina and African diasporic cultures, a way to appoint ethnoracial identity.
Given these scholars’ interpretations of this legacy of figurative dismemberment,
Maldonado’s work complicates this discourse. If the usage of body parts gestures towards
an excess that is incomprehensible, then Maldonado’s work reminds us that that
incomprehensibility is actually, deeply comprehensible. It is these bodies’

26
Both Frances Negron-Muntaner and Isabel Molina-Guzman discuss Jennifer Lopez. The body part in
question, for both scholars, is Lopez’s behind. However, as Paredez argues, this is but one example of the
ways Latina bodies are fragmented into assumingly transparently representative body parts.
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incomprehensible excess that makes them legible as certain kinds of racially-marked
figures in her work. The artist mobilizes specific body parts, gestures, bodily movement
and comportment, and of course, the girls’ skin color to guarantee the reading, to make
these bodies perform a representation that is legible in a U.S. context. That specifically
U.S. racial formations are so critical to Maldonado’s aesthetics in this particular exhibit,
however, is not simply a matter of making her work visually and discursively legible in
the geopolitical context of its reception. It is also closely tied to the U.S. art market’s
economies of “Latino/a” art and that market’s normalization of discourses of racial
legibility.
As a Puerto-Rican, U.S.-based artist, who self-identifies as a Latina, Sofia
Maldonado occupies an uncertain space in the U.S. art world’s economy of “Latino/a”
visual art. As scholars like Arlene Davila (1999), Guillermo Gomez-Pena (1989), Mari
Carmen Ramirez (1992), and George Yudice (1996), have all argued, the late 1980s U.S.
exhibition boom in “Latin American” or “Latino/a” visual art
27
was one of the art world’s
responses to the U.S. politics of multiculturalism and its prioritization of survey-like
essentialist nationalisms. The boom also coincided with the increasing financialization of
the U.S. art market, where foreign investment became attractive. As totalizing as the
category of “Latino/a” art already is, Davila, Gomez-Pena and Ponce de Leon point out
that visibilities within this category are even further stratified by neoliberal capital and
the art market’s logics of free-trade. First, U.S-born or U.S-based “Latino/a” visual artists
are rarely included in these survey exhibits; rather than being “recognizable citizens of

27
This “boom” has seen a considerable resurgence since 2010, according to Stefanie Kogler (2010), who
has observed that “Latin American” Contemporary Art is a growing sector not just in the U.S., but also
across Europe, fueled by exhibitions at the Tate Modern and the PINTA Art Fair.
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Latin America,” they are instead seen as “bicultural minorities” (Davila, 1999, p.182,
181). Carolina Ponce de Leon adds that
U.S. Latino and Latina artists are often deprived of the romantic undertones
awarded to artists south of the U.S.-Mexico border. The U.S. economy of
poverty… does not quite resemble the atmosphere of partnership that surrounds
U.S trade with neoliberal economies in Latin America (p.146).
For Puerto Rican artists, the label of “bicultural minorities” is complicated even
further through colonialism-inflected citizenship. Secondly, U.S. galleries, museums and
auction houses tend to privilege visual artists from Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and
Venezuela as representatives of the “Latin American” art world. The U.S. art market
“favor[s] the wealthier, more Europeanized, modern countries with stronger national
elites and thus a stronger art market” (Davila, 1999, p.187). And those selected Latin
American countries’ art markets are really the critical aspect of this economic
configuration, because as Davila and Helen-Louise Seggerman (1995) remind us, Latin
American collectors are the primary customers of Latin American art in the U.S.
28

Importantly, because “collectors” are often not individuals, but foundations working on
behalf of Latin American corporations, government ministries of culture, and embassies,
these collectors’ purchases are frequently motivated by nationalist investment and
publicity. Consequently, collectors often purchase works of fine art that hail from their
own countries (Davila, 1999; Seggerman, 1995). According to Artvest Partners, 2012
sales in the “Latin American” market bare out this claim, demonstrating that works
originating from one of the four major “collector” countries garner the highest prices in

28
The U.S. art market is a validating market for these Latin American investors and collectors (Davila,
1999).
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the global art world. Artists from Mexico and Brazil, as I will address shortly with regard
to Máximo González, enjoy the highest number of sales and the highest price points
(Artvest Partners, 2012). This market configuration typically forces U.S. born and U.S.-
based Latino/a visual artists into the categories of street art and pop art, exploring the
borders between “high” and “low” art (Ponce de Leon, 2002).
It is in this context that Sofia Maldonado exists in the U.S. art market. She is a
resident of the U.S., which makes her unappealing for exhibitions showcasing “Latin
American” art. Plus, she cannot claim heritage in one of the Latin American countries
with wealthy art markets. The geographic heritage she can claim is not conducive to
smooth nationalisms or narratives of immigration, as Puerto Rico’s position with regard
to the U.S. remains liminal. Maldonado’s only option to find resonance in the U.S. art
market, then, is to adopt the visual grammars of U.S. racial formation and to use her
aesthetics in order to underscore her work’s geographic specificity to the U.S. Since the
economics of the U.S. market, which favors free-trade as a validation for visibility, do not
allocate any space or market for a Puerto Rican diasporic citizen of the U.S. (an identity
she claims for her own body since she was raised in Puerto Rico), Maldonado
accommodates her aesthetic to speak to U.S. racial otherness, thereby making her work
“American,” slotting it into the broader U.S. markets for street art, graffiti art and pop art.
As I briefly mentioned above, it is a tactic that demonstrates the point made by Carolina
Ponce de Leon, who notes that U.S.-based “Latino/a” artists often find their market home
in the street art and pop art markets (Ponce de Leon, 2002).
Maldonado does not just visually deploy U.S. racial formations on the bodies of
her subjects, she also chooses from this discourse’s enduring metaphors to emphasize
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specifically American racially-marked geographies. The New York exhibit I have been
discussing is called “Concrete Jungle Divas.” It is not simply that these figures are asked
to occupy their immediate space in ways often deemed “inappropriate,” or that they are
deployed to perform an aggressive sexuality that is often ascribed to particularly U.S.
women of color. In New York, the exhibit title also subjects these figures to the “concrete
jungle” trope, which is ambiguous enough in scope and anything but in connotation.
Mariana Valverde (1996) traces the wide use of the jungle metaphor to the imperial
“slum writing” of Victorian England, wherein variations of “the jungle” worked in close
allegiance with imperial narratives of Africa as “the dark continent.” Susan Hayward
(2000) has recounted Paris’s historical turn as a city reminiscent of the concrete jungle.
29

However, it is this metaphor’s frequent attachment to New York that is significant here.
As Hanjo Berressem (1992) argues, in the cultural imaginary (in literature, cinema, etc.)
that is built around New York, the city’s “poetics are apocalyptic,” often depicting
“hordes of city- nomads roam[ing] the asphalt jungle” (p.117). He is referring to the fact
that the jungle metaphor (and its most frequent incarnation, the concrete jungle) has a
long musical and literary history in U.S.-based and specifically African American
cultural productions. It was made into lasting metaphor by Upton Sinclair in 1906,
revolutionized in Duke Ellington’s “jungle sound” in the 1920’s, referenced in film noir
from the 1950’s and 1960’s, and invoked by Bob Marley’s 1973 song by that name, all
works that depict an urban space, where, to borrow from Marley, “the living is harder.”
The metaphor is, at its most basic, a reference to concrete housing towers that are the
visual signature of projects in urban areas. It is a metaphor that is in conversation with the

29
Hayward argues that in the 1950s Paris’s image as a city of dreaminess was replaced by the discourses of
the concrete jungle. This association only lasted through the mid-1970s however, when the mayor reversed
key building legislation in the city.
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desperation and tragedy that accompanies these geographic spaces, but one that also
points to racist representations of black and Latina bodies as untamed and uncivilized.
In that 1973 rendition, Marley sang “No chains around my feet/ But I'm not free/ I
know I am bound here in captivity.” And it is precisely this notion of urban captivity (as
opposed to Ellington’s modern jungle, for example), of physical excess born out of
desperation that Maldonado recycles in this exhibit, in order to position her girls in the
cultural geography where their bodies can be made distinctly American and legible for
the New York public. For Maldonado, this stable citation of the jungle metaphor
constitutes a shorthand for the expression of racialized structures of feeling, using the
bodies of black, Afro-Latina and Latina women to spectacularize an unruly and
aggressive – indeed, a jungle – femininity; a femininity that is rendered as somehow
organic to the body parts, the physical gestures and movements she depicts through her
girls. In New York, this violent essentialism that Maldonado’s girls are made to wear is
not only recognizable but also necessary for an easily digestible visual morality. It is a
morality that underscores race through place in order to situate Maldonado’s girls – her
works of visual art – in the “American” market (as opposed to the U.S. “Latin American”
market) where they can be made visible and available for consumption.
To fully understand the aesthetic contours of the U.S. Latin-American art market,
we must also consider how it conditions those Latin-American artists who it privileges.
Before fleshing out Maldonado’s pop-up performances, then, this chapter detours to
Máximo González, explaining how this Mexico-based visual artist negotiates the same
U.S. art market that marginalizes Maldonado. As I have already suggested, the U.S.
market for “Latin-American” visual art impacts artists from different countries in
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drastically different ways. The same U.S. “Latin American” market that marginalizes
Sofia Maldonado, an artist who considers herself a Latina and Caribbean, centralizes
Máximo González. He was born in Paraná, Argentina and has been based out of Mexico
City, Mexico since 2003. Representing two countries that are prioritized in the U.S. Latin
American market, González must embody a set of aesthetics that speak to nationalistic
Latin-American collectors, and as an artist from Mexico, he must also mobilize aesthetics
that can coexist with (if not, reproduce) the local politics on Chicano visual art. As Karen
Mary Davalos (2012) explains, the two are not incompatible. Writing about the criticism
that the Los Angeles-based 2008 group exhibition “Phantom Sightings: Art after the
Chicano Movement” received from local artists and critics, Davalos says that the
exhibition was heavily criticized for its unwillingness to engage with identity politics,
which critics saw as a mode of political and racial erasure and violence. The exhibition,
30

according to Nizan Shaked (2008) “triangulates the main discourses surrounding identity-
based definitions, distinguishing itself from nationalistic tendencies that aim to preserve a
core identity as well as approaches arguing against identity-based classifications
altogether” (p.1069). It is precisely this rendering of a mobile, relational identity that
critics found troubling, arguing that doing away with nationalisms and identity politics
renders an oversimplified and apologetic history of Chicano/a artistic practice (Davalos,
2012). This criticism of “Phantom Sightings” is just a brief glimpse into the kind of
economic and cultural climate that dominates the Latin-American art market and
especially the Chicano/a art market in the U.S. While Máximo González is a citizen of
Mexico and therefore, not Chicano, the ideological debates over Chicano/a artistic

30
“Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement” was organized by the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art in 2008. Its co-curators were: Howard N. Fox, Rita Gonzalez, and Chon A. Noriega.
197

practice in the U.S. nevertheless demand his attention. Consequently, the U.S. Latin-
American market, coupled with the local Chicano/a art market, make Máximo González
both a privileged and a restrained exhibitor. The former demands an engagement with
nationalism to appease Latin-American collectors and their purchasing values, and the
latter asks for a wrestling with identity politics, history, and the sociopolitical conditions
of border existence.
The ways in which Máximo González complies with these requirements in order
to exhibit in the U.S. are evident in two different works of art. In 2010, González
exhibited sets of colorful "papel picado" (perforated paper banners), strung up over San
Francisco streets in his exhibit at San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Folk. The exhibit
underscored the traditional and festive elements of this artistic practice, reminding
viewers that this is a specifically folk Mexican art form connected to traditional Mexican
identity. In San Francisco, the exhibit was called “Art Volver: Mexican Folk Art into
Play,” a title that emphasizes both the nation and its identity. Six years before, the same
banners appeared in an exhibit at The Spanish Cultural Centre in Mexico in Mexico City.
In contrast to the San Francisco exhibit, here González’s exhibit was called “Invasion,
Occupation, Extension.” In Mexico City, the banners gestured to far more global
practices of history and identity formation, inflected with histories of transnationalism
and colonization, rather than closed references to an imagined national folk culture.
Furthermore, similar banners accompanied the artist’s 2008 exhibition at the Valle Orti
Gallery in Valencia, Spain and meanings shifted yet again. This time, “papel picado”
arrived under the more abstracted title “Heart of Lead,” exploring the concepts of
humanity and personal journeys through affect (the title is a play on “heart of gold”).
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These three drastically different deployments of the same aesthetic product suggest that
González deploys as many significations and narratives of these colorful tissue banners as
international exhibition touring will require. In order to participate in an art world
characterized by the commercial sensibilities of pop-ups, the artist’s aesthetics are treated
to the pop-up mechanism as well, re-arranged to produce aesthetic wholes that
temporarily appear (seemingly out of nowhere) and disappear, only to be replaced by
different permutations in another exhibit location. The aesthetics here are endlessly
changeable.
González managed something similar more recently. In 2012, as part of his solo
exhibition at the Craft and Folk Art Museum (CAFAM) in Los Angeles, the artist showed
a piece called “Aluminum 1886.” This same piece also appeared at his 2010-2011 solo
exhibit in Chicago, at the Hyde Park Art Centre. The work is a large-scale installation
that is mounted on a wall, and consists of closely arranged vintage aluminum kitchen
wares. There are trays and a few drinking vessels, but the installation is made up
predominantly of plates and various serving platters. The piece asks its viewers to think
about these domestic items in their historical context, rendering a stylized motif of
tradition and the domestic space, which itself invokes notions of the popular and the folk.
The year in the piece’s title both situates the work historically and leaves it there, locking
it into its historical moment. But that was only the U.S.-bound work. In contrast, plates
also appeared in Máximo González’s work in Mexico. In a 2012 exhibit titled “Codo a
Codo” (side by side) at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, plates were
prominent yet again. The piece was called “Inheritance” and these plates were neither
stylized nor historically static. These were a varied mix of mismatched dishes, passed
199

down from older generations but made useful in the contemporary moment. The plates
are made from various materials, like ceramic, porcelain, and bone china, all common in
present day kitchens (unlike a solid aluminum kitchen set). According to the artist, the
piece is “an exercise of transfer, of detachment from things, allowing treasures to change
hands, and come back converted” (González, Buenader, 2012). Another way to think
about this work, in its Mexico City version, is that González is interested in domesticity
as it is rendered mobile, across time and space, confusing historical closures and fixities.
The deep contrast between the artist’s usage of plates and serving dishes in the U.S. and
Mexico contexts brings into sharp relief the ways in which he transforms his aesthetics to
accommodate the economics of each market. The basic objects of these pieces – the
building blocks of his pop-up performances – are the same: plates and dishes. In the U.S.
however, the plates are about the kind of historical closures and stylization that both
nationalism and identity politics demand. They render a particular vision of the Mexican
domestic popular. At the same time, exhibited (or popping up) in Mexico, these plates are
the commodities of historical and personal travel, more wide-reaching in scope, touching
on different time periods and different spatialities.
These examples from the works of Máximo González demonstrate the ways in
which the U.S. economy for Latin American visual art prioritizes artists from particular
Latin American nations, but restricts their aesthetic expressions, as much as it restricts
those artists that the market marginalizes. While he enjoys a higher degree of visibility in
the U.S. Latin American art market than an artist like Sofia Maldonado, Máximo
González is also conditioned by this market. He pursues strategic pop-up performances of
race and nation in order to make his works visible in the U.S. market. Sofia Maldonado
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too pursues pop-up performances of race as she travels inside the global art world. As I
have shown, in the U.S. Maldonado’s “girls” speak to a specifically American racial
formation, where race is biologically “proven” and affixed geographically. Thanks to the
economics of the U.S. Latin American art market, Maldonado, an artist who identifies as
a Carribbean woman and a Latin-American woman, must transform her aesthetics and
acquire symbolic aesthetic U.S. citizenship. She does this through the bodies of her
“girls” and the metaphor of the jungle. Maldonado’s racially-indexed strategy, however,
becomes clearer once we consider her Amsterdam exhibit as well.

Maldonado and Tayou in Europe: Delivering Abstraction and Colonial Visions
Sofia Maldonado’s New York “Concrete Jungle Divas” exhibit was only the
beginning of the artist’s aesthetic economically-compelled transformations. No more than
a few weeks after the New York exhibit began Maldonado’s first European solo exhibit
went up in Amsterdam in July 2010. In Amsterdam, a new aesthetic body popped up.
Instead of the concrete jungle, the exhibition’s visual paradigms shifted, mobilizing racial
tropes suggested by the exhibit’s title, “Bling Bling Chicas.” What was in New York a
determined and transparent discursive citation of Afro-Latinas or blackness became, in
Amsterdam, a blurred, amorphous invocation of an otherness that is understood primarily
through the commodity objects suggested by the exhibit title. Here, the girls are no longer
vaguely brown: instead, their bodies are either rendered in deep blues or else, done in
simple black outline, with the only color granted to their oversized jewelry, suggesting
that in Amsterdam, race is made legible not through embodiment, but through
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performances of style. Here, style is working overtime, engaged in a kind of compulsory
racial over-representation, speaking that, which bodies cannot.
Comparing the performances of race that make up the fabric of each exhibit
suggests a rather fine, but significant distinction between a performance of race that
underscores embodiment, focusing on bodily features, specific body parts and the
movements of those parts, and then, a performance of race through costuming.
Costuming that is deeply racialized, but has nevertheless, embedded in it, a certain degree
of play and masquerade, relying on racial signifiers that imagine race as a sliding
category, both unspecific and prone to fantasy and changeability. In New York, the
discourses of race spoke through the materiality of the girls’ bodies – their skin color,
their occupation of space. In Amsterdam, it is stylization that does all the speaking.
Here, the girls are no longer in motion; instead, these are still portraits. Against
monotone bodies and in some cases, monotone canvases, what stands out are the large,
colorful doorknocker earrings, nameplate necklaces, and enormous chained crosses, all
abbreviated visual symbols of racialized hip hop style, reminding us that globally, racial
otherness travels across cultural industries in one of a few registers, one of them being
hip hop (Condry, 2006; Dimitriadis, 2009; Gray, 2005). Speaking of the Japanese
context, for example, Ian Condry (2006) lists nearly the same accoutrement as
“supposedly globally recognizable markers of hip-hop style” (p.27) and Greg Dimitriadis
(2009) observes simply that “hip-hop has all but defined our… global discussions around
the politics of class, gender, race, and sexuality” (p.xi). That racial identity, as rendered in
Maldonado’s exhibit, is understood through the costuming and flexibility implied by style
is critical here. In Amsterdam, it seems, it is not the girls’ particular racial bodies and
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those bodies’ tethering to U.S. urban geographies that matter, but rather, that they are
vaguely othered through a flexible wearing of “cultural” identity. These bodies gesture to
race through style, but they don’t invoke essentialized racial bodies in order to do so.
This vague othering is accomplished through a diffuse sense of hip-hop style, but also
through the discursive.
In the Amsterdam context, Maldonado traffics in the term “chica.” While the term
“chica” of course takes on different cultural significances in different geographies
31
this
term can also work to both encompass and signal any number of femininities attached to
vaguely Spanish-speaking geographies (Heredia, 2009; Hershfield, 2008). Documenting
the ambiguity that is produced when this term is invoked without political context
requires that we also consider its history in dance. As Susan Leigh Foster (2011)
explains, la chica is a dance that originated in central Africa and traveled first to Spain,
by way of the Moors, then the Caribbean, ultimately landing in South America and
eventually becoming popular with the Creole population of New Orleans. Interpreting
works of Carlos Blasis (1830, trans.1968), the first dance historian to chronicle the
development and migration of the dance, Foster observes that the dance was widely
understood to incite women to “lasciviousness and vice” since the “tropical heat induced
excessive wiggling of the hips and an unrestrained enthusiasm for performing
movement” (p.41). What is important here is the reliance on racist biological determinism
that is tied to climate, and therefore land. This brief detour into dance history is not at all
to suggest that Maldonado is either aware of this interpretation or even intends to cite it.
On the contrary, my suggestion is that she is deliberately leaning on a term that is racially

31
Joanne Hershfield’s (2008) work on “la chica moderna” in Mexico is a good example of historical
instances when the term “chica” took on temporal and geographic specificity.
203

loaded but also ambiguous in the Western European context. By contrast, deployed in the
U.S., “chica” would likely land Maldonado and her works right back into the “Latin
American” art category, where she cannot take up market residence. In Amsterdam,
references to la chica – whether to the myriad of political identities or the dance – then
are also references to the racially hybrid (because of its migration) but nevertheless
biologically informed systems of racial hierarchy. The discursive world produced by this
exhibit, much like its visual world, abandons the use of “representative” racial bodies, in
favor of more diffuse tropes, like style and terminology. La chica could refer to
populations in Mexico, Africa, New Orleans, or populations in the Caribbean. It could
potentially be so wide-reaching that it sheds many of its (often, politicized)
particularities, becoming a vague racial signifier of a deeply generalized Latina or Afro-
Latina identity.
The title for the Amsterdam exhibit, in concert with its visual landscape, suggests
a different racial imagination from the one audiences would have encountered in New
York. Unlike the metaphor of the concrete jungle, the notion of the “bling, bling chica”
conjures up racial structures that work through an indeterminate racialization, trading in
an ambiguously defined racial otherness. That Maldonado uses the bodies of her girls to
shift the grammars of racial performance in this way, suggests that the kind of racial
essentialism that is legible – that makes sense – in the Western European context is one
that pivots primarily on a white-nonwhite axis, where bodies’ cultural performance
through racialized style is quite enough to signify racial otherness. The primary functions
of racial difference are read through signifiers that point to either deducible whiteness or,
everything else. That Maldonado’s girls are ambiguously racialized – maybe Caribbean,
204

maybe African, maybe South American or Mexican – is telling. Their pan-otherness is all
that is required of their representation. Here, the reading of bodies and their comportment
to ascertain racial difference is simply unnecessary and perhaps even superfluous. Style
and a vaguely directional discursive signal will do.
The aesthetic sensibilities that Maldonado deploys in Amsterdam are, in fact,
perfectly tailored to the art market that the city participates in. Her pop-up transformation
from the New York market to the Amsterdam market can be seen as entirely strategic,
complying with the tenor of the art market in Amsterdam and Western Europe in general.
Overall, the basic economic architecture of Amsterdam’s art world does not much differ
from that of New York. Olav Velthuis (2003) explains that both cities are typically
considered centers of their respective nations’ art markets and operate according to the
neoliberal logics of the global art world. New York has more galleries, but Amsterdam’s
galleries have a much lower rate of turnover. Conversely, while New York’s galleries are
mostly profitable enterprises, Amsterdam’s are not (Velthuis, 2003). Furthermore, Merijn
Rengers and Olav Velthuis (2002) note that in the Amsterdam context, “the most
expensive works of art are those of foreign artists living abroad” (p.21). This premium for
foreign-born artists is accounted for by a combination of higher transaction costs
(shipping, insurance, percentage paid to home gallery) and the novel legitimacy ascribed
to foreign-born artists. “Potential buyers interpret the fact that the artists live and work
abroad as a signal of quality, and galleries market these artists accordingly” (Rengers &
Velthuis, 2002, p.11).
32
This premium placed on foreign-born artists suggests that buyers

32
There is little further scholarship connecting the idea of “foreignness” to price points in Amsterdam or
the Netherlands in general and no major studies that examine the relationship between the Amsterdam art
market and race (whether that is the “foreignness” of the artist, or the perceived racially-marked aesthetics
on display).
205

of visual art in Amsterdam and its larger art market are primarily local to Western
Europe. In terms of larger economic schemes, however, the differences between
Amsterdam and New York are slim. But the economic domain of the global art world is,
as I have shown, not the only factor that visual artists must consider in preparing their
aesthetic permutations for each specific market. The aesthetic fate of the Latin-American
art market in the U.S./New York context is refracted through the neoliberal logics of the
art world and specifically U.S.-based racial formulations, including an ethic of
multiculturalism. In Amsterdam, and in Western Europe, what determines the values
ascribed to particular aesthetics in the Latin-American market is a combination of the
same neoliberal logics that govern the U.S., but also, the uniquely Western European
discourses of race and racial embodiment. That the global art world functions according
to neoliberal economics means that an artist like Sofia Maldonado must constantly
“wander,” temporarily popping up in various markets, securing her visibility and market
viability through constant global travel and exhibition. However, even in those
destinations where the same economic structures apply, the artist must nevertheless
activate pop-up performance in order to accommodate the racial rhetorics of the
destination. When it comes to Amsterdam and the Western European art market context
that it operates in, that racial rhetoric engages one of two extremes: either abstraction or
colonial visuality.
The Amsterdam art market is part of the larger Western European art world,
where “Latin-American” art has been gaining visibility and popularity since 2010
(Kogler, 2010). It is in this expanded market where we can glean some aesthetic trends
with regard to race, culture, and aesthetics. In 2010, the UK’s Tate Modern celebrated its
206

collection of Latin-American Modern and Contemporary Art by establishing PINTA (the
Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art Fair). This was the victorious
culmination of the museum’s active augmentation of its Latin-American collection for
some years. The museum staged two retrospective exhibitions of Latin American artists
in the years prior. The first retrospective was of Brazilian visual artist Hélio Oiticica,
33

who belonged to Brazil’s Concrete Group, specialized in bright colors, geometric shapes,
temporal organization through installation, painted reliefs, and abstract painting. The
second retrospective exhibition, held in 2008, belonged to another Brazilian, Cildo
Meireles, a conceptual artist known for his large-scale abstract installations that address
state political oppression. While both of these artists have had considerable visibility in
the U.S. (large solo exhibitions), it is important to distinguish between the U.S and the
Western European markets for Latin-American art. The former includes these conceptual
and abstract Modern and Contemporary Latin-American artists, but prioritizes nation-
specific, racially-fixed aesthetics. While the latter, only recently experiencing a “boom”
in the Latin-American market, seems to prefer abstract and conceptual art from its Latin
American market category. One possible explanation for this geographic difference in
aesthetic preference might be the fact that the U.S. market is considered by Latin-
American collectors as a validating market, necessitating the U.S. market to entertain
Latin-American collectors’ nationalist biases (Davila, 1999). The European market is not
burdened with the same responsibility and is therefore free to pursue more generalized
Modern Art and Contemporary Art aesthetic trajectories.
That Western Europe’s art market prefers the abstract form of Latin American art
is only emphasized by the London-based Austin-Desmond Fine Art’s 2010 exhibition of

33
The artist passed in 1980.
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Geometric Abstract Art from South America and Europe. Called “Abstraction Creation,”
the exhibition was a survey of 29 Latin American, South American, and European visual
artists, active from the 1940s to the 1970s. Describing this exhibit, Kogler writes:
All artworks move away from figurative representation and seek to find true
meaning in abstraction and geometric forms… the themes and ideas… mirror a
common drive away from the figurative tradition and toward a fresh, exciting and
conceptual way of creating and approaching art (para.5).
In the Western European market then, the Latin-American market category favors
abstraction, conceptual art, and avoiding the figurative, all characteristics that Sofia
Maldonado manages to consolidate into her Amsterdam exhibit and its performance of
race. As I have described here, Maldonado’s exhibition in Amsterdam used the bodies of
her girls to render vague that which had been racially specific in New York. She
transformed biological racial exactitude into racial abstraction and costuming, gesturing
to racial bodies, but only vaguely, through pan-Latino signifiers and importantly, altered
skin color. I am deliberately conflating abstraction as artistic genre and the racial
abstraction that Maldonado approximates in order to demonstrate the ways in which
Maldonado uses race to accommodate an art market climate that prefers the open
interpretation of abstract Contemporary Art. She does not turn her girls into geometric
shapes, of course; she does, however, following the logics of abstraction, turn their racial
identities into the same wide, open repositories of meaning that the visuality of geometric
shapes might imply.
Sofia Maldonado’s accommodation of the Western European art market and its
racial climate did not end with transformations into abstraction. Exhibiting in
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Amsterdam, she readily took on the other end of Western Europe’s racial discourse:
colonialism. As I discussed earlier in this chapter, the global art world requires site-
specificity, homogeneity, and a reckoning with what is positioned as cultural identity. In
Western Europe, this cultural identity, as Mbembe and Joselit have demonstrated, is
viewed through the residual visual grammars of colonialism. In fact, the Netherlands
specifically has recently revealed its deep rooted and unapologetic attachments to
colonialism’s performances and spectacles of race with the controversy over the nation’s
beloved Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) character.
34
Recent examples from Dutch expressive
and arts cultures abound, from the 2012 film “Alleen Maar Nette Mensen” (“Only Decent
People”), which trades in sexual and racist fetishisms of the nation’s Afro-Surinamese
population, to the 2011 incident of the Dutch magazine Jackie suggesting a sartorial style
that they call “Nigga Bitch.” These are just a few of the recent examples that have
illuminated the discourses of racial identity and racial embodiment in the Netherlands and
in Western Europe. It is no wonder then that Sofia Maldonado attends to precisely this
visual rhetoric of race.
Perhaps even more instructive about the racial climate that Maldonado enters is
the fact that in her Amsterdam exhibit, the only image that is not zealously over-
representing through style or discursive metaphors is simply naked. Her breasts are
deconstructed, her shape rounder, more exaggerated than others. Her body is impossible
to separate from the familiar imagery of Sarah Baartman and the Hottentot Venus and
Maldonado takes measures to crystallize this citation: the girl in the drawing has one
pointed finger on a head of dark, tightly curled hair, which is hiding below the canvas

34
Zwarte Piet is a slave-servant character who appears in blackface next to St. Nicholas, in all the
December celebrations surrounding Saint Nicholas. The Zwarte Piet character is prevalent in festivities in
the Netherlands and Belgium.
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(only the head and hair are visible). This deconstructed conflation, full of exaggerated
shapes, seemingly spilling in every direction, belongs to Western Europe’s colonial
tradition of scientific displays of the bodies of women of color. It is a familiar rendering
that has embedded in it the colonialist discourses that mobilize all of the biological
determinism, the corporeal otherness, the fetishism of body parts and the historical
legacies of movement perpetrated by colonial power. Speaking as the Hottentot Venus,
the poet Elizabeth Alexander (1989) articulates this tradition: “But there are hours in
every day/To conjur my imaginary/daughters, in banana skirts/and ostrich-feather fans.”
Here, Alexander is drawing a connection between the Hottentot Venus and the later,
Bronze Venus, Josephine Baker, whose racialized body, dressed in the accessories of the
colonial imagination, also became the object of display and fascination in Western
Europe. Maldonado’s image of the Venus is speaking to this European legacy, providing
a contemporary Venus who fits far too neatly into this historical trajectory in order to
accommodate the legibility of racial embodiment in the Netherlands.
Where all the other images in the Amsterdam exhibit are vague and only
abstractly racialized, working through gestures and tacit metaphors, this image is plainly
literal. Whether Maldonado intended to use this image as critique or just representation is
not what is significant here. The fact that she uses it (for whichever ends) indicates that
this visual rhetoric of race, this manner of embodying race, is what resonates in the
Western European art world market. It is this body, in addition to its stylized abstracted
counterpart, that speaks and performs race according to the parameters of site-specific
legibility. What the scope of this exhibit makes evident is that with “Bling, Bling
Chicas,” the artist builds her aesthetic pop-up to produce either literalized racial
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performance or else, stripped (newly colonized) bodies. In Amsterdam, this image seems
to suggest, the bodies of racial difference, are made to either perform race through
essentialist renderings of style or else, revert unapologetically and rather transparently
back to the grammars of colonial discourse. Through pop-up transformation,
manipulating her artistic style to cohere around racial formations that speak to the
complexity of each destination, Sofia Maldonado manages to carve out a market of
articulation for herself in New York and Amsterdam. Conditioned by both the global
economics of the art market and by site-specific racial knowledges and visual cultures,
Maldonado’s girls become “American” racial others in New York, and both abstracted
racial subjects and colonial subjects in Amsterdam.
While I have shown the ways in which abstraction permeates the “Latin-
American” market in Western Europe, it is important to note that Maldonado is not alone
in recognizing that the Western European context also asks artists of color to produce re-
colonized bodies. When it comes to making race legible in Western Europe specifically,
colonial discourses, as Sofia Maldonado’s work in Amsterdam has already begun to
suggest, re-appear in new, updated ways. This particular attachment to the racial
essentialism, atavism and neo-primitivism of colonial discourse is evident in global
contemporary artists’ treatment of bodies, as racialized subjects in their Western
European exhibitions. What appears again and again among these works is their
treatment of racialized bodies as colonized bodies of stillness, weighed down by racial
over-representation, bound by readable femininity, forced to bear witness, rather than
participate, in the mobilities afforded by the global. Pascale Marthine Tayou’s “Poupees
Pascales” or “Pascale’s Dolls” (2008 – 2009), an exhibit I mentioned earlier in this
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chapter, is a good example of the ways in which visual artists acknowledge and
accommodate European visual cultures of race (Tayou exhibits primarily in Europe –
France, Italy, UK, Spain – with a few exhibitions in Asia as well). Doll statues are shaped
out of crystal, dressed in feathers, beads, fabrics and other small objects. In conversation
with the wood fetish statues
35
that have been normalized in the Western art world as
African art objects, these dolls wear the accoutrement that is typically associated with
these statues but are made out of valuable crystal. In the Western European imagination,
which has long mythologized traditional African fetish statues, the accessories, including
the beads and fabrics are meant to symbolize religious ritual and ancestral magic, all
qualities deemed “exotic” and often used to validate the atavism that is associated with
bodies of color. Tayou’s dolls certainly participate in this categorizing and representation,
performing their African subjectivities according to these regulations of legibility.
However, the presence of crystal, a material typically associated with European influence
(and would in this case, mean European colonialism) upsets that clean system of racial
signification. The usage of crystal instead of wood ascribes these African dolls with
subjectivities that are informed as much by European influence as they are by whatever is
imagined of African aesthetics. What the critic Emmanuel Posnic has called “an almost
worrying contrast” suggests that the bodies buried underneath the pounds of accessories
and layers of signifying fabric are racially hybrid ones (Tayou Press Release, 2011). The
shield of accessories, feathers and fabrics, then, becomes a kind of stabilizing mask,
imposed onto a racially un-organizable and illegible body in order to immobilize it and
render it readable. Ultimately, the dolls’ legibility points accusingly at itself, complying

35
Tayou has actually said that these dolls were his attempt to engage with “the mystery of fetishes” (Tayou
Press Release, 2011)
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in order in participate in the global art world, but using the opportunity to show the edges
of its complicity. While Tayou’s intention was perhaps to critique the contemporary
residue of colonialist visuality, it is nevertheless clear that in order to wage this critique,
the artist had to activate the parameters of European racial legibility. Tayou had to
juxtapose crystal and wood fetishes, as mutually-exclusive, closed, geographically and
racially-marked signifiers in order to make his aesthetic vision legible in the European
spaces of exhibition.
Using the grammars of legibility, aesthetic elements both signify and, in their
volume, weigh bodies down, pinning them to place, making their performances both
generative and immobile. The dolls’ bodies point to their own stillness, to the discourses
that hold them captive, and to the multiplicities of subjectivity that are silenced in favor
of that stillness. Importantly, these bodies remain in place, symbolically bearing witness
and chronicling the mobilities of the global, rather than participating in them. The
practice of colonized witnessing is reinforced in both artists’ works. In Maldonado’s
Amsterdam exhibit, her subjects pose rigidly and symmetrically, either facing forward, or
in perfect profile. Their bodies are fixed, but their facial expressions are confronting
stares, recording and archiving the movement around them. Tayou’s engagement with the
same concept is even more literal. In his installation “Human Beings” (2008), figurines
made of an assortment of fabrics and plastics, with their faces covered in beads, gather
around screens that show activity in modern cities. In other cases, they gather simply
around a structure that emanates light from above. These figurines, weighed down by the
expectations of history and racialization, watch the mobilities of global economic
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modernity, on screens or even through more basic forms of technology, like light posts.
These colonized bodies are global mobility’s witnesses.
This notion of immobile witness is an especially significant feature of global
mobilities as economic globalization has overseen renewed interest in strengthening
geopolitical borders and limiting national citizenship (Camacho, 2008; Clifford, 1997;
Jackson, 2005b; Mignolo, 2000). What Alicia Schmidt Camacho (2008) calls “the
autonomy of movement” has often been calibrated by labor laws and populations’
migration in search of work. In this scenario, it is unsurprising that the visual artists
discussed in this chapter work primarily with images of women. After all, as Clifford has
suggested, “histories of freedom and danger in movement” are particularly salient for
women travelers, as women’s global movement must always be connected to the
historical economies of mobile female domestic workers and female sex workers (p.6).
That the historical figure of the gentleman traveler is, indeed, a gentleman is at this point
a truism, demonstrating that global mobility is tempered by racialization, but also along
gender lines (Clifford, 1997). In this context, the fixity – both subjective and physical –
embodied by the women who populate these works of art is particularly poignant, only
emphasized by the titles they are awarded by the artist. The casual and dismissive
grandiosity with which the female subjects are named – divas, bling bling chicas,
Venuses, dolls – approaches satire, juxtaposed almost tragically with the immobility and
captivity that characterizes the conditions under which they enter visibility and become
legible.
I have described the works of Pascale Marthine Tayou alongside those of Sofia
Maldonado and Máximo González here in order to illustrate how different global visual
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artists, specifically artists of color, respond to the economic and geopolitically specific
conditions of their exhibitions. Máximo González, favored in the U.S. art market for his
Argentinian roots and his Mexican residence, nevertheless transforms his aesthetic
sensibilities to accommodate the ideologies that this particular version of favoritism
implies. He frequently uses the same artistic practices and even objects, but consolidates
them in compliance with the U.S. market, to render nation and identity politics in order to
gain U.S visibility. Sofia Maldonado’s back-to-back exhibitions in New York and
Amsterdam reveal a similar strategic pop-up performance at the heart of the artist’s
aesthetic selections. The artist uses her signature aesthetic style – graffiti, “street art,”
abstractions – but mobilizes that style in geographically specific ways on the bodies of
her “girls.” Their bodies consolidate U.S. style racialization of Afro-Latina and Latina
bodies, with metaphoric gestures to U.S. urban geographies in order to participate in a
U.S. market that will not recognize the artist in the Latin-American category.
Immediately after that exhibit, the girls’ bodies transform, this time to manage the two
types of racial rhetorics that prevail in the Western European market: abstraction or
colonial visuality. Europe’s new Latin-American art market has shown to prefer abstract
Modern and Contemporary Art at the same time that Europe’s wider (mainstream) art
market includes visual dialogues on race insofar as they depict racialization according to
colonialist rhetorics; rhetorics that we can see prominently displayed in the work of
artists like Pascale Marthine Tayou.

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The Body of the Artist: Branding Heritage and Diasporic Identity
This chapter’s discussions of art works by Sofia Maldonado, Máximo González
and Pascale Marthine Tayou have been dictated by the urgency of considering what is at
stake for artists of color who participate in the global art industry. I have argued that the
global art market’s neoliberal economics have produced a market that asks visual artists
to balance aesthetics of site-specificity, cultural identity, and homogeneity. Artists of
color toggle between these demands with the help of constant, compulsive, pop-up
performance, endlessly transforming their site-specific aesthetics and their own bodies to
purchase legibility and visibility in different racial visual economies. As I have suggested
in the Introduction to this dissertation, and as the cases of both Sofia Maldonado and
Máximo González demonstrate, the neoliberal logics of the art world require a near
pathological racial accommodation of the market. The transformations are not simply
expressions of artists’ agency. On the contrary, the market both compels them and
ensures that they are endless. But the transformations are not enough for a market that
trades in artists and artist reputations like commodities on an open market. Exploring the
imbrication of race, the global economy, and mobility on the terrain of artistic practice
cannot overlook the body of the artist and its role in this schema. Artists’ strategic uses of
economically-specific, legible racial performances in order to enable the works’
movement through the circuits of the global art world, are often shored up through the
artist’s own body. Whether the artist is managing pop-up transformations or simply
adhering to those performances deemed most conducive to their habitual exhibition
space, that artist’s body works to not only bridge the differences between the racial
transmutations but to also authenticate them. As I explained earlier in this chapter, the
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global art industry also relies on a constant branding of the artist as an authentic creative
body (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Tang, 2012). In the global art industry, the contemporary
visual artist does indeed become a brand. When it comes to visual artists of color,
however, that brand has specific racial inflections. For artists of color, as I discuss below,
identity brands are entirely dependent on their own racialization, with diasporic identity
becoming a constitutive resource for the neoliberal brand.
As the below examples of Delphine Diallo, Sofia Maldonado, and Pascale
Marthine Tayou demonstrate, in the global art world, an artist’s grappling with the
intersections of race and globalization guarantees that this artist’s body will be harnessed
for exhibition and legitimation, to adjudicate racial sincerity. Importantly, much like the
fashion designers discussed in the previous chapter, these visual artists also opt into these
projects of self-narrativizing openly. Artists like Maldonado, Diallo, and Tayou brand
themselves through racial heritage and diasporic identity in order to anchor their aesthetic
transformations and to impose continuity onto their otherwise disconnected pop-up
performances. Sofia Maldonado demonstrates this point well in her response to critics.
When critics charged that her Times Square mural exploited all too familiar, essentialist
representations of racialized femininity, reifying racist discourses of a wildness that is
assumed to permeate the bodies of women of color, Maldonado’s immediate response
was to invoke her own racial heritage. The artist’s own body suddenly became a vessel of
authentication. In a piece entitled “My Mural, My People,” she writes that the mural is a
“compilation of [her] memories and experiences” (Maldonado, 2010, para.1). She tells
the reader, as she often does, that she is from Puerto Rico; that she has lived in Bedford-
Stuyvesant, an economically disenfranchised and historically poor area of Brooklyn, for 4
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years; that she has worked with the women she illustrates. Maldonado tirelessly reiterates
that she is “a Caribbean woman”; that she depicts her own communities. Her racial
identity becomes inseparable from the local, using the notions of race and place as
symbiotically telling. The basics of this narrative are repeated over and over again as a
kind of stand-alone, automatic validation, across several of her interviews and her
autobiographical short pieces. To support what is positioned as her rightful ownership of
these racial representations, Alberto Magnan of the Magnan Metz Gallery
36
offered an
explanation of the mural: “Sofia is Puerto Rican, maybe it would be a problem if the
artist was white American, but she is Puerto Rican, from San Juan, and lives in Bed-
Stuy” (Magnan, 2010).
This kind of corporeal legitimation and constant citation of the local, however, are
hardly unique to Maldonado. Delphine Diallo begins nearly every discussion of her work
with the explanation that she comes from a “French-Senegalese bloodline” and that she
grew up in Paris’s “immigrant center” (Diallo, 2010; Henderson, 2008). Here too the
specificity of place is a necessary anchoring of a multicultural, diasporic identity. Both
Maldonado and Diallo position themselves as artists living in the diaspora, bridging the
gaps between what James Clifford (1997) would call their “routes” and their “roots” with
their own bodies.
37
They both speak frequently of global mobility, of traveling to their
homelands for inspiration. Diallo, in fact, uses her diasporic travel as a way to rationalize
her own entrepreneurialism. She explains her own 2009 participation in a commercial
medium like the Pirelli calendar by alleging that it was an opportunity to return to her

36
Alberto Magnan has represented Maldonado since 2005 and the Magnan Metz Gallery has been
Maldonado’s primary gallery in New York.
37
James Clifford, in his study of the relationships between travel, globalization and cultural identity, says
that “roots always precede routes” (Clifford, 1997. p.3).
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homeland, her roots. The Pirelli calendar was shot in Botswana and the artist says it
“revived her return to Senegal” (Diallo, 2010). That Botswana and Senegal are entirely
different nations does not matter here. Her diasporic brand dissolves those differences by
positioning her as an artist-wanderer, both globally cosmopolitan and fixed to a set of
racial meanings.
It is a kind of global cosmopolitanism that Pascale Marthine Tayou articulates
explicitly. The Cameroonian artist, now living in Europe, says paradoxically, “I never left
my country, I am a traveler now” (Wright, 2009, para.3). When the artist’s close friend
and curator Simon Njami staged a faux interview with Tayou, Njami imagined Tayou as
answering the question of identity in a similarly contradictory manner: “First of all, I see
myself as a human being. I am citizen of the world. Yet I am an African” (Njami, 2010,
para.4). Tayou, together with Maldonado and Diallo, expresses his own existence in
multiple worlds, rehearsing his own cosmopolitanism in addition to a persisting
attachment to place.
What is interesting in the cases of Tayou and Diallo specifically, is that the two
artists neglect the dissonances redolent in the notion of unfettered global mobility and
African identity. They ignore the fact that racialized bodies (even those who participate in
the global art world) undertake global mobility under increasing surveillance and
policing. It is an incongruence that they engage at length in their respective works, but
seem to abandon when it comes to narrativizing the self. This abandonment is a strategic
one. The ways in which they straddle these contradictions of mobility is a tactic of
branding oneself as an ethnographer, an artistic identity that has gained some traction in
the global art world (Foster, 1996). Powered by the notion that “anthropology is prized as
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the science of alterity” and that specifically racial alterity is itself a resource in the global
economy, ethnography becomes the method of choice for contemporary global visual
artists (Foster, 1996, p.74; Yudice, 2004). In this climate, the artist’s own racial heritage
operates to excuse ethnographic intrusion and participation. Delphine Diallo, in other
words, claims Senegalese heritage, just as she travels there (or sometimes, to Botswana)
for the first time, becomes inspired alongside mentor Peter Beard and proceeds to make
‘African’ art. The contradictory identifications as both cosmopolitan and somehow
mystically tied to a place of originary heritage, become, for artists, strategies of mining
one’s own racialized body to gain visibility and credibility in the art world. Heritage and
the racial sincerity it implies are used to validate the artists’ ownership of these images.
As they position themselves as sincere ethnographers, native informants, speaking
authoritatively and authentically about their subjects, their own bodies become part of the
exhibit. And the artists’ brands – cosmopolitan wandering coupled with markers of racial
heritage – resolve any contradictions that the narrative might include. This trio of global
visual artists wear heritage in order to validate their strategic – in some cases, pop-up –
racial visions and to ultimately, purchase mobility for their work as a result. Their self-
representation then is a critical component of the artists’ right to knowledge and
consequently, works as a kind of validating haunting, hovering over the art works as they
travels globally.

The Brand Catch-All: Racial Elasticity and Excess Absorption
For artists of color participating in the global art industry, as I have argued, the
continuous, necessary racial transformations that secure global mobility and visibility
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operate in part through their relationship to the branded body of the artist. The artist’s
own body becomes a brand that is indexed through narratives of diaspora, racial heritage,
cosmopolitanism and that underwrites all the racial transformations that the artist
undertakes in her work. The racial brand becomes the body of knowledge that stitches
together the fragments of the pop-up transformations into a legible whole and that
authenticates those transforming aesthetics through the ever elastic body of the artist. In
discussing the increasing, neoliberally-energized normativity of the self-brand, Sarah
Banet-Weiser argues that brands operate through the affective register, making their
relational quality “slippery, mobile, and often ambivalent, which makes them as powerful
and profitable as they are difficult to predict and discuss” (Banet-Weiser, 2012, p.9). Part
of her objective is to understand how brands reconcile seemingly contradictory narratives
and sensibilities (Banet-Weiser, 2012). It is precisely this elasticity of the brand, its
ability to absorb and synchronize seemingly contradictory and incongruous narratives
that makes it difficult to read any kind of racial contestation or excess in the works of
these visual artists. The brand’s reliance on slippery, ambiguous affective attachments to
notions of homeland, roots, heritage, and global cosmopolitanism make this brand a
catch-all for any ideological or visual spillover that the artist might produce. Consider,
for example, the work of Delphine Diallo.
The French artist Delphine Diallo created a collection of portraits entitled “Queen
of New York” (2010 – 2011). The photographs feature black and white portraits of young
women, framed by remnants of vintage, unmistakably colonial posters. One of these
frames reads “Imperial Photographic Studio, New Britain, Conn.” Diallo’s queens follow
Maldonado’s model. They wear little clothing, making the physicality of the body
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primary in the photographs; a recurring feature among all the photos, which is only
disrupted by the equally prominent presence of hair. Their hair is braided, slicked and
smoothed in voluminous quantities, worn in an Afro, in shiny curls, and finally, cropped.
The variation in hair tends to suggest the variation in the queens’ modes of racialization
and their subsequent performance of those modes. In the U.S., scholarship on specifically
African American hair and its significance to both scientific racism on the one hand, and
stylizations of identity on the other, abounds. Kobena Mercer (1987) observed that hair
styling “may be seen as both individual expressions of the self and as embodiments of
society's norms, conventions and expectations” (p.34). Therefore, “Black hair-styling
may thus be evaluated as a popular art form articulating a variety of aesthetic 'solutions'
to a range of 'problems' created by ideologies of race and racism” (Mercer, 1987, p.34).
Mercer’s description of black hair as a contested space of both hegemony and articulation
potentially complicates Diallo’s focus on hair beyond the immediate reading of it as a
racially representative extension of the body’s physicality. Because the artistic displays of
black hair for global audiences cannot avoid the legacy of displaying hair for “scientific”
racial evaluation, the two discourses are undeniably present in each piece. Diallo seems
to be aware of the dualities that exhibiting hair in this way implicates. Her
acknowledgement of these dueling histories and discourses is made evident through her
use of the colonial frames to anchor and contain each image, but also in her use of
accessories. Diallo’s queens wear heavy, bold jewelry, channeling the colonial dream of
Caribbean and African women’s adornment of large (if also, not ‘valuable’ in the
Eurocentric sense) jewelry. Diallo too accommodates the neo-primitivist requirement that
in order to be legible as women of color, women’s bodies must be covered with layers of
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necklaces and heavy, large earrings. What might disrupt this conservative and
compulsory accessorizing is the placement of animal jaws, open and aggressive, on the
top of one of the queen’s heads. For Diallo, the jaw is clearly both an accessory and an
unsettling point of alienation, as its casual, disruptive presence gestures towards the
visual rhetorics that structure the visibility of women of color in the global art world. The
animal jaw points its figurative finger in the direction of the neo-primitivism (an
outgrowth of colonial tradition) that requires an intensified focus on bodies, hair, and
unruly accessorizing in exchange for legibility in the global. The centrally situated animal
jaw invites us to read this series as Diallo using the bodies of her queens to push back
against the parameters of legibility, staging their bodies in ways that manically over-
represent their given subjectivities.
But Delphine Diallo is also, as I have shown, an artist who is herself branded
through the tropes of diasporic identity and global cosmopolitanism. Through the
neoliberal brand, her own body reconciles the histories of colonial displacement,
rootlessness and its diasporic identity on the one hand with contemporary global travel
and a seamless, entrepreneurial participation in the global art industry, on the other. That
is, those same aesthetic and stylistic touches that could result in productive incohesion in
her work are actually made cohesive through her own branded body. Diallo’s work brings
into encounter seemingly incompatible visual rhetorics, attempting to gesture at the ways
in which colonial vision still conditions global modernity and its treatment of racial
presence. Her own body, branded through neoliberal logics, however, renders that very
same encounter consistent, makes sense of it through the elasticity of the racial brand. It
is a process that we can see in the works of Sofia Maldonado, Pascale Marthine Tayou,
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and Máximo González as well. The elasticity and even polysemy of theses racially-
indexed brands makes them ideally positioned to absorb most visual excesses that the
artists might produce in their works. The visual artist’s brand, itself an outgrowth of the
global art industry’s neoliberal economy, not only enables the artist to travel as a
cosmopolitan citizen of the world (as opposed to a specifically racially-marked subject),
but also, paradoxically, restrains the artist’s aesthetic field of meaning through its own
elasticity.
As I stated in the Introduction to this dissertation and as both the preceding and
following chapters make clear, my investment in the aesthetic and physical mobilities of
artists in global arts industries is motivated, in part, by the desire to understand how the
global economy conditions aesthetics, but also how artists from different industries
perform in ways that push back against those conditions. This dialectic of economically-
compelled, racially-rigid transformations, together with corporeal and visual leaks can be
found in the fashion industry discussed in the previous chapter as well as in the dance
industry I cover in the next chapter. For visual artists who travel the exhibition and trade
circuits of the global art industry, however, these potential leaks are rendered
inconsequential through the artist’s own body. As aesthetics produce hegemonic leaks,
the body’s brand stretches its field of meaning-making to catch the spill. Those aesthetic
visual excesses and potentially productive dissonances become incorporated and made to
make sense within the space of the artist’s neoliberal racial brand. For artists of color,
presence and participation in the global art industry, then, is particularly wrought. In
order to accommodate the economically-produced aesthetic trends of site-specificity,
cultural identity, and homogeneity, visual artists must engage in a constant
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transformation of their aesthetics, rendering logics and formulations of race that change
so drastically from one exhibition to the next, that their “style” retains its aesthetic
devices and techniques, but not its political moralities. As artists mount and display their
aesthetic pop-ups to accommodate the economic and racial climate of their latest
exhibition, the materials that make up the pop-up remain the same, but reorganize
themselves into a completely different image, inflected with its new context. But for
visual artists of color, the neoliberal logics of the global art industry do not stop there.
The artists’ branded bodies work to sanitize the traveling, racially-marked artists, but also
to neutralize and absorb any surplus racial meanings that the artist’s work might produce.
In the case of visual artists of color, the pop-up is both the mechanism and the context of
their industry visibility. In the global art industry, artists of color cannot afford to wander
dreamily across expanded geographies, as Bourriaud and Birnbaum might wistfully
imagine. Their wanderlust is economically-compelled, strategic and pathologically
transformative.
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CHAPTER FOUR: DANCING THE NATION: TRAVEL AND RACIAL
TRANSFORMATION IN THE U.S. DANCE INDUSTRY
In the international dance industry, questions of race are often met with one
common refrain: dance and its mastery transcend racial politics. The problem of the color
line, according to public discourses espoused by dance professionals, has been overcome
in the dance world. Choreographers, dancers, artistic directors and often historians,
publically imagine dance as an artistic domain that has managed to grapple with,
negotiate and eclipse the racial hierarchies that have plagued it as a cultural industry.
Some describe the dancing body as a transformative vessel, capable of writing racial
histories and structures of feeling with a freedom that is impossible in other artistic
domains, such as literature or visual art. Others cite dance mastery and corporeal
discipline as equalizing practices, capable of shifting the visual economies of racial
representation. Still others refer to oft-cited statistics about increasing racial diversity in
the world’s leading dance companies.
These celebratory pronouncements of racial progress are supported by the
expansions of the international dance world’s geographies. In congruence with fashion’s
newly emerged global cities I discussed in Chapter 2, the mainstream international world
of concert dance has also overseen an expansion of its dance hub maps. In the last twenty
years, places like Tel-Aviv, Singapore, Rio de Janiero, and Atlanta have joined a roster
that has been traditionally dominated by New York, Paris, Moscow, and The Hague.
Companies from these newly visible geographic locations are often buzzed about and
indeed, position themselves as offering the international audience locally imbued
aesthetics, a notion that is hard to divorce from the racial connotations that ‘the local’
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implies. It is these uneasy but concurrent tropes of racial diversity and racial
transcendence that tend to dominate contemporary mainstream dance discourses.
Israeli choreographer and legendary artistic director Ohad Naharin, for example,
frequently discusses his work as addressing “great conflicts” and “universal conflicts” as
opposed to the concrete political conflicts he is often asked about (Rose & Vega, 2005).
Time and again he is asked to discuss geopolitical borders and racialized expressions.
Naharin typically defaults to the personal, suggesting that the body’s mastery of its
psychological weight far surpasses concerns like political borders and racialized contests
over citizenship and statehood. The body, for him, is an elevated mechanism; the body
transcends the language of race that depends on it. And he is not alone – his
contemporaries often echo these sentiments. The U.S.-born Israeli choreographer Barak
Marshall takes a less metaphysical approach but manages to cover the same ground,
talking about dance as a “cultural bridging experience,” an artistic chamber that has the
ability to overcome heated and current antagonisms surrounding race and religion
(PillowTalk, 2010). Recounting his own struggles with immigration and a desire for
assimilation, artistic director of New York’s Ballet Hispanico, Eduardo Vilaro fills in the
space between Naharin’s metaphysical philosophy and Marshall’s more concretized
observations. Vilaro notes that “cultural dance” specifically can operate as a “vehicle to
open dialogue” (Jacoby & Martens, 2011). “I don’t know if [staging dance performances]
will cure all racial problems…but at least you start talking,” he adds (Jacoby & Martens,
2011). Dancers around the world reiterate some of these same conversations. Pina, the
documentary tribute to choreographer Pina Bausch, for example, includes dancers from
Bausch’s company speaking about the choreographer’s impact on their lives. Although
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these dancers clearly possess the ability to communicate in one shared language, as
evidenced by the fact that they were all trained by Bausch, in the documentary the
dancers provide testimonials in their native languages – German, English, Russian,
Italian, French, Slovenian, Korean, Spanish and Portuguese – underscoring and securing
the narrative of racial and ethnic diversity their bodies demonstrate on camera. And this
trend reproduces among other dancers as well, with histories of racial segregation and
asymmetrical access to visibility acknowledged but relegated to the industry’s distant
past. The contemporary moment, we are told over and over again, is one steeped in
meritocracy and an allegiance to aesthetic honesty, even if that honesty sometimes calls
for racial tokenism, essentialist authenticity and caricature.
In this chapter, I am interested in unpacking these discourses and the racially-
indexed aesthetic permutations they produce in the context of the current state of dance
industries, considering how economic and cultural globalization has informed the dance
world’s treatments of race. This chapter examines the cultural industry’s performances of
race, as they are rendered by choreographers and dancers and by choreographic aesthetics
on display. I explore these multi-level performances alongside the industry’s economic
logics and objectives, arguing that dancers’ and choreographers’ racial performances can
be understood as compelled by the economic operations required of globally mobile arts
industries. Do imperatives imposed by the global economy require that members of the
dance world consolidate their racial performances according to racial legibility and the
funding required for mobility? What is at stake in these economically-shaped
permutations for the racialized body? What are their performative closures and
possibilities?
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Furthermore, I have been deliberately vacillating between addressing the network
of international dance companies as a network of industries or as one single, fluid, global
industry. Unlike the previous chapters on fashion and visual art, the unique consumption
of dance as well as its nation-specific histories of institutionalization preclude any claim
to one global industry. In dance, there are no global markets for the production, sale, and
distribution of goods or commodities of art. In stark contrast to items of fashion or works
of fine art, the world’s dance companies rely primarily on the global market for the
consumption of live and temporary performances, which are often not even recorded for
later sale or distribution (Kirschner, 2013). These live performances are organized and
facilitated by internationally-focused booking agencies, management companies and
promoters, but are, as I will show in this chapter, financed locally. Consequently,
companies’ and dancers’ constant global mobility through touring has always been a
mandatory element in dance industries on a scale and manner unfamiliar to either fashion
or visual art industries. As scholars like Theodore Bale (2008), Barbara Browning (2002),
and Paul Scolieri (2008) have shown, the global economy and the emergence of new
international dance hubs have only amplified these patterns of mobility. These increased
mobilities have meant that the international world of dance companies is populated by
many dance industries that are often invested in national identification, but nevertheless
reliant on the global performance network for sustenance (Bale, 2008; Shay, 2002).
If, as Xavier Castaner and Lorenzo Campos (2002), Bill Ivey (2008), George
Yudice (1999), and others have suggested, the performing arts sector and specifically, the
dance industry, has almost always been at the mercy of local funding and legislation (as
opposed to global trade legislation, for example), then the international circuit of
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performance that dance companies participate in cannot, even vaguely, be considered one
industry. These industries’ links to global mobility however, are a significant avenue to
explore. Does the dance industries’ reliance on global staging, performance and the
mobility both of these imply, inform companies’ arrangements of racial discourse and
embodiment? Do their performances of race change in order to accommodate different
geopolitical racial structures? Do they privilege certain racial knowledges over others in
order to be legible and acceptable in different locales? And what do these prioritized
racial knowledges tell us about the physical and symbolic movement of racially-marked
bodies in global culture?
It is due, in part, to the dance world’s long-standing history of geographic
mobility that dance industries and dance troupes have a particularly rich history of openly
grappling with racial embodiment. The dance stage has historically operated as an
informal and symbolic public sphere for populations without access to more formal
structures of sociopolitical and personal expression and redress. As many scholars of
dance history and race (Brooks, 2006; Brown, 2008; Burt, 1998; Kavoori and Joseph,
2011; Manning, 2004; McMains, 2001; Ovalle, 2010; Ramirez, 1989; Savigliano, 1995;
Sorgel, 2007) have shown, dance performance and the staging of corporeality have
served as resources for the articulation of otherwise unscripted and illegible racialized
structures of feeling. These legacies, however, are not alone. They have existed alongside
histories of dance forms being deployed as mechanisms of – depending on the era being
discussed – public diplomacy and/or colonial pedagogy. However variable their politics
these uses of different dance forms all capitalize on the simultaneity of geographic
mobility and movement praxis to articulate racialized registers through the body.
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Furthermore, as this chapter will demonstrate, these uses of dance and the racial
aesthetics they have preferred have traditionally corresponded to dance industries’
economic imperatives.
In light of these histories and their relationships to economic development, this
chapter views the contemporary racial aesthetics favored by dance companies as a
constellation of choreographic and economic histories. In order to address the ways in
which local economies and policies of arts funding help determine dance companies’
choreographic choices and subsequent treatments of racial discourse and racialized
bodies, I focus on two specific dance industry sites: the U.S. dance industry and to a
lesser degree, the Israeli dance industry. In this chapter, I begin with the U.S. dance
industry, its history of institutionalizing dance forms into systems recognizable as
neoliberal industries and the impact this has had on funding. Having established a
historical framework, I move on to the U.S. dance industry’s current economic
architecture and its impact on the industry’s preferred depictions of race and racial
structures of feeling. In order to demonstrate how this economically-motivated discourse
on race operates in movement praxis and invites choreographers and dancers to mobilize
pop-up performances of race, I examine the works of the Alvin Ailey American Dance
Theater (AAADT). Next, having considered how U.S. funding of dance companies
conditions U.S.-based movement aesthetics and choreographies, I explore how this
climate also determines the repertoire selections and aesthetic choices of companies
visiting the U.S. on tour. To understand the pop-up transformations engaged by visiting
companies, I focus on Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, showing how its’
choreographic selections for the U.S. tour are strategic accommodations of the U.S.
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market. Lastly, I conclude with an analysis of what happens to embodied racial discourse
and the racial vocabulary of corporeality on stage when AAADT performs Batsheva’s
choreography. I argue that despite the global neoliberal economy’s scripting of racial
bodies and their mobilities, moments of encounter, like the one between AAADT and
Batsheva, yield productive, performative uncertainties.

Funding the National Body: Institutionalization and Industry in the U.S.
Unlike cultural industries that operate by plugging their practices of circulation,
distribution, consumption, and visibility into increasingly globalized cycles of trade and
exhibition, dance industries have typically been inseparable from local sources of funding
(Castaner and Campos; 2002; Ivey, 2008; Miller, 2000; Shuster, 1985; Yudice, 1999).
Concert tours and travel, therefore, are best explained as the circulation of national bodies
inside international performance circuits. Put another way, national bodies temporarily
pop up inside a landscape understood as international. Anthony Shay (2002), for
example, has argued that state-sponsored dance companies have dominated the
international concert dance touring circuits since the middle of the 20
th
century, bringing
with them an embodied nationalism as they tour (the reliability of state sponsorship
enables touring). One example of this persistence of the national is the Mexico-based
Ballet Folklorico, one of the most commercially successful and internationally mobile
dance companies around the world. This company is financed through direct state
sponsorship, through the Mexican tourism industry (which is an indirect form of state
sponsorship), and touring revenue. Consequently, even if the company is not a designated
state representative or cultural ambassador, it is nevertheless deeply implicated in the
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nation-state through funding. In the U.S. context specifically, as this chapter will show,
dance, along with other performing arts, has been what Annette Zimmer and Stefan
Toepler (1999) have called a government “subsidized muse,” where federal, state, and
local government funding has sustained these industries (with some help, as I will show,
from private foundations and corporate sponsorship). For this reason, any exploration of
the intersections between economic developments and aesthetic accommodations of those
developments must begin at the national level. Furthermore, as legislation governing
national and regional arts funding varies wildly from one nation to the next, case studies
can be comparative but are in no way generalizable. While the ways in which these dance
economies behave certainly presents some limitations in studying the global in
conversation with cultural industries, these dance industries also offer some unique
opportunities. Dance economies’ necessary invocation of the national (or the local as it
exists inside the national) suggests another mode of thinking about the relationship
between the local, regional, national, transnational and global. Previous chapters have
described the different ways in which fashion industries and visual arts industries stage
conversations between their respective geographies, demonstrating how the economic
and cultural global are always embedded in the nation and how artists harness that
relationship towards their own ends as they gain mobility and visibility in the global. I
have argued that the global fashion industry helps us understand the role of racialized
geographies in the global’s creative circuits, while the global visual art market provides
some insight into the racial power structures that attend a frenetic global “wandering.”
Here, however, dance industries make little claim to any imagined global. This
distinction is critical: rather than claiming membership in an imagined global, dance
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companies continue to claim membership in an imagined national that is in circulation
inside transnational networks. Theodore Bale’s (2008) analysis of the globalized
proliferation of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring is a good example of the
centrality of the national and the local in dance. Bale’s investigation of the aesthetic fate
of ballet in the context of a “world market” leads him to compare three recent
productions of Stravinsky’s ballet: one by the Israeli choreographer Emanuel Gat, one by
the Chinese choreographer Shen Wei, and one by the U.S. choreographer Trey McIntyre.
He concludes that the ballet world has no need to fear globalization’s aesthetic
homogeneity in part because of the significance of national experience and national
identity in dance choreography. In the international dance world then, even discussions of
globalization and glocality maintain a strong sense of the national as its basic primary
building block.
This chapter’s examination of the economies of dance industry funding and its
impact on aesthetics and program choices, consequently, will begin by unpacking the
history of U.S.-based dance industries. I have chosen the United States, as opposed to
other dance industry hubs, because the U.S. history of dance offers a particularly rich
dialogue between race and dance cultures and because, as I will show, contemporary U.S.
dance companies tend to rely on a diverse portfolio of funding sources, which allows us
to consider how both government and corporate funding influence dance companies’
exhibitions of race (Shuster, 1985; Yudice, 1999). In the contemporary U.S. context, the
majority of dance companies belong to the non-profit sector, wherein, as Bill Ivey (2008)
has argued, arts organizations and their artistic directors are obligated to constantly
compete for federal funding, one-time grants, private patronage and now increasingly,
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corporate sponsorship. While this economic arrangement is true of most sectors of the
U.S. performing arts industry – including dramatic theater, musical theater, opera, and
symphony – dance has historically been most vulnerable to economic fluctuations,
considered less stable than others in its performing arts cohort and therefore, most keen to
introduce funding constancy into its year-to-year company operations (Ivey, 2008;
Kirschner, 2013; Netzer, 1986). Repertoire and programming choices as well as aesthetic
directions have often been steered by precisely these efforts at stabilization. It is in the
context of these efforts that we must consider American dance cultures’ treatments of
race, both in the contemporary moment and historically.
The U.S. institutionalization of dance (stable funding, education, organized
regional, national and international touring, etc.), occurring from the mid-1950s to the
late 1970s, is typically understood as the maturation of the nation’s dance industry
(Foulkes, 2002; Kolcio, 2010). This chapter uses this particular moment as its starting
point for the detailed examination of the U.S. dance industry precisely because the
moment of institutionalization is wrapped-up with the legislation and political discourses
that determined enduring financing structures. In this way, the moment of
institutionalization is also critical for understanding the ways in which funding was
designed to interact with choreographic aesthetics and racial bodies. However, it is
necessary to note that in starting with institutionalization, I am necessarily abridging the
rich and complicated historical intersections between race, dance and touring economies
that have characterized dance in the U.S. In addition to the minstrel and Vaudeville
traditions that I discuss briefly in Chapter 1, this historical arc also includes histories of
tap, swing, and jazz, among other popular, racially-indexed dance forms (Evans, 2000;
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Gitler, 1985; Monson, 1995; Panish, 1997). Central to this history is the U.S. ballroom
world’s fetishization of dances like the tango post-WWI and then rumba and salsa (the
latter two as “Latin walks” or “Cuban walks”) during the 1930s, both practices that
endure to this day (Bosse, 2008; Savigliano, 1995). Importantly, this arc also engages
African American dancers’ constitution of ‘the modern’ in modern dance, the histories of
hyper-visible and internationally mobile dancers like Josephine Baker and the Babylon
Girls (Brown, 2008; Burt, 1998; Manning, 2004). African-American dancers’ and
choreographers’ history with modern dance provides some critical context for the
discussions of institutionalization.
As Susan Manning (2004) has importantly pointed out, for African American
modern dancers, the objective was to break with the traditions of black dancing bodies on
stage. African American dancers and choreographers of this period sought to develop a
style that would be easily distinguishable from jazz dancing and would, to borrow from
the choreographer Katherine Dunham, pluck the dancing from the burlesque (Manning,
2004, p.xiv). They called it “Negro Dance,” a moniker that lasted into the 1960s,
describing the works of Pearl Primus and Alvin Ailey among others.
1
During the 1930s
however, leading modern dance companies’ embrace of African American companies
and individual dance professionals was contingent on the understanding that “Negro
Dance” is antithetical to modern dance, articulating feelings alien to the majority of
modern dancers through movements unique to specifically racially-marked bodies
(Manning, 2004).
2
The troubled and constitutive nature of “Negro Dance” and modern

1
In the late 1960s, this term was replaced by “black dance” (Manning, 2004).
2
By the early 1930s, conversations about racial justice and its role in the modern dance vocabulary took on
more significance as the Workers Dance League began incorporating black dancers and choreographers into
their performance schedules and lecture series. In 1933, the Workers Dance League sponsored a discussion
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dance, a topic that has been explored by scholars like Brenda Dixon Gottschild (1996),
John Perpener (2001), Susan Manning (2004), and Gay Morris (2006), was described as a
dualism that, with some change in terminology (“black” and then “ethnic” replaced
“Negro”), persisted into the postwar period.
While modern dance performers’ and choreographers’ political motivations were
already well defined, organization and institutionalization of the modern dance industry
was still “inchoate,” with organizations and assemblies forming around very specific
needs of dancers and then dissolving soon thereafter.
3
The industry’s first taste of
institutionalization arrived in 1936, when the Works Progress Administration (WPA)
4

funding allowed for concert dance to be defined as its own “project,” outside of the
purview of the Federal Theater Project (FTP).
5
More significantly for the present chapter,
however, as the first steps of institutionalization took shape during the 1930s, American
modern dancers adopted a distinctly national, cultural American ideology, in which the
freedom of movement and form was wedded to specifically American freedom (Foulkes,
2002).
6
This transition existed in an awkward space where a commitment to the social
body and justice (like racial justice and class struggle) were necessary for the claim to
freedom, but all radical or even internationalist politics had to be avoided at all costs. In

at the Harlem YWCA called “What Shall the Negro Dance About?” (Manning, 2004). By 1934, the
Workers Dance League hosted a talk by Asadata Dafora, entitled “The Negro Dance,” and included the
Modern Negro Dance Group in their schedule of shows (Foulkes, 2002).
3
Touring in the modern dance industry was often derisively called the “gymnasium circuit” throughout the
1930s since performances often took place in school and university gyms, in the absence of dedicated
performance spaces (Foulkes, 2002; Vertinsky, 2010).
4
Later renamed to Works Project Administration, the WPA was a New Deal agency established in 1935.
5
The won independence lasted for only a year, after which time dance was brought back into the FTP fold,
but the brief institutionalization exposed dancers and choreographers to unprecedented employment
regularity, wage stabilization, and union benefits.
6
In modern dance specifically (a movement praxis that was, at its inception, interested in radical class
politics), this move correlated directly to increased state funding. As government funding of modern dance
grew, so did scrutiny from organizations like The House on Un-American Activities (HUAC), which
quickly led to changes in the political ambitions espoused by leftist dancers and choreographers.
237

form, techniques rendered personal emotions on the dancers’ bodies – suffering and pain,
for example – as a way to abstractly gesture to the political detriments of Fascist politics
(Foulkes, 2002). The fact that these abstractions showcased the malleability and freedom
of the moving body in modernist dance aesthetics became the key link to dancers’
growing investment in nationalism and what was publicly understood as America’s
tradition of democracy. This allegiance to nationalism in both form and content suitably
positioned modern dance to benefit from postwar arts funding policies,
institutionalization and the era of public diplomacy that the Cold War would usher in.
In laying out the histories of institutionalization, I am focusing on the U.S.
institutionalization of modern dance specifically for three reasons: (1) its’ complicated
history with race, (2) the fact that it’s widely considered to be a “homegrown” dance
form helps us understand the process of financing and institutionalization from the
ground up, and (3) the two dance companies I focus on in this chapter – AAADT and
Batsheva – are both modern dance companies.
As a “homegrown” art form that purports to replicate the democratic traditions
that it is born out of, modern dance was one of the primary beneficiaries of the U.S.
federal government’s Cold War era sponsorship of dance, which laid the groundwork for
the institutionalization of the industry overall. Toby Miller (2000) explains that
throughout the 1950s and 1960s nonprofit foundations like Ford, Carnegie, and
Rockefeller “helped generate an infrastructure of artistic diversity at the same time as the
federal government and state and private colleges stimulated development” (p.37). These
foundations were a key partner to government’s investment in the arts system, laying out
the cornerstone strategy for subsidizing the arts in the U.S., which included “matching
238

grants to nonprofit cultural organizations” (Ivey, 2008, p.210). While both Miller and
Ivey argue that “it’s hard to overstate the impact of midcentury foundation investment in
culture” (Ivey, 2008, p.210), it is important to point out that when it comes to the dance
industry, the work of these foundations played a less direct role as they often prioritized
the symphony and theater. Foundations like Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller triggered a
wide scale government investment in the arts and the eventual establishment of the
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA),
7
both of which in turn, benefitted the dance
industry in its processes of institutionalization. It is these socioeconomic genealogies that
help us understand not only the conditions under which the U.S. dance industry was
institutionalized and funded, but also how the industry operates today, with significantly
different financing and revenue demands and in the global economy.
Prevots (1998) argues that the contemporary practice of government dance
funding can be traced back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1954 Emergency Fund
for International Affairs (Public Law 663), which, in part, allocated $2,250,000 to the
State Department “for presentations of American dance, theater, music, and sports
broadly,” with the performing arts sector receiving the bulk of the sum (p.11).
8
The same
law also provided funding for the United States Information Agency
9
“to publicize
performing arts and sports events” (Prevots, 1998, p.11). The law’s now well-
documented objective was to sponsor the presentation of U.S. cultural products abroad in
order to mitigate international criticism of American foreign policy as well as its
domestic struggles with race relations. Modern dance troupes, jazz musicians, abstract

7
The NEA was established in 1965.
8
Public Law 663 also allocated funds to the Department of Commerce to subsidize the U.S. presence in
international trade (Prevots, 1998, p.11).
9
The USIA actually came into existence in 1953, the year before Eisenhower’s law passed in Congress and
subsequently provided it with federal funding.
239

expressionist visual artists, and athletes acted as cultural ambassadors in tours to
geographic regions that were suspected of nurturing growing anti-American sentiments
(Denning, 1997; Philips Geduld, 2010; Prevots, 1998; Taylor, 1994; Von Eschen, 2004).
A June 1956 Department of State Bulletin lays out the fund’s intended function and
future:
With the financial support of the President's Emergency Fund for International
Affairs, we have sponsored, in cooperation with private industry, agricultural and
industrial exhibits at international trade fairs which have effectively demonstrated
the achievements of private enterprise in a free economy. Similarly, our cultural
achievements have been presented throughout the world by American actors,
dancers, and musicians during the past year. These trade fair and cultural
presentations have been enthusiastically received abroad and have contributed
significantly to a better understanding of our values and objectives as a nation. In
view of the effectiveness of these activities, legislation will be recommended to
authorize them on a continuing basis (Dept. of State Bulletin, 1956, pp.153-154).
As scholars of public diplomacy and cultural ambassadorship have frequently
observed, these traveling ambassadors were akin to cultural salesmen and their product
was democracy – they were to embody it and publicize it as an ideology cultivated and
subsidized by the U.S. state body. The bodies of traveling artists, musicians and athletes
had to stand witness to the nation’s espoused commitment to racial harmony.
Subsequently, the dance troupes that the American National Theater and Academy
(ANTA), acting on behalf of the State Department,
10
selected for official public

10
The State Department outsourced the processes of artist selection, administration, and travel scheduling
of all Emergency Fund performing arts efforts to ANTA, which was established by Congress in 1935 and
240

diplomacy projects, and the visible and legible racial diversity that these troupes
represented indirectly functioned to promote American ideals and domestic policies.
While it is true, as Prevots argues, that the State Department and the United States
Information Agency (USIA) made a concerted effort to avoid obviously anti-Communist
and pro-U.S. rhetoric, it is important to underscore that they could only exercise this
flexibility because the cultural ambassadors and their art forms were considered such an
influential form of propaganda (Denning, 1997). For example, the voice of Radio Free
America’s Music USA Willis Conover has famously likened jazz to freedom
11
and Alfred
Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, has said that abstract art is “synonymous”
with democracy (Von Eschen, 2004, p.17). Programming choices, then, in these cultural
industries were intrinsically linked to the aesthetic freedom they could claim to represent.
From the beginning, racial embodiment constituted a significant component of this
testimony to freedom.
ANTA’s Dance Panel, which handled the State Department’s dance exports, made
strategic use of traveling troupes, selecting dance troupes whose racial make-up would
both resonate in each particular destination and tow the official line of promoting U.S.-
based racial harmony and diversity. The first of these federal dance initiatives was the
José Limón Dance Company’s 1954 tour of Latin America. Naima Prevots (2007)
observes that this tour was scheduled to coincide with that year’s Inter-American
Economic and Social Council (Rio de Janeiro) as well as the UNESCO Conference held
in Montevideo. José Arcadio Limón was born in Culiacan, Mexico and despite having

had been acting as the State Department’s official agent since 1951.
11
Wills Conover has frequently suggested that jazz does the ideological work of spreading freedom and
democracy more efficiently than outright propagandist discourses. In his obituary, the New York Times
credits him smuggling the idea of democracy behind the Iron Curtain in the form of jazz music (Robert,
1996).
241

moved to the U.S. at the age of 7, the legendary choreographer and dancer spoke fluent
Spanish. At the time of his company’s state-sponsored tour, Limón was already a success
in the modern dance arena and his selection “implied… the idea of diversity in America
and possibly even the message that the United States is a country where immigrants have
found a home” (Prevots, 2007, para.2). The company’s performance repertoire only
reinforced America’s pledge to cultural and racial diversity. Limón’s company performed
The Moor’s Pavane (based on Shakespeare’s Othello), La Malinche (set in Mexico and
about an Aztec princess), and an abstract piece entitled Vivaldi Concerto. The trio is
almost too perfect: a staple of the Eurocentric canon joins a legibly race and region-
specific (and geographically-targeted) selection, and the two are underwritten by the
freedom of form that abstraction implies. Together, these three pieces render the image of
the national body, one that is inclusive of racial difference, allows those racially-marked
as ‘others’ access to traditionally European forms, and committed to aesthetic freedom.
Likewise, in 1955, Martha Graham’s multiracial dance company, which included
African American and Asian American dancers, was sent to Asia in order to insert
diplomatic dialogues into the rising tides of Communist influence across Southeast Asia
(particularly Vietnam). Apart from the racial make-up of bodies on display in her
company, Graham’s selection of dances, like Limón’s, adheres to the practice of blending
the Eurocentric canon with region-specific inflections and a heavy dose of topics deemed
universal in scope. While the two most popular dances her company performed on this
tour – Cave of the Heart and Night Journey – are based on ancient Greek tragedy, the sets
for nearly all of her dances, as was widely reported, were done by the Japanese-American
sculptor Isamu Noguchi. In Japan, one reviewer remarked that her choreography invoked
242

something of the Kabuki traditions and in Burma, the Prime Minister saw similarities to
Burmese theater (Prevots, 1998, pp.49-50).
José Limón and Martha Graham’s dance companies are but two examples of a
consistent tradition of racially strategic practices of public diplomacy. It is a tradition that
includes the Alvin Ailey dance company,
12
a topic I cover more fully later in this chapter.
As the Limón and Graham examples show, exported dance companies were meant to
signify in two, related ways: the dancers’ racially legible bodies were meant to gesture at
inclusion and meritocracy and the program/repertoire selection was to perform a blending
of regionalisms by bringing culturally-specific dances into peaceful coexistence on the
stage (and on the bodies of those dancers). That this period of rapidly increasing cultural
diplomacy and the state’s subsidy of modern dance as a vehicle of soft, cultural power
marks the beginning of what Katja Kolcio (2010) describes as the period of
institutionalization and organization for U.S. dance is hardly coincidental. Eisenhower’s
law and the federal funding it provided for dance organizations normalized particular
treatments of race and racial embodiment in American dance companies and then – by
virtue of introducing consistent funding sources – proceeded to institutionalize those
newly formed practices. Kolcio argues that American dance companies underwent their
most critical period of institutionalization from 1956 to 1978, when dance programs
multiplied in U.S. universities, dance periodicals and monthlies were joined by academic
journals and associations, and six national organizations were founded ( The American
Dance Guild, The Congress on Research in Dance, The American Dance Therapy

12
It must be noted that the Dance Panel, in its quest to present a picture of racial diversity, also engaged in
more overt and familiar discourses of racism. In his autobiography Revelations, Alvin Ailey, whose
company’s first recommendation as a potential export was denied by the committee, explains the scrutiny
and racism that black bodies were subjected to in the dance world (Ailey & Bailey, 1995).
243

Association, The American College Dance Festival Association, The Dance Critics
Association, The Society of Dance History Scholars) (Kolcio, 2010). While Kolcio does
not explicitly connect this moment in dance history to the 1954 law and funding that
immediately preceded it, she does explain this period of institutionalization in part by
drawing on the same qualities of dance that made it so conducive to public diplomacy in
the eyes of the State Department. Modern dance’s entry into higher education “is
concurrent with the radical democratization of the creative and knowing body in art and
academia,” a paradigmatic shift that prioritizes “cultural production, activism, and
discourse that would fundamentally challenge existing networks and hierarchies of
knowledge” (Kolcio, 2010, p.4). It is this capacity for “radical democratization” and
transformation through dance that made modern dance (as opposed to ballet, for
example)
13
particularly attractive to scholars in fields like feminist studies, postcolonial
theory, and anthropology and ultimately led to the dance form’s institutionalization.
These are also the qualities that made modern dance well suited for the work of public
diplomacy. I am drawing this connection here in order to emphasize the notion that
modern dance’s institutionalization, its effective consolidation as a cultural industry and
its current position in the global economy were determined, in part, by the dance form’s
role in state sponsored public diplomacy and the racial aesthetics that diplomacy
demanded of its participant companies and dancers. Both institutionalization and current
corporatization are inseparable from the traditions of public diplomacy. It is public
diplomacy that built the dance industry as a national body that today interacts with the
global economy and its touring circuits.

13
Kolcio also points out that modern dance was “a reaction against canonical dancing, and ballet in
particular” (p.6).
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The result of public diplomacy’s heavy hand was a starkly national dance body
that was less interested in the potential links between race, technical movement
innovation, and the possible articulation of racialized feeling through movement praxis
and more focused on racial bodies as symptomatic of the nation’s commitment to
diversity. In this arrangement, the dancer’s body can be considered a kind of mobile
national archive of U.S. racial discourses, encompassing the historical significances of
racially motivated power asymmetries and offering up bodies of color as evidence of
what is positioned as political progress. Natalie Zervou (2011), discussing contemporary
U.S. public diplomacy and its use of dance, has suggested that we examine the dancer’s
body as “a two-layered body; a bodily archive,” consisting of the physical body and what
she calls the content, or the “dispositions, experiences, and memories” (p.7). While
Zervou’s “archive” is a useful trope for the present discussion, it must be noted that
historically, dancers’ bodies traveling the global concert dance circuit as part of official
public diplomacy programs, contributed to specifically national archives. As the brief
descriptions of José Limón and Martha Graham’s companies have shown, dancers’ and
choreographers’ bodies labor to manifest a particular narrative about U.S. racial relations,
one in which their own bodies serve as the material end point. Furthermore, to perform
the archive – both on stage as well as by their mere presence – dancers’ bodies must be
rendered material evidence; corporeality must be reduced to an easily legible, essentialist
signification, yoking the otherwise static national to a futuristic racial transcendence.
Importing Zervou’s distinction between the physical body and the content body for the
examination of the racial body in histories of dance and public diplomacy, means that
what is privileged, above all, is the physical body and as I will argue, its “authentic”
245

signification of racial affect. It is the physical body, by virtue of its signification, that
gestures at the content body of the dancer and the choreographer, concretizing the
national story that the overall bodily archive labors to reproduce and reify. José Limón
and his dancers must read as unmistakably ‘Latino’ in a narrative that, with the help of
strategic program selection and constant reference to the choreographer’s Mexican roots,
positions them as both privileged U.S. citizens and beneficiaries of the nation’s racially
progressive immigration policies. Dancers’ bodies gain visibility insofar as they
contribute to a seamless racial legibility. That the U.S. dance industry’s historic public
diplomacy function is economically linked to that industry’s expansion and
institutionalization means that one of fundamental tenets of funding and global concert
travel in the dance industry is contingent on the labor dancers and choreographers’ bodies
can offer to the nation-state.
As this history suggests, the contemporary industry was in part built and funded
as a mobile national archive, a legacy that not only makes dancers and choreographers
necessary subjects of the nation-state, but also manifests in more contemporary forms of
industry organization. It is this treatment of racial politics and racial bodies that
contemporary U.S. dancers and choreographers inherit and articulate today. The co-
existence of federal support and the concurrent move towards national ideology during
the critical period described above are the twin pillars that the modern dance industry is
built on in the U.S. These pillars outline the economic, sociopolitical, and cultural terrain
on which modern dance and the U.S.-based dance industry, overall, has functioned since
then. As this chapter will show, the residues of this history are evident in contemporary
U.S. cultures of dance and their production of race through the bodies of dancers.
246

Funding the Contemporary Dance Body: Public/Private Sponsorship and its
Demands
Since the early era of industry institutionalization, both the economic and cultural
dimensions of each U.S.-based dance company’s operationalization have become
decidedly more complicated and arguably, more openly and normatively reliant on the
demands emanating from would-be sources of funding (Ivey, 2008; Miller, 2000;
Shuster, 1985). Starting with the early 1980s, public funds for the performing arts sector
and with it, the dance industry, which had to that point, relied more heavily than other
performing arts sectors on public funding, began to wane considerably. As many political
economy scholars have explained, the expansion of neoliberal economics in the U.S. in
the 1980s occurred alongside increasing privatization of industry and the state’s
abandonment of its social welfare subsidies. Scholars like David Harvey (2005) and
Jeremy Gilbert (2008) explain that in this socio-economic arrangement, the state’s only
function – and one of its only purposes for intervention – is to guarantee the uninhibited
and unlimited growth of free markets and the theories of private enterprise, individualism
and competitive free trade that those markets espouse.
14
The state, as Harvey argues,
“must therefore use its monopoly of the means of violence to preserve these freedoms at
all costs” (Harvey, 2005, p.64). Harvey’s point is that this philosophy radically
reinterprets both that which is seen as a “fundamental good” and the role of the state in
securing that good, leading ultimately to “reductions in welfare provisions,” the

14
Harvey, along with most other writers on neoliberalism, makes an important distinction between the
theory of neoliberalism and its application, as we have seen it historically. Application, he argues, is not
quite as orthodox or even as the logic behind the philosophy would suggest. States offer uneven protections
to certain favorable industries and do intervene in times of economic crises (Harvey, 2005).
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privatization of pensions as well as programs invested in the social body, and in the
performing arts sector, a steady and increased abandonment of federal funding and
sponsorship (Harvey, 2005, p.92). I have addressed this period with regard to different
creative industries in past chapters, noting that this period of deregulation, privatization,
and globalization laid the foundation for the growth of the Pakistani and Chechen fashion
industries and led to the re-organization and globalization of the visual arts industry as we
understand it today. For the U.S. dance industry, neoliberalism’s divestment from the
social body was critical in triggering major internal changes.
In a 2010 Dance/USA
15
study, authors Carolelinda Dickey and Andrea Snyder
note that exchange-based diplomacy in the dance industry began to diminish significantly
in the 1980s, taking with it its federal dollars and the dance industry’s primary source of
funding. Ivey adds that this drastic reduction of exchange-based diplomacy coincided
with the near withdrawal of public funding among local, state and federal foundations
(Ivey, 2008). At the federal level, for example, defunding of the NEA, which had been a
model of arts funding and one of the only consistent sources of subsidy for the dance
industry from its establishment, began in the early 1980’s (Miller, 2000). By 1996, the
NEA budget was cut by 40%.
16
This move was followed closely by the elimination of the
USIA, and its international touring budget in 1999. Dance/USA reports that federal
funding for cultural exchange and sponsored travel finally began growing in 2009, when

15
Dance/USA was established as a national service membership organization in 1982, as a way to
consolidate and promote “professional dance by addressing the needs, concerns, and interests of dance
artists, administrators, and organizations” (Dance/USA website).
16
It is important to remember that the NEA budget was always small in comparison to its counterparts in
Western Europe. Yudice says that even at its peak, it amounted to no more than $0.66 per person, in
comparison to Western European countries, where governments provide arts budgets with a median of $40
per person. The U.S. arts budget becomes equivalent to those of Western European nations only when you
account for private sources of funding (Yudice, 1999, p.19).
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$9 million dollars were allocated to the efforts.
17
I am deliberately consolidating facts
from the world of sponsored cultural exchange and more mainstream NEA funding of
dance companies and state dance organizations because historically, the two have always
worked in concert with one another and the dismantling of any one budget has
dramatically impacted the industry overall. Another crucial development in the dance
industry during the spread of neoliberal economics was the splintering and multiplication
of dance companies across the nation. Cynthia Hedstrom (2005) remarks that from 1970
to 1994 the number of dance companies in the U.S. grew from 100 to 650. By 2010, that
number was closer to 2,200 (Dickey & Snyder, 2010).
18
Most of the new companies that
were founded during this period of time were established as non-for-profit 501(c)(3)
organizations. Currently, they are reliant year-to-year on a combination of federal grants
(typically from the NEA), state and local foundations (like the New York State Council
on the Arts and the San Francisco Arts Commission), private arts patronage foundations
(like The Getty Foundation and The Ford Foundation) and perhaps most importantly,
corporate sponsorship.
In the dance world, which relies on international touring for visibility and partly
for revenue, this financial instability has meant that dance companies – and indeed, most
companies in the performing arts sector – have been functioning as “local monopolists,”
meaning, in part, that their travel is limited to region (Throsby & Withers, 1979;
Escaleria, 2002). Jennifer Kuan (2001) has described the conditions of these local

17
Immediately after this reported gain, DanceMotion USA was formed in 2010. The program is the result
of a partnership between the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the US Department of State and
the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Its mission is “to showcase contemporary American dance abroad… and
to share work by some of America's finest contemporary dance makers and serve as a gateway for cultural
exchange” (DanceMotion USA website).
18
As a point of comparison, “The UK has approximately 200. Germany has approximately 150. Australia
has 50. France has around 500” (Dickey & Snyder, 2010, 4).
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monopolist performing arts companies succinctly as “monopolies teetering on the edge of
bankruptcy” (p.510).
19
What this scholarship on concurrent developments in the dance
industry makes clear for the present discussion is that dance companies that do manage to
tour internationally are large companies with the benefit of diversified sources of
revenue, which helps stabilize their operations (and scheduled international touring) from
year to year. Diversifying revenue sources has traditionally meant the introduction and
attraction of corporate sponsorship to the existing mix of federal and local government
sponsorship and private foundation funding. As early as 1986, Dick Netzer noticed that
dance companies began seeking out private sponsorship and corporate sponsorship in
order to supplement waning government funding and private foundation funding that was
being spread increasingly thin. For the New York market specifically, “increased private
giving has offset the decline in NYSCA support, and helped pay for the deficits on the
home seasons” (Netzer, 1986, p.18-19). With this transition, arts organizations, including
dance companies, “have increasingly been bundled into multinational corporations,” with
U.S. businesses and corporations becoming the gatekeepers of the arts system (Ivey,
2008, p.187, 188).
This commercialization of the performing arts sector and specifically, its impact
on repertoire and artistic innovation has been a significant topic of debate since the early
1990s (Alexander, 1995; Castaner, 1997; Castaner & Campos, 2002; Heilbrun, 1998;
Ivey, 2008; Kirschner, 2013; Porter, 1990; Pierce, 2000; Seaman, 2004). Because arts
organizations are embedded in local markets and work on a supply-and-demand logic, the
choice of repertoire and the degree to which it embraces innovation are subject to market

19
Kuan’s primary case study is the opera but she does use this model as a way to understand the performing
arts sector and its economics overall.
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forces. In the dance industry, The Nutcracker is a frequently employed example of how
commercialization leads to conservative repertoire choices and a lack of innovation in
movement praxis. Bill Ivey explains that “competition for audiences and funding among
nonprofits encourages the same kind of conservative artistic choices that are forced on
record companies and film studios by the demands of shareholder value” (Ivey, 2008,
p.214). “Why, after all,” he asks, “does just about every dance company in the United
States stage The Nutcracker each holiday season?” (Ivey, 2008, p.214). After attending
the 2013 Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) conference in New York,
Mark Kirschner (2013a) agrees, declaring that in the dance world “The Nutcracker is
heroin. It is that easy, calming fix that makes all of those financial projections work”
(para.9). Like Ivey, Kirschner too is concerned about dance companies sacrificing
aesthetic innovation in favor of financial stability, particularly in context of what he sees
as structural funding weaknesses (not enough NEA and/or private funding to go around,
coupled with increased international competition).
But the relationship between traditional funding sources like the NEA and the
new demand for a diversified funding portfolio is far more complicated than the
Nutcracker effect implies. To understand the contemporary relationship between
hybridized funding sources and repertoire selection, aesthetic innovation, and companies’
treatment of race and racial bodies, it is first necessary to consider what economists call
the “crowding-in effect” in performing arts funding. Studying the consequences of NEA
grants for private donations to dance companies, Thomas Smith (2003) concluded that
NEA funding, although small in the amount it typically allocates to individual dance
251

companies,
20
has been proven to have a crowding-in effect on private donations and
corporate sponsorships. Private and corporate donors view a dance company’s
achievement of an NEA grant as validation of quality and company health, a stamp of
approval that works as a kind of permission to contribute in larger numbers. In his
findings, Smith encourages dance companies to apply and petition for NEA grants as a
gateway to more stable and more diversified private and corporate sponsorships. Smith’s
analysis suggests a further conclusion relevant for the present discussion. In order to
achieve the diversified mix of funding sources that is now required of dance companies to
be viable locally and to participate in international concert touring, dance company
managers must shift their positions in two consecutive moves. First, they must attract
public funding in the form of an NEA grant. Second, armed with the grant, they must
pivot, rearranging their aesthetic pieces according to pop-up logics, to appeal to corporate
or private donations. The U.S. Census Bureau shows that large U.S. dance companies that
routinely perform on the international circuit do indeed follow these instructions,
diversifying their funding portfolios according to Thomas’s findings. In light of these
organizational tactics, then, this chapter explores how it is that dance companies, their
managers, choreographers, and dancers position their aesthetics, their bodies, and their
approach to race in order to leverage the unique mix of public and private funding that
they require in order to be viable domestically and travel internationally. What kinds of
performances of race do dance companies rely on in order to implement the strategic pop-
up driven pivoting described here? And how do these performances create a climate of
racial discourse that then disciplines the bodies of dancers? I examine the U.S.-based

20
In the mid-1990s, the average NEA grant to a dance company was $49,000. However, the NEA awarded
grants to almost 50% of all its dance grant applicants and subsequently (Smith, 2003).
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Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Israel-based Batsheva to ask: how do U.S.-
based dancers comply with this climate, performing their bodies through the
improvisational pop-up mechanism to speak both nation and racial feeling? And how do
visiting dancers negotiate this same requirement as they cross the border into the U.S. and
are faced with having to erect their own pop-ups?

Shifting Balance for Funding: The Role of Race in Attracting Diversified Funding
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and the most recent annual industry study
conducted by Dance/USA’s research division, U.S. dance companies’ 2011 income
breakdowns demonstrate those companies’ significant dependence on charitable
contributions and sponsorships. Surveying dance companies with an income of $100,000
or more, the study reports that companies generated 30% of their income from
performances (ticket sales, etc.), 47% from contributions (private donations and corporate
sponsorships) and 23% from a variety of other sources. Furthermore, an analysis of
trends for the past several years indicates a significant reduction in performance income
(it was 38% in 2007, 37% in 2008, and 34% in 2009), promising that as performance
income becomes an increasingly smaller share of the companies’ overall revenue,
companies will have to compensate for these losses by inviting larger private donations
and corporate sponsorships. The question then becomes: how do companies best position
themselves in order to capture these contributions and how does race become complicit in
this arrangement?
As Smith’s theory of “crowding-in” in the dance field suggests, companies’
primary fund-raising goal must be to secure NEA grants or other forms of nationally
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recognized federal subsidy.
21
There has been little scholarship done on the direct impact
of NEA grants or federal grants for either program repertoire or artistic innovation in the
U.S.
22
However, Gregory Sporton’s (2004) analysis of the British Arts Council (BAC)
and its implicit requirement of racial diversity for funding, is instructive here. Sporton
argues that “the policymakers… create a strange and patronizing linkage between social
inclusion, economic hardship, creative expression and immigration,” mandating that an
embodied racial diversity be readily visible and recognizable among the dance companies
they subsidize (p.86). This mandate that companies provide evidence of both racial
diversity and racial testimony in the form of recognizable and classifiable bodies is
prefaced by the assumption that “experiencing the validity of art is possible only through
the cultural memory of others who have seen it” (Sporton, 2004, p.83). Support for this
line of argument about the contemporary function of the national dancing body in service
of the nation-state’s racial politics, is evident among several other scholars (Alibhai-
Brown, 2001; Parekh, 2000; Root, 1996). Alibhai-Brown (2001), for example, observes
that the bodies on stage, engaging in dance praxis become prioritized over dance form,
aesthetics, or innovation in movement. While these evaluations are in reference to the
British context, examining the U.S. dance industry’s treatment of race and racial bodies
reveals that there are undeniable parallels between the tacit requirements imposed by the
BAC and the NEA. As I will show in this chapter, the NEA too prioritizes an
epistemological framework on racial identity that both hinges on and normalizes the
discourses of racial authenticity and the kind of subject immobility that necessarily

21
Smith is careful to point out that NEA grants are best to achieve the crowding-in effect mostly because of
the organization’s perceived public image as taste-makers. Consequently, if a company is to seek funding or
grants from another federal organization, that organization must be commonly understood as prestigious.
22
As I mentioned previously, scholars have been primarily concerned with the impact of commercial
intervention into the dance world’s repertoires and aesthetic developments (i.e. The Nutcracker effect).
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accompanies the “authentic” body. First however, it is important to consider the
complications that commercialization introduces for U.S. dance companies. Dance
companies, as I have argued, must meet the ideological demands of NEA grants only to
then re-calibrate their positions to best attract corporate sponsorship and private
donations.
Writing about the motivations for corporate philanthropy and corporate
sponsorship,
23
John O’Hagan and Denice Harvey (2000) argue that promoting a corporate
brand image and capturing media space
24
are among the two central reasons for
corporations’ sponsorships of arts events. Arts sponsorship specifically is predicted to be
on the rise, according to Kotler and Scheff (1997), who suggest that this kind of
sponsorship offers marketers an opportunity to advertise indirectly in a saturated media
advertising environment where traditional advertising has been failing and audiences
have been immune to aggressive advertising appeals. In the dance industry, scholars have
found that increased corporate presence has led to the routinization of the repertoire
(Kirschner, 2013a, 2013b). Cultural economics literature suggests that an increased
dependence on the commercial sector yields a stabilization of the repertoire, where dance
managers are less likely to innovate or risk new programming material in order to
demonstrate an ongoing record of successful performances to would-be sponsors. Dance
managers promise future success based on past success, which precludes any serious
diversion from past programming. When it comes to the role of race specifically, the

23
While many scholars draw a distinction between philanthropy and sponsorship because some nations’
legislation dictates this distinction, O’Hagan and Harvey argue that in effect, “under the neoclassical model,
corporate philanthropy is effectively seen as corporate sponsorship” (p.208). Incidentally, U.S. laws make
no such distinction.
24
Capturing media placement is an important secondary objective for corporations and explains why arts
festivals are the most sponsored of all arts events. Festivals typically guarantee media spotlight (attention
and press coverage) for the duration of the event since they are usually annual and draw large crowds
(O’Hagan & Harvey, 2000).
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conclusions are far more oblique. O’Hagan and Harvey, as well as well as other scholars
of marketing and advertising processes, assert that one of the incentives for corporations
to include arts sponsorship in their overall promotional toolkit is that “sponsorship
responds to the consumer demand that companies give something back to their
communities” (p.209). This quote alludes precisely to the kind of “community
engagement” strategies that Hedstrom suggests can “pigeonhole artists as fulfilling social
agendas rather than letting the artistic work stand on its own” (Hedstrom, 2005, para.12).
Hedstrom is speaking specifically about the function of race and visible racial diversity as
the cornerstones of what “community engagement” means in corporate literature. Dance
professionals (Hedstrom is a journalist and interviews several choreographers and dance
managers) and scholars of cultural economics clearly approach this intersection of
corporate sponsorship, aesthetics and race from two different ends. Together however,
these arguments indicate that corporate sponsorship seeks out dance companies that
fulfill the “community engagement” requirement but do not risk any unexpected
wrestling with the prevailing discourses on race or what racial bodies may or may not
stand for. That corporate literature does not dare mention the idea of race or racial
diversity and opts instead to cloak the concept in the vagaries of “community
engagement” is telling. Where federal funding demands visible racial diversity on-stage,
complete with “traditional” aesthetics performed by dancers who are understood as
ethnographers; corporate funding asks that dance companies eschew the idea of racial
difference in favor of racial harmony. The result of this dualistic but not incompatible
landscape is a U.S. dance industry that trades in both legible and verifiable racial
diversity and a constant narrative of racial transcendence. The bodies of dancers are made
256

to carry these two demands as consistent, speaking to an agenda that would appropriate
them as mobile national archives as well as to an agenda that requires them to constantly
perform racial harmony to the point of racial silence.

Ethnographers and Avatars: Race in Contemporary U.S. Dance and AAADT
Conversations about racial diversity became particularly pronounced in the U.S.
dance industry starting with the late 1980s, corresponding, as I have argued, with the
newly urgent need to compete for federal and corporate funding as a result of the state’s
divestment from social programs. Choreographer and dancer Patricia Hoffbauer says that
multiculturalism became a “visible policy” in dance companies during this time precisely
because companies were interested in diversifying their funding (“Other Voices on
Race,” 2005). Citing the legacies of George Balanchine and Arthur Miller, both of whom
are often credited with leading the pack in diversifying ballet, choreographers and dance
managers often explain their efforts at diversification as belonging to a long tradition of
dance internationalism. Valerie Gladstone (2005) puts it plainly: “artistic directors do
whatever it takes to diversify their troupes” (para.11). Racial diversity, however, is
treated, in accordance with the mandates of federal arts councils, as pure, racially-
indexed embodiment. As I have suggested here, relying on the work of Gregory Sporton
and others, becoming available for federally subsidized arts grants like the NEA has
meant that dance companies’ efforts at racial diversity dead-end into simple racial
inclusion, into legibility that relies on a violent and static racial authenticity, where
dancers’ bodies are legible and understandable as racial ‘others’. Inclusion becomes the
end of politics; not the starting point for unraveling the very idea of racial diversity,
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difference, or the structures of feeling that difference might suggest. And this end comes
courtesy of would-be commercial sponsors, who require that racial difference be visible
and available but never addressed or deconstructed.
In line with these parameters, dancers adhere to this dualistic narrative of race
closely. Dancer and choreographer Harry Shum, Jr. says that among his cohort “it wasn’t
about a color… we had this universal thing, which was dance, and we all just had fun
with it” (Shum quoted in Perron, 2010, para.11). In Los Angeles, he adds, his “ethnicity
worked to [his] advantage” (Shum quoted in Perron, 2010, para.12). Shum addresses his
own racial background only to the extent that it has worked in his favor, never touching
on the insidious type-casting that this implies, and steering closely to the notion that
dance renders race moot. It is a sentiment that Benoit Swan Pouffer, artistic director of
Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, articulates openly: “dance doesn’t have a race, doesn’t
have a palette” (Perron, 2010, para.19). Combining both Shum’s and Pouffer’s
acknowledgment and then dismissal of race in dance, Alonzo King, the artistic director of
San Francisco’s LINES Ballet, says that “as fascinating as diversity is in nature and
humanity, it is a trick, an illusion. It is all the same substance ingeniously manipulated to
appear different. The artist is interested in the essence of things, not their appearance”
(King quoted in Gladstone, 2005, para.11). King’s assertion is especially significant
because of its prioritization of diversity for its undefined and deliberately vague
“essence”. It is a move that at once validates a politics of racial diversity based on
embodiment and more pointedly, racial authenticity, and then gestures to the idea that
those exteriors are made unimportant in dance; that dance praxis has the ability to offer a
kind of transcendence of racially imbued surfaces.
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King’s point is made clear in several dance companies’ recent usage of masks as
part of their performances. In 2010, for example, the Oakland Ballet’s production of Igor
Stravinsky’s Petrouchka featured the Blackamoor character in blue face. This character,
usually performed in blackface,
25
became an avatar, a body that uses dance to transform
contemporary racial realities into science fiction futurisms. The innovation seems to have
offered a useful racial trope for dance companies since San Francisco Ballet’s version of
the production, which immediately followed Oakland’s, also used the blue-faced avatar.
The dancer Ron Thiele, Oakland’s Moor, explained the decision to use the avatar simply:
“How can we approach this with a more contemporary view? And so we went to a
different color—a greenish dark blue” (Thiele quoted in Carman, 2010, para.13). A more
contemporary take on race and the racialization of bodies, he makes clear, is to suggest
that race doesn’t exist altogether and to provide futuristic bodies in its place.
Elsewhere in the U.S. dance industry, dancers wear literal masks. The commercial
hip-hop dance crew The Jabbawockeez, who won America's Best Dance Crew in 2008, is
often spoken about in terms of its racial and ethnic diversity. While the crew welcomes
these celebrations of their bodies as racially “authentic” representative signifiers, their
approach to racial embodiment steers closely to the avatar solution. Members of The
Jabbawockeez wear identical masks and white gloves during their performances. The
masks they wear are physical (and apparently intended to enable a sense of performative
cohesion) but also ideological as their diversity and particularly, their predominantly
Asian American team make-up, become knowledge that is undeniably part of their
narrative, satisfying the demand for legible racial presence, but never foregrounded or
incorporated into their choreographic moralities. As in the discourses of other dancers

25
In Balanchine’s version of this production, the character was in yellow face.
259

and choreographers described here, the fact of racial diversity must be part of the fabric
of the dance company but the dance itself must transcend the difference that those bodies
signify through tropes of racial authenticity; dance operates on a system of meritocracy,
this discourse alleges. Dance praxis, in this configuration, is a vehicle for bodies that
represent racial otherness to become something else; to shed the weight of racial injustice
and transcend the racial memory that their bodies hint, all in the name of becoming
bodies that are owned simultaneously by the nation and by corporate interests.
In the U.S. dance industry, this movement dialectic – a coexisting proof of racial
presence and the transcendence of that same racialization – is consistently routinized in
U.S. teenage dance films. Contemporary U.S. dance films like Save the Last Dance,
Honey, Feel the Noise, Take the Lead, Step-Up and others uniformly favor over-
simplified multiracialism in their handling of racial relations and the multiplicity of racial
realities, fetishizing race as an embodied category but also constructing the narrative
around protagonists’ transcendence of these embodiments through dance. One of the
most reliable conventions of this film genre is the interracial romance that brings partners
together in dance, enabling each to shed the racial memories that their bodies articulate
by mastering dance choreography that necessarily purports to blend varying dance
cultures – classical ballet, hip-hop, reggaeton, ballroom, etc. The romance is a narrative
tool to position dance as an equalizing medium, allowing mastery to smooth out
otherwise fragmented and intersectional identities and managing to exaltedly transcend
what figures as traditional identity politics. In each film, the protagonist couple’s victory
on the dance floor alleges a kind of de-racializing of bodies, reducing identities to a
moment that produces a pure corporeal meritocracy for the audience’s marvel. This
260

moment promises to render race an insignificant and even passé category, evaluating
bodies based on their mastery of choreography instead. In these popular films, dance is
imagined as a vehicle through which bodies are no longer constrained by racial
categories; a vehicle that operates on a system of equality and meritocracy. A dancer
need only to master the right moves and race ceases to exist as an impediment.
While this chapter addresses the discourses and movement praxis that dominate
the concert dance industry specifically, the cross-racial lovers of contemporary teen
dance films and their investment in dance as a racially transcendent praxis demonstrate
the tenor of the contemporary U.S. dance industry’s perspective on race. Certainly,
concert dance and film dance occupy different dance cultures, with equally different
economies and sources of funding. However, the discourses on dance and race that teen
films seize and further normalize originate in the cultures of U.S. concert dance and its
economic imperatives.
Nowhere, however, are the impacts of the U.S. dance industry’s governing
discourses on race more salient than in the work of the Alvin Ailey American Dance
Theater. AAADT , as an official U.S. cultural ambassador intended as a mobile national
archive, as one of the most successful and economically stable dance companies in the
U.S., and as a modern dance company that trades on racial dialogue (through
embodiment, choreography, dance narratives, and history) is a unique example of the
ways in which the U.S. dance industry’s economic structures produce a discourse on race
that pivots on both tropes of authenticity and an imagined racial transcendence.
AAADT was founded by the choreographer, dancer and artistic director Alvin
Ailey in 1958. Ailey originally envisioned it as an exclusively African American modern
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dance company. The company “fused in movement and theme the nationalist political
focus of the 1930s with the racial heritage of America – thus embracing and altering
American modern dance” (Foulkes, 2002, p.179). The concept of African American
heritage loomed large in AAADT’s repertory, exemplified by early pieces like
Revelations (1960) and Blues Suite (1958), consequently making the company an ideal
candidate for public diplomacy and state funding, under Eisenhower’s Emergency
Fund.
26
In 1962, the same year that the company became multiracial (although still
predominantly African American), it was chosen as the first African American company
to participate in President John F. Kennedy’s “President’s Special International Program
for Cultural Presentations” (DeFrantz, 2004).
27
Since then, AAADT has toured
extensively, as both an official U.S. ambassador and an independent company, leading
the U.S. Congress to view the company as America’s “vital cultural ambassador to the
world.”
28
In 1970, as a result of the company’s financial turmoil and possible closure, the
Dance Theater Foundation, Inc., a non-profit, tax-exempt organization, was created as a
body dedicated to seeking funding for AAADT. The move proved successful. By 1992,
journalist Camille Hardy announced that AAADT could be considered “recession proof”
thanks to its international touring, constantly sold-out performances and a stable financial
situation (Hardy, 1992; DeFrantz, 2004). Importantly, AAADT’s route to financial
stability has been the direct result of its diversified funding strategy, the same one that, as

26
As I described earlier in this chapter, while the discourses of racial justice and cultural identity were
prominent tenets of early modern dance, these concerns were supplanted by rabid nationalism in the 1930s.
Ideas of racial heritage and social injustice were largely absent from mainstream American modern dance
until the mid-1950s, when they reappeared but only under the rubric of public diplomacy, wedding previous
concerns of nationalism to a newly minted focus on racial and cultural identity. In this context, the aesthetic
and thematic fusions performed by AAADT were in line with the political agendas favored by the State
Department and the American National Theater and Academy.
27
As part of this initiative, AAADT toured the Far East, Southeast Asia and Australia, gaining major
international acclaim.
28
This designation came courtesy of a U.S. Congressional resolution in 2008.
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Ivey has observed, has turned U.S. dance companies into multinational corporations
operating in a neoliberal global economy. Today, the company and its subsidiaries are
funded through a combination of endowments, planned giving, state support, and
corporate sponsorships. It has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the New
York State Council on the Arts, and the NEA, but also, American Express, Bank of
America and Merrill Lynch, among its many other corporate sponsors. The Alvin Ailey
Dance Foundation oversees the many branches that the original company has spawned:
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Ailey II, The Ailey School, Ailey Arts in
Education & Community Programs and The Ailey Extension.
The AAADT’s choreographic aesthetic archive has occupied a primary and
authoritative space in U.S. modern dance since the company’s establishment. These
aesthetics are best explained by looking to the company’s most recent season. Since
2011, the choreographer and dancer Robert Battle has been the company’s artistic
director.
29
For his first Ailey season, Battle resurrected several Ailey favorites
(Revelations, Streams, and Joyce Trisler’s Journey
30
), and premiered renown
choreographies new to AAADT. Among these newcomers were Rennie Harris’s Home
and Paul Taylor’s Arden Court. Harris and Taylor’s dances are both in fluid conversation
with the modern dance aesthetic that AAADT has honed since its inception. It is the same
aesthetic that has made AAADT an enduring cultural ambassador: an insistent
preservation of the American modern dance heritage, which makes AAADT a mobile
national archive and the incorporation of that which is typically and “authentically”
legible as African-American cultural memory and knowledge. Harris’s Home is a great

29
Battle is only the third artistic director in the company’s history, after Ailey himself and Judith Jamison.
30
Joyce Trisler was a member of AAADT and choreographed the piece while in residence with the
company.
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example of this aesthetic. It is the creation of a hip-hop choreographer, who uses gospel,
Afro-Brazilian rhythms, and hip-hop, to tell the stories of people living with and
surviving HIV. It is a rousing piece, with dancers “saturated in the musical and dance
culture of the streets and clubs” (Asantewaa, 2012, p.6). That these musical choices and
venues are all familiar, racially-coded signifiers of the African American cultural
experience, what Herman Gray (1995) calls signs of blackness within an environment of
multiculturalism, is just the beginning for Home. Here, the markers of black racial
authenticity are only underscored by the narrative of the piece. This narrative toggles
between relying on the political discourses that normalize a racialization of HIV and its
spread, and discourses of American exceptionalism and nationalism that demand
meritocracy and willful strength to overcome institutional racism and its structures of
power. The dance tells stories that are inseparable from questions of racial identity and
the structures of power attached to them, but resolves those questions through depictions
of individual resilience and faith, making Home – its attachment of racial corporeality to
public spaces like clubs and streets, to hip-hop, and its allegiance to racial transcendence
– well suited for the contemporary climate of the U.S. dance industry.
In this repertoire, Paul Taylor’s Arden Court is another great example of how
racial authenticity permeates the Ailey aesthetic (and the U.S. dance industry overall).
Unlike Home, this piece is a more abstracted, sometimes humorous (slapstick, even),
gentle meditation on love. Arden Court is dominated by bare-chested, classically sculpted
men, most of whose bodies are racially legible as black. In the context of American
visuality, where, as Robyn Wiegman (1995) reminds us, corporeal inscription defines
race as both visible and legible, these dancers’ bodies are inseparable from histories of
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fetishizing and policing the legibly black male body. These are histories that, as Stuart
Hall’s (1989) and Kobena Mercer’s (1994) scholarship has suggested, resonate with the
fetishization, desire and ambivalence in the work of Robert Mapplethorpe; histories that
are rooted in colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Above all, for the purposes of
the present analysis, the spectacle of black male corporeality works to signify a static
blackness that gestures to the cultural experiences and structures of feeling assumed to be
perpetually dormant inside of them. In context of Arden Court’s pastoral tone, however,
this signification of “authentic” racial difference is activated, but also resolved (and
dissolved) through music, narrative and dance movement.
Finally, that Robert Battle selected Revelations as the repertoire’s finale is no
surprise either. It is the most famous and most frequently performed Ailey production,
debuting in 1960 and still on tour in 2013. The piece makes use of African-American
spirituals, blues, gospel, and song-sermons. Importantly, these are all musical styles that
have, throughout U.S. history, consistently worked as “authentic” testimonies of African
American expressive culture, assumed to be carrying the signifiers of a knowable and
legible body of black cultural meanings (Cruz, 1999).
31
In its current version, Revelations
consists of three pieces – Pilgrims of Sorrow, Take Me to the Water, and Move Members,
Move – that tell the stories of the unspeakable violence and pain of slavery, the discovery
of faith, and finally, the transcendence of that history of pain through spirituality. In the
first part, dancers routinely crumble in agony, reaching for the sky with clenched fists
right before slowly collapsing. They raise their torsos once last time, convulsing, as if

31
Specifically spirituals, which Revelations makes wide use of, became, according to Cruz a “signifying
system for the psychological, spiritual, and collective subjectivity of slaves, and as a symbol of the slaves’
perseverance within a history of oppression. On the other hand, it functioned as a testimony for the
emerging critical perceptions of white northern progressives” (Cruz, 1999, p.99).
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gasping for air or perhaps signaling a departing spirit, visually breaking the body into
pieces. The second section sees the bodies of dancers (primarily female) enter other-
worldly fluidity, possessed by spirit and faith after baptism. In one scene, a group of
identically-clad dancers stand in a closely knit formation, slowly reaching, one-hand-at-a-
time, towards the sky, their heads following the motion. Finally, in realization and
acceptance of the power above them, their palms open. The third section’s gospel-backed
dancing is triumphant, energized by hope, promise and of course, resilience.
In Celebrating ‘Revelations’ at 50, a 2010 film by Judy Kinberg, Judith Jamison
says that the dance’s significance was in articulating a black past that has been silenced
and buried in mainstream U.S. history: “[Ailey] knew what that truth was about and he
was unafraid to reveal it” (Kinberg, 2010). In compliance with what the industry has
asked of him since the 1950s, Ailey says that this “truth” has been implanted in his
“blood-memory” (Kinberg, 2010). The significance of Revelations both to American
modern dance and to the articulation of African American histories is both undeniable
and difficult to underestimate. However, what I am interested in here is the ways in
which the piece’s overwhelming popularity and constant production and circulation
accommodates the contemporary discourses of race in the dance world, by performing a
static, historically-situated, ultimately triumphant blackness that, through its popularity,
also manages to deflect from the current realities of racial structures of domination. To be
clear, it is not Revelations itself that is the problem; or Home or Arden Court, for that
matter. The problem here is the fact that the racially signifying aesthetics of Revelations
are continuously privileged by the dance economy as the only choreographic expressions
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of racial experience in American dance, normalizing the epistemologies of race that those
aesthetics espouse as “authentic,” singular expressions of racial feeling.
These examples from AAADT demonstrate the kind of narrow racial authenticity
that the dance industry’s economic structures manifest in the U.S. context. These
economics of dance, as I have described them in this chapter, produce a U.S. dance
climate that requires companies to exhibit racially legible signifiers that shore-up national
discourses on race, in order to attract public funding, become sanctioned as exceptional
and ultimately, attract corporate and private sponsorship. Satisfying corporate
sponsorship, however, requires dance companies to simultaneously shift position, to also
accommodate a vision of race that is vague, more concerned with politics of inclusion
and liberal humanism than those of social justice. Consequently, the U.S. dance economy
requires companies to inhabit two ideological positions with relationship to race,
producing a mode of pop-up transformation within the space of each performance in
order to operate in the U.S. concert dance industry. Dance companies must pop up as
national ambassadors, re-arrange their racially-inflected permutations and then return,
popping up as corporate darlings. While AAADT provides some compelling examples of
the ways in which the dance industry’s economic structures condition aesthetic
articulation in the choreographic discourses of race, I have also selected this company as
an example in order to demonstrate what is at stake when racial “authenticity” provides
the primary framework for the expression of racial knowledge. The kind of racial coding
that “authenticity” implies has particular significance for dancers of color, for whom
racial authenticity is the precursor to dispossession.
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As scholars like Daphne Brooks (2006), Herman Gray (2005), John Jackson
(2005), E.P. Johnson (2003), and Hortense Spillers (1987) have argued, authenticity and
dispossession, both built on the premise of subject fixity and corporeal guarantee, are the
primary modes of racial presence and visibility in the context of U.S. structures of
racialization. To begin with, material and discursive dispossession with regard to people
of color traces its lineage to colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, both of which
systematically denied the newly colonized and/or enslaved peoples what Butler would
call a “becoming” (Butler, 1990; Brooks, 2006).
32
Daphne Brooks explains that slavery
was “fueled by the 'power' to 'make' all slaves black regardless of their seeming
whiteness” (p.19). Borrowing from Hortense Spillers,
33
Brooks adds that the traumas of
subjugation, violence and captivity, coupled with “little access to the culture of property,
to the culture of naming, or to patriarchal wealth,” have rendered a black body that is
scripted through what Spillers calls a “powerful stillness” (Brooks, 2006, p.5). It is
through the twinned practices of material, legal dispossession and discursive, signifying
dispossession, that this black subject is denied mutability, the kind of movement and
transformation that can yield alternative imaginaries.
The notion that the immobility imposed onto racialized bodies through the
practices of racialization amount to a set of twinned dispossessions also implicates the
concept of racial authenticity, which can be seen as prefacing dispossession. Authenticity
too, relies on the steady, unchanging signification of the racialized body. It claims the
same kind of guarantees as racial essentialism – a closed, predetermined system that
assumes a necessary set of relations and denies the subject being essentialized any

32
I discuss the significance of “becoming” to Judith Butler’s theory of performativity in the Introduction to
this dissertation.
33
Brooks is referring to Spillers' 1987 work “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book.”
268

movement or becoming (Grossberg, 1997).
34
John Jackson observes that rhetorics of
racial authenticity presuppose a relationship between the subject (who authenticates) and
the object (which is authenticated). It assumes therefore, that there is some objective real
that the subject can be measured against, something like a racial “transcendental
signified.” In other words, the search for authenticity reads the body, its practices and
habits against predetermined racial scripts, which are as constrictive as they are
immobile, lacking any possibility for alterity or improvisation. These practices
“dehumanize,” turning actors “into mere objects of our own social discourses” (Jackson,
2005, p.15). Significantly, the mobilization of racial authenticity to read and evaluate
bodies subjects those bodies to a dispossession, rendering a symbolic death (Jackson,
2005).
In light of these scholars’ careful examinations of the imbricated relationship
between practices of racial authenticity and dispossession, the kind of racially authentic
coding that the dance economy asks of its dancers and choreographers becomes
particularly noteworthy. For companies like AAADT, which are compelled to produce an
immobile and legible racial authenticity through choreography, music and movement
praxis in order to invite funding that is underwritten by the nation-state, the constant
staging of a piece like Revelations is both financial necessity and symbolic annihilation
of the mobile black subject. The current racial climate, born of the industry’s hybrid
public/private economic structure, steers choreographic aesthetics in the U.S. dance
industry and in the process, compels choreographers and dancers who seek funding to
comply with a form of racial dispossession.

34
Lawrence Grossberg (1997) explains that in essentialist positions, “the answers are guaranteed and
everything is sewn up in advance. Identities are fixed” (p.258).
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Indeed, these discourses constitute a racial climate in U.S. dance worlds; a climate
that visiting dance companies, on tour of the U.S. must negotiate in their own treatment
of race. In terms of race and its relationship to dance, the choreographic narratives and
movement philosophies that this climate fosters compel visiting dancers and
choreographers to transform their own dance aesthetics in accommodation; to speak race
through the bodies of dancers in a way that coheres with the demands of the U.S. dance
industry’s economic structures. As the following case study of Israel’s Batsheva Dance
Company and its tours of the U.S. demonstrate, visiting companies activate a pop-up
based transformation in order to enter the U.S. market, accommodating their host nation’s
dance culture climate in a variety of ways, including repertoire choices, music,
choreographic selection, and interviews.

Israeli Dance: A History of Touring and U.S. Exchange
In examining the aesthetic conditions that inform dance companies’ visiting tours
of the U.S., the choice of Israeli dance is not an incidental one. Historically, the U.S. and
Israel have engaged in a robust practice of influence and exchange, with new movement
praxis developed in the U.S. frequently being imported into Israel’s growing dance
industry. Consequently, the current manifestation of these exchanges and the guidelines
that accompany dance companies’ crossing of national borders (while in the process of
their international tours) are instructive in pointing to the ways in which the U.S.
contemporary dance industry’s economic shape cultivates a rather specific dance industry
climate, obligating visiting companies to adjust their aesthetic and choreographic
sensibilities to match the destination. Born out of rapid economic globalization and its
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concomitant impacts on the public sector, the economic logics that structure the U.S.
dance industry compel companies like Batsheva to transform their ideological position
with regard to race and geopolitical borders in order to reap the financial benefits of
touring the U.S. market, crystallizing a system in which local economic demands
indirectly organize and authorize the global movement of dance aesthetics.
The nascent moments of Israel’s dance industry date back to the 1920s, when the
British capture of Palestine led to an influx of European Jewish immigrants, who brought
with them an allegiance to contemporary European dance cultures. Rejecting classical
dance forms like ballet as bourgeoisie, the choreographers favored the German
Ausdruckstanz expressionist style for its “simplicity and freedom from tradition and
opting for personal expression and social movement” (Eshel, 2003, p.63).
35
Scholars like
Jacqueline Robinson (1997) and Bettina Vernon-Warren and Charles Warren (1999)
explain that Ausdruckstanz is the earliest known form of ‘expressive’ dance, which, in
privileging a freedom of form and challenging classical ballet, is commonly understood
as the parent of modern dance. It is this dance style that dominated what would later
become Tel Aviv’s dance culture and industry from the 1920s and well after the creation
of the state of Israel in 1948. The first critical aesthetic shift came courtesy of U.S.
modern dance, when Martha Graham’s company toured Israel in 1956 and effectively
introduced American modern dance to Tel Aviv, inaugurating a new phase in Israeli
dance and movement praxis.
36
The following year, Israel’s Inbal Dance Theater became
the first dance company to receive state support for a foreign tour. Inbal’s 1957 tour was

35
Eshel makes the point that the choice of Ausdruckstanz dance was natural for this socialist society of
“pioneers” (Eshel, 2003).
36
This phase began institutionally and definitively in 1964, when Bethsabee de Rothschild, who had
original hosted Martha Graham’s company in Israel, founded the Batsheva Dance Company (Eshel, 2003;
Friedes Galili, 2012).
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to the U.S. This particular connection is a significant development in the touring history
of Israeli companies because, as Eshel observes, until 1957, the state subsidized many
artistic endeavors but never dance. Artistic dance was viewed as elitist and therefore
incompatible with the socialist ideologies espoused by the state (Eshel, 2003). Again,
cultural exchange with the U.S. marked a significant transition for Israel’s dance culture.
The third major Israel-U.S. cultural exchange that transformed the landscape of Israeli
dance arrived in the mid-1970s, when Israeli choreographers, having studied in the U.S.,
returned with a new appreciation for American postmodern dance.
37
Famed U.S.
choreographers like Merce Cunningham and Alwin Nikolais became inspirations for a
new crop of Israeli dancers and choreographers (Eshel, 2003; Friedes Galili, 2012).
While the two countries have historically engaged in a rich dialogue of aesthetic
exchange and frequent touring, these three instances of influence sketch out the scale and
volume of cultural exchange that has taken place between the U.S. and Israel within the
scope of modern dance. Given this brief history, Batsheva’s contemporary tours of the
U.S. market provide a glimpse into the ways that U.S. dance companies’ economic
realities organize and direct global mobility in the dance world, especially with regard to
U.S. imports.

Ohad Naharin’s Batsheva At Home and On Tour
Since Ohad Naharin took over as artistic director of Israel’s Batsheva in 1990, he
has become the global face of Israeli dance, touring annually and as critics have argued,
revolutionizing Israeli modern dance (Lenkinski, 2012). DLB, which specializes in the

37
Although his timing is slightly later, Ohad Naharin can be considered part of this cohort. He studied and
made his reputation in the U.S. in the 1980s and returned to Israel, to take over at Batsheva in 1990.
272

production, promotion and distribution of dance companies and counts Batsheva as one
of its clients, calls Batsheva both a “true champion on the global map of performing arts”
and “Israel’s cultural ambassador” (DLB, 2011). The latter claim is hardly surprising
since, according to H-Art Management, which organizes Batsheva’s tours, the company
is jointly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Culture and Sport and the Municipality of Tel
Aviv, invariably making Batsheva an investment for Israel’s public diplomacy arm.
Batsheva currently includes 40 dancers and 250 annual performances in Israel and
internationally and was originally established by Bethsabee de Rothschild in 1964, when
the philanthropist and patron of dance wanted to sponsor a dance company inspired by
Martha Graham in Israel. She withdrew her support in 1975, however. Since then,
Batsheva has been a wholly state-sponsored company (Friedes Galili, 2012). It is
important to point out that, as I described in earlier sections, while the onset of neoliberal
economic philosophy and concurrent global economic expansion led U.S. dance
companies to increasingly lose state funding and search out corporate sponsorship,
Israel’s dance companies as well as most other nations’ companies pursued entirely
oppositional funding strategies. Leading dance companies across Europe, Southeast Asia,
Latin America and the Middle East transitioned from a primarily patronage/philanthropic
model, to a state-sponsored one, cementing long-term state support at the same time that
U.S. companies were increasingly privatizing (Shuster, 1985; Yudice, 1999; Zimmer &
Toepler, 1999).
38

38
The distinction between the U.S. model and others is so stark that in the contemporary moment, the U.S.
model for the dance industry can be considered globally unique, alone in demanding its companies to
appeal to both nation-state ideological discourses and corporate ones. “Unlike European or Latin American
countries, the United States does not have a cultural policy… NEA and the National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH) are the closest thing to a policy” (Yudice, 1999, p.19).
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It is under these conditions that Ohad Naharin has prospered at Batsheva’s helm.
Much of the artistic director’s influence has come packaged as a signature movement
language. Called “Gaga,” this praxis is a warm-up routine in which dancers are
encouraged to abandon “taught sequences or exercises” and the homogeneous moves that
accompany them, in favor of corporeal pleasure, freedom and volatility (Lenkinski, 2012,
para.8). Bringing into relief the sharp and deliberate contrast between physical
explosiveness and stillness is the hallmark movement of this method. As critic Michael
Crabb (2012) explains, the Gaga method is “richly varied, from tiny quivers and
articulations, through lush, jellylike moves to dynamic explosions” (para.6). Writing
about the worldwide attention this method has garnered, Lenkinski (2012) offers that
“dancers step out of prescribed moves and offer gutsier, groovier, more exposed sides of
themselves” (para.9). Naharin, who uses words like “thick,” “soft,” “quake,” and
“horizontal force” to direct dancers’ movements throughout this routine, explains the
method as an activation of abstracted nascent affect through the body: “I like dancers
who have the leftover baby in their bodies – being without self-consciousness, letting
movement echo their feelings. This is just one color in the palette. It’s about being
untamed and available” (Friedes Galili, 2012, para.18). The objective of the movement is
to be acutely alert to the surrounding environment but more importantly, to be aware of
the encounters between that environment and one’s body, wherein dancers “embark upon
a journey of personal research” (Lenkinski, 2012, para.8). The effect, consequently, is
one in which the dancer must become highly sensitive to the demands of her own body
and the kind of space it occupies.
274

The Gaga method is particularly important for both Naharin’s traveling dance
company as well as for the present discussion because it is a movement philosophy that
Naharin has harnessed towards a wide variety of performances. To apply a theoretical
lens introduced earlier in this dissertation, Naharin has used the components of this
movement language like the fundamental building blocks of the aesthetic pop-ups he
erects. The artistic director has choreographed his aesthetic bodies – the pop-ups – to
produce performance permutations that that are temporarily inflected with the
geopolitical moralities of their reception climate; that both speak to and conform to the
nation in which they are to be witnessed. Throughout the last 22 years, the Gaga language
has written bodies that depict playful joy in some performances, abstracted meditations
on the intensity of human existence in others, and literal, unmistakable racial violence in
still others. Naharin has adapted Gaga to whimsical, energetic performances as well as to
those that speak to suffering in variably vague terms. It is Gaga that has allowed him to
strategically mobilize dancers’ bodies to enable his work to travel internationally and to
pop-up in drastically different performance spaces. When it comes to these pop-up
strategies and their impacts for the use and depiction of race in Naharin’s works, the
distinctions between Batsheva’s tours of Europe on the one hand and the U.S. on the
other, are most telling.
Scholars Gaby Aldor (2003) and Ruth Eshel (2003) have argued that the concepts
of geopolitical strife and its rendering through the bodies of individual dancers as they
articulate unmistakable suffering, isolation, and longing, have been the favored themes
for modern Israeli dance companies, performing both at home and abroad. From the birth
of Israeli modern dance, these concepts have been yoked to the violence of constantly
275

shifting and complex realities that result from the racial and religious borders between
Israel and Palestine. Aldor writes:
political commentary is read through bodies that register the realities of daily life
in Israel, that have become sites of resistance. A country without real borders
eventually finds this borderlessness reflected in other areas of life. The ongoing
threat to the lives of all, Palestinians and Israelis alike, influences the way people
behave, move, and think. The deadlock if two societies that live in total mutual
dependency – every murderous move answered by a military countermove, which
is then answered by a murderous move – the confined moving about of Israelis
inhibited by fear and terror, and the restricted freedom of Palestinians under
military occupation are factors too strong to be ignored (Aldor, 2003, p.84)
The questions of racial and cultural identity and the persistent increase in
violence, made manifest by this geopolitical border have occupied a primary space of
articulation for dancers and choreographers seeking to speak on behalf of Israel through
dance performance. Israeli choreographers, in fact, have often erected actual walls on
stage as a way to literalize this violence and simultaneously ask dancers’ bodies to
perform a conflicted racialized nationalism, in which their bodies both represent the
nation and reject that representation by questioning the military actions of that same
nation. For example, in 1987, the year of what Israelis view as the first Palestinian
uprising, dancers in Israeli choreographer Rami Be’er’s A Reservist Diary hurled stones
at a fence erected on stage and participated in a funeral procession, their bodies full of
both anger and mourning. Aldor captures the conflicted nexus of race, religion and
national identity as it has been depicted by Israeli dance performances perfectly in
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describing the soldier who appears in A Reservist Diary, as one who is “facing moral
dilemmas… torn between his deep-rooted commitment to his country and his unwanted
job as a soldier in charge of an occupied village” (Aldor, 2003, 84). Be’er’s work,
however, is not the only one. A quick survey of the Israeli modern dance archive reveals
that fences and walls have appeared in many Israeli dance productions: Noa Dar’s 1995
Biting the Peels (1995) and Home (2001), Inbal Pinto’s Duet (1999) and Wrapped
(2000), as well as Ohad Naharin’s Sadeh21, which I will discuss at length below, are
some of the more famous examples. These fences and walls gesture to an aesthetic, which
Aldor summarizes as “invisible unless in final pain,”
39
that has been favored by Israeli
choreographers and has unsurprisingly loomed large in Naharin’s work as well. Across
Naharin’s body of work, there are staged executions and hangings, masks obscuring
dancers’ identities, sickness, overt references to Palestine, and of course, walls.
Taken together, these aesthetic tropes can be seen as the intricate narrative of
public diplomacy, waged by a nation-state whose political position in the
Palestinian/Israeli border conflict has been greatly criticized by humanitarian groups
across the globe. While the present discussion cannot capture the extent of the dialogue
and debates surrounding this ongoing military conflict over statehood, the fact that Israel
has received heavy criticism for its occupation of Palestinian lands, for its erection of a
physical wall along the West Bank as well as its military actions, is undeniable.
40
In
context of this geopolitical debate, then, Israeli modern dance companies’ adoption of an
aesthetic that claims mutual pain, Israeli ambivalence over military tactics, and Israeli

39
The refrain Aldor uses is a reference to the text that is whispered during Naharin’s 1995 piece Z/na.
40
Of course, there has been significant criticism of the Palestinian position in this conflict as well.
However, for the purposes of understanding how Batsheva operates as a cultural ambassador, I am focusing
on the criticism leveled at Israel to examine how Batsheva addresses this criticism through choreography.
277

citizens’ suffering over the wall’s isolation, certainly constitutes a rebuttal to the
international criticism that Israel has received. The insertion of these narratives into the
body of criticism that typically hovers over discussions of this border conflict, seeks to
absolve Israel’s cultural domain (dance) of the ‘aggressor’ charge. These touring state-
sponsored dance companies become true national ambassadors, not only spreading a
positive image of their patron-nation, but suggesting that this nation suffers as much as its
political antagonist from the violence of their mutually rendered political climate. It is
these narratives that dominate Israeli dance companies’, including Batsheva’s, tours of
the European and Asian markets.
Artistic diplomats like Batsheva use the bodies of dancers to articulate the
national pain and importantly, the ambivalence wrought by the military conflict in places
where the governing dialogue does not favor the Israeli position. For example, a 2011
large-scale study conducted jointly by Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, the Middle East
Monitor (MEMO), and the European Muslim Research Centre (EMRC) at Exeter
University to gauge European perceptions of the Israel-Palestine conflict found the
continent to be divided on the issues at best, often seeing Israel as the military aggressor
(Abdullah & Chehata, 2011).
41
According to the study, some 60% of Europeans view
Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip as illegal; roughly 70% believe that the pro-Israel
lobby exercises heavy influence over European media, with 39% seeing this to lead to
Islamophobia (Abdullah & Chehata, 2011).
42
The study interviewed individuals from
Great Britain, France, Spain, Netherlands, Germany, and Italy. A 2012 study done by the

41
This study was carried out by ICM Government & Social Research Unit in January 2011, by Dr. Daud
Abdullah and Dr. Hanan Chehata.
42
These statistics actually show a decline in Europe’s anti-Israel leanings since 2003. Findings of a survey
conducted by the European Commission in October 2003 showed that 60% of Europeans considered Israel
as the greatest threat to world peace.
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Anti-Defamation League has not only corroborated these results, but has actually
reported even higher antagonisms, mostly predicated on Israel’s political and military
action in the Israel/Palestine conflict (“Attitudes toward Jews” report, 2012). Scholars too
have discussed the complicated relationship between Western Europe’s increasingly
vocal criticism of the State of Israel, the continent’s history of anti-Semitism, as well as
the need to both curb its currently growing Islamophobia and to also preserve the racial
purity of European nations (Bunzl, 2005; Kaplan, 2010; Kempf, 2010). While unpacking
this matrix of relationships and racially-indexed political motivations is far beyond the
scope of this chapter, Western Europe’s growing popular hostility towards the State of
Israel provides the backdrop to Batsheva’s tours of Western Europe. Since 2011 and into
the 2012 concert season, when the two studies cited here were conducted, Batsheva has
traveled to Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Canada. It is important to point out
that I am not alleging a direct correlation between these studies and Batsheva’s touring
schedule. Rather, the correlation lies between rising anti-Israeli sentiment and Israel’s
efforts to curb that sentiment through Batsheva’s advocacy of mutual suffering.
In 2011, 2012, and in the current 2013 season, that advocacy has come in the
shape of Ohad Naharin’s new touring production Sadeh21, a piece that not only mimics
the aesthetics that Gaby Aldor ascribes to Israeli modern dance, but exaggerates those
aesthetics to the point of critical surprise. Sadeh21 premiered at the Israel Festival in May
2011. Its original cast is credited as collaborators and its multi-sourced soundscore was
designed by Naharin, although under the pseudonym Maxim Waratt. The work appears in
episodes, each of which sketches out the fundamental tenets of movement that Naharin
has become so famous for. Corporeal explosions are juxtaposed with soft, slow
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sensuality; a dancer’s isolation and perhaps individuality suddenly transforms into group
cohesion and conformity that then transform yet again into militaristic marches; the
overarching absence of color (everything is white in the beginning) is interrupted by
flashes of vibrant peeks of color carried onto the stage on dancers’ bodies; those color-
rich costumes are glimpses into Naharin’s version of bodily “difference.” Dancers’
bodies, at the point of encounter with other dancers, bend into agony, crumbling jaggedly
to the floor, suggesting that military contact requires mutual complicity, but also ends in
mutual pain. One dancer is dragged by another, slowly miming the act of kicking and
resisting, performing a kind of ambivalence in participation, in the context of militarism.
Dancers resist militaristic conformity, an effort that is sometimes successful and other
times ends in their death. Two female dancers fight aggressively, each one of their bodies
flailing underneath the rigidity and roughness of tangled arms and fists, while other
dancers, crouch down surrounding them, witnessing but not watching the battle, subtle
symbols of the ways silence renders agreement in war.
The soundtrack features screams of agony as an individual dancer mimes the act
of being shot; another dancer shivers on the ground, as if in shock, while the rest of the
dancers on stage form a military line of identical marching movements. The dead are
carried. There are walls. The piece opens with three white walls dividing the space of the
stage and the dancers that inhabit it, creating a maze-like anxiety. More notably,
however, Sadeh21 closes with dancers climbing to the top of the wall, which is also the
top most point of the set, and leaping into the black abyss. They reappear immediately
and climb again, repeating the leap into the unknown space, reminding the viewer that
walls and borders do not create finality, only complicated obstacles that endlessly recycle
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an inevitable violence; that existing on either side of the wall compels transgression; that
borders contaminate both sides. Critics have called this the darkest, most enthralling and
haunting of Naharin’s works, pointing out that affect and emotion are more accessible in
this dance than they have been in the choreographer’s previous works (Dekel, 2011;
Friedes Galili, 2011; Schaefer, 2011). More than any other Naharin piece, Sadeh21 is a
drama of racially and religiously constructed geopolitical borders and the violence those
borders inflict on bodies occupying either side of the ideological and physical wall.
Difference, as Naharin depicts it, works overtime here. It is both the racial difference
invoked by the idea of statehood and geopolitical border walls as well as the more
abstracted individual difference that is contrasted to national conformity. Sadeh21,
touring all over Europe, Asia, and Canada, is not just the quintessential example of what
Aldor calls Israeli modern dance aesthetics. Naharin and his company are also artistic
diplomats for their financial patron and home country, offering a performative rebuttal to
discourses that imagine the State of Israel as an aggressor.
Despite these aesthetics’ prevalence in both Israeli dance in general and Naharin’s
choreography in particular, when Naharin’s Batsheva travels to the U.S. however, quite a
different picture of Israeli dance and its performative political morality emerges. Since
Naharin took over Batsheva, the company has toured the U.S. extensively, continuing the
long tradition of exchange that the U.S. and Israeli dance industries have historically
engaged. The most current iteration of the relationship is a curious one that illuminates
more about the structures of the U.S. dance industry than it does about Israeli dance
public diplomacy. Prior to 2011 and the debut of Sadeh21, the U.S. had typically been
included in Batsheva’s international tours, with new dances frequently performed
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throughout the U.S. market. Despite the success Sadeh21 has enjoyed on tour, however,
the company has never brought and has no plans to bring the dark and political drama to
the U.S. Instead, the U.S. market has hosted a far more joyful, spectacle-based and less
emotional Batsheva repertoire. Most recently, Batsheva brought Mamootoot to Brooklyn
in 2005; Telophaza to New York (as part of the Lincoln Center Festival) in 2006; Three
to New York and Deca Dance to Charleston in 2007; Kamnyot to New York in 2008;
Max to New York in 2009; Project 5 to New York in 2010; Hora to Brooklyn and San
Francisco in 2012.
On tour in the U.S., Naharin’s aesthetics and movement language take on an
entirely different tenor. In congruence with what I have referred to as pop-up
performance, the pieces that constitute his core aesthetic tropes are all present, but re-
arranged to produce an effect that is more inward looking, more congratulatory of the
apparatus of theater and the exalted dance mastery that it spectacularizes. There are still
borders, bouts of violence, plays with racial identity, and military parades, but all
strategically re-imagined through Naharin’s Gaga method in order to present dances that
are more conducive to the U.S. market and the ideological climate on race its economy
has constructed. The borders in dances like Minus 16, Mamootot, and Kamuyot are not
geopolitical; they are Brechtian
43
and metaphoric. Here, dancers are not scaling walls
constructed on set; they are breaking the theatrical fourth wall between the performers
and the audience, which is seated in a manner that marks the edges of the dancefloor. The

43
Breaking the fourth wall between the actors and the audience is a theatrical technique that was advocated
by Bertolt Brecht as a way of preventing the audience from over-identifying with the actors on stage, by
forcing the break of illusion. Brecht believed that in Aristotelian theater, strict maintenance of the fourth
wall works to lull the audience into political submission, allowing members of the audience to revel in the
pleasure of illusion rather than engaging political reality. Breaking the fourth wall was one part of what he
offered as solution (Brecht on Theatre, 1957).
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pre-occupation here too is to challenge the idea of the wall’s existence. These dancers,
however, are challenging the walls erected by traditional theater, not those erected by
militant nation-states.
44

Mamootot is another interesting example of racially informed border violence
being reconstituted into abstraction. The dance includes images of violence, “but in an
eerie, surrealist manner” (Acocella, 2006, p.85). Like the avatars that have become such
popular and safe racial proxies in the U.S. dance industry, Mammootot’s dancers were all
powdered in white, made to look indistinguishable from one another. Fantasy is imported
as a substitute for racial and geographic reality yet again in Max. In this dance, Naharin
creates his own, imaginary language, with dancers mumbling incomprehensibly, invoking
elastic narratives of futurism, deflecting from concrete politicized realities. This dance
can be seen as a direct and fantastical foil to pieces like Sadeh21, where dancers speak in
clear Hebrew. This trope continues with Hora, which has a score that “transports [the
dance] from the realm of recognizable to the otherworldly… famous melodies… take on
a futuristic tone in Isao Tomita’s synthesized renditions… insistently inviting the
imagination to push beyond familiar associations” (Friedes Galili, 2012, p.541).
Batsheva’s Telophaza represents a pop-up transformation of Naharin’s aesthetics
as well. Unlike Naharin’s darker, more political vocal pieces like Sadeh21, Telophaza is a
spectacle of multimedia innovation and amusement, featuring a video show and live
camera recording of the dancers, which were then projected onto a screen. Military-like
conformity appeared in this dance as well (as it did in Sadeh21), but this time, the
growing energy and exuberance of the dancers made it clear that Naharin wasn’t

44
“I’m not sure how much it has to do with the boundaries of the Jewish state,” the critic Joan Acocella has
observed, “I think it was about the boundaries of the theater” (Acocella, 2006, p.85).
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interested in the somber dangers of nationalism and the rigid compliance it requires of its
citizens. On the contrary, this was an ecstatic display of unison and choreographic
mastery. Reviewing Batsheva for The New Yorker, critic Joan Acocella (2006) reported
that the “theatrical pizzaz” she witnessed on stage was uncomfortable since the audience
“were all chewing our fingernails over the situation in the Middle East, to see Israel’s
most celebrated dance troupe put on a show that consisted of a seemingly unstructured
series of kinetic thrills peppered with a few attempts to épater le bourgeois” (p.85, 86).
The critic in this case is unwittingly asking Batsheva to perform its public diplomacy
repertory, dances that satisfy the curiosity and criticism of those uncomfortable with the
metastasizing political unrest between Israel and Palestine. And Acocella was not alone.
Since 2009, protests and boycotts have followed Batsheva’s U.S. tours in cities like New
York, Chicago and San Francisco. Activist groups like Adalah-NY
45
have argued, citing
the statement made by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs that Batsheva is “the best
known global ambassador for Israeli culture,” that Batsheva’s U.S. performances are a
way “to show Israel’s prettier face” (Adalah, 2012).
46
Protesters have connected Batsheva
to state-sanctioned apartheid, asking U.S. institutions to boycott the dance company.
Like Acocella, protest groups have reacted to what they understand as Batsheva’s
“total silence in the face of the egregious actions being carried out by the Israeli
government” (Adalah, 2012). This “silence,” for the protesters, translates to an
obfuscation of and denial of apartheid, in the attempt to brand the state of Israel.

45
Adalah, which means “justice” in Arabic, is a New York-based coalition of organizations and individuals
that campaigns for the boycott of Israel. According to their mission statement, the coalition “demand[s] an
immediate, unconditional, and permanent end to U.S. and U.S.-sponsored Israeli aggression in the Middle
East.”
46
This specific protest occurred at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in March 2012, in response to
Batsheva’s scheduled performance of Hora. BAM did not comply with the boycott, stating that Batsheva’s
performance did not support any political agenda.
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Considering Batsheva’s selected repertory for its’ U.S. tours, it is little wonder that critics
allege a “silence.” As I have shown, Naharin has consistently, using pop-up performance,
re-imagined his movement aesthetics and their ideological attachment for the U.S. market
in order to, in fact, render an abstracted silence on the topics of war, racial identity, and
statehood. For Batsheva, public diplomacy in Europe has meant an engagement with
these topics, performing a position that seeks to complicate the political debates and
absolve Israel of its evaluation as hostile invader. In the U.S., however, Israeli public
diplomacy has meant a complete eschewing of these realities, in favor of theatrical
spectacles, folk performances of “authentic” Israeli culture, abstracted pain and
choreographic reverie to accommodate the U.S. dance industry’s climate on race and
racial performativity. These U.S. critics’ arguments bring to the forefront the clear
discrepancy between these two strategies of public diplomacy. Ironically, Batsheva’s
Sadeh21 might provide exactly the kind complicated acknowledgment of the
Israel/Palestine conflict that U.S.-based critics demand; still public diplomacy, to be sure,
but a permutation of performed public diplomacy that is more nuanced, more aware of
the criticisms it faces, less “silenced,” not so much a “pretty face.” But Batsheva cannot
bring its beacon of contemporary public diplomacy – Sadeh21 – to the U.S. market
because the choreography does not comply with the racial discourses that dominate the
U.S. dance industry. What the U.S. critics of this dance company overlook is that
Naharin’s selection of works for the U.S. market adapts its ideas of borders, racial and
cultural identity, isolation, and military ambivalence to those permutations that can be
legible in the U.S. dance industry and its climate of racial and political ideology. Naharin
deploys the logic of the pop-up and settles on a choreographic arrangement of bodies and
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movements that can be acceptable within the parameters of the U.S. dance industry’s
governing perspectives on race; perspectives that are dictated by the hybridized ways in
which the U.S. dance industry is funded (both publicly and privately). His ideas of
futurism, illusion, otherworldliness, the exaltation of theater as a mechanism, and the
focus on transcendent corporeal mastery may not serve the State of Israel’s public
diplomacy agenda, but do, in fact, fit perfectly in the world of dance that the U.S.
industry has cultivated. It is a world, as I have argued, that must acknowledge and
embody racial difference, but only on the most superficial, “authentic” terms, privileging
transcendence, uniformity, and post-raciality in order to invite both federal and
commercial sources of funding for each season. For Batsheva, touring the U.S. means
that the bodies of dancers become carriers of the delicate balance between nation and
market, transforming their bodies to accommodate articulations favored by the host
country and its economic principles.
Ohad Naharin and Batsheva’s pop-up transformation and performance in the U.S.
market can be further understood by looking at the famed artistic director’s interview
with the American journalist and television show host Charlie Rose. When Rose asks
Naharin about the role of culture, his homeland, and the racial violence most associate
with the region, Naharin responds that he thinks of his work as personal, not as
geographic expressions about the politics of borders. His answers routinely default to
both the personal and the universal, avoiding any conversations about geographic
contexts or cultural specificity. “I think we all have great conflicts… You can grow up in
a small village in Switzerland and have great conflicts or have great drama or being
abused or being an innocent victim,” he says (Rose & Vega, 2005). The role of the body
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in dance, he says in this interview, is to carry the weight of these universal and highly
personalized conflicts and sufferings; it is to carry the weight of life, not the weight of
culture, race, or geopolitical conflict. Interestingly, he briefly admits that he has “always
had a very clear social conscious in [his] work,” but then quickly reverts to his original,
U.S. market-tailored position: “The storytelling of suffering or worlds [is] probably quite
boring to see onstage in compared to see somebody’s ability to use texture, dimensional
and multi-layered movement and use of creating tension between elements” (Rose &
Vega, 2005).
As Naharin’s statement suggests, it is mastery of innovative choreography that
makes dancers and artistic directors unique creators, not their involvement in politics. His
position in this interview is a perfect crystallization of the strategic transformation he
undertakes in order to tour the U.S. market: it is both at stark odds with his choreographic
morality in dances like Sadeh21 and simultaneously, easily congruent with the morality
that the U.S. dance industry espouses with regard to racial and border politics.

The Case of Alvin Ailey and Ohad Naharin’s Minus 16: Finding Possibility in
Abstraction
Ohad Naharin and the Batsheva company’s tours of the U.S. market demonstrate,
as I have argued, the ways in which artistic articulation takes on strategic pop-up
transformations in order to reap the benefits of international touring; and conversely, the
ways in which local economic structures condition racial and cultural discourses as they
are imported into that market, compelling the visiting aesthetics to adjust to the local
ideological climate in order to be aesthetically legible. These transformations, however,
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are never absolute. As artistic aesthetics, having undergone an economically determined,
temporary mutation, travel and as they become absorbed by their destination culture,
newly performed by bodies that carry the weight of drastically different corporeal
memory, the aesthetics can take on new meaning. As they are seized by different bodies,
those meticulously woven, pop-up performances begin to exceed their own conditions of
production; they begin to perform beyond their intended boundaries, introducing new
meanings and new edges. When it comes to the pop-up transformations engineered by
Ohad Naharin for his tour of the U.S., this instance of what I have, in earlier chapters,
called a hegemonic leak appears in Batsheva’s relationship to the Alvin Ailey American
Dance Theater (AAADT).
Earlier in this chapter, in order to address the ways in which the neoliberal global
economic model of the U.S. dance industry conditions performed racial articulation in
U.S. dance, I discussed AAADT and its first season under new director Robert Battle. I
explained how the premier dances of this first season – Home, Arden Court, and
Revelations – render the bodies of AAADT dancers mobile national archives, working to
shore up a climate on race that prioritizes an immobile, embodied racial authenticity and
benefits the public touring face of the nation-state. That AAADT season however
included another dance in its repertoire, Ohad Naharin’s Minus 16,
47
which AAADT has
now taken on its 2013 tour.
The Ailey Company’s performance of Naharin’s 1999 dance
48
was both a surprise
and an almost unanimous triumph, according to critics. Speaking rather bluntly to the

47
This was not the first time that AAADT used Naharin’s choreography. In 2002, Naharin premiered Black
Milk with the company.
48
With AAADT’s performance of Minus 16, Ohad Naharin dedicated the dance, which had been performed
by various repertory companies all over the world since its creation, to his deceased wife, Mari Kajiwara.
288

choreography’s distinction from the AAADT signature aesthetic, critic Robert Johnson
(2011) suggested that “adding Ohad Naharin’s ‘Minus 16’ to the mix confounds the
notion that this company is in any way constrained by its ties to the black community, or
limited in what it can express” (para.2). Another critic added that the dance is “the
biggest departure from the traditional Ailey style” (Kussell, 2011, para.11). Less directly,
Eva Yaa Asantewaa (2012) wrote that this particular season represented “new surprise
and reward in the company’s offerings,” forcing patrons to pay attention to the new
artistic director’s “crafty curatorial ways” (para.1, 2). Robert Battle explained his
selection of Naharin’s dance by saying, “I’m looking at the rep and going, Who can I
bring in that hasn’t been brought in?” (Battle quoted in Perron, 2011, para.27). In another
interview, Battle adds, more pointedly: “This piece is edgy, and it’s unlike anything
we’ve done before” (Battle quoted in Kussell, 2011, para.4). That Naharin’s
choreography has been widely interpreted as an anomaly for AAADT, however, is only
the most superficial point in determining what the Ailey dancers’ adoption of this dance
means aesthetically and ideologically. What new knowledges are possible when,
propelled by globalization and its economic conditioning of dance industries, an
American dance ambassador performs the work of an Israeli dance ambassador? What
happens to the racially-marked body on display when the global economy brings
different, nationally-inflected racializations into cultural encounter on stage? How are the
nationalisms that are imposed onto all the dancers’ bodies re-written in this performance
and what energies does this re-writing activate? Some clues, I suggest, lie in Naharin’s
unique movement language, Gaga.

Kajiwara was an AAADT dancer when she first met Naharin and eventually followed him to Tel Aviv to
become a dancer and rehearsal director for Batsheva. She passed away in 2001 (Kisselgoff, 2002).
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Minus 16 is a collection of pieces from Naharin’s past works, including Mabul
(1992), Anaphaza (1993), Zachacha (1998), and Three (2005) stitched together by the
Gaga method, which dominates throughout the dance. It is a perfect example of the type
of pop-up selections that Naharin and Batsheva make to accommodate the U.S. market.
With Gaga as its primary movement praxis, the dance’s hallmark components include
risky improvisation and corporeal unruliness as well as audience participation, both
aesthetic departures for AAADT stylizations, which are rooted in the Ailey and Lester
Horton techniques and their love of choreographic narrative. Ailey was significantly
influenced by Lester Horton’s style and developed his brand of theatrical, experimental
and expressive, but also deeply controlled dance as a result of his collaborations with
Horton. “In following Horton, Ailey conceived theatrical dance as the formalized display
of movement narrative tempered by lighting, costuming, and the emotional presence of
the dancer” (DeFrantz, 2004, p.28).
49
In contrast to this tradition, Gaga requires that
dancers focus on their internal affective energies, neglecting consistency of narrative and
formalized movement. Naharin insists that dancers practice without any mirrors, to
prevent a preoccupation with reflection and representation, in favor of an internalized,
affect-based engine.
50
The method asks that dancers re-imagine the choreography through
constant improvisation, by deploying their bodies in non-scripted ways. More
importantly, to access the affective energies that would spawn improvisation, Gaga asks
dancers’ bodies to pay attention to their own, constantly mobile subjectivities. For the
dancers of color, and especially African American dancers, performing on a U.S. stage,

49
Horton was also the inspiration for Ailey’s multicultural perspective on dance and its possibilities. The
latter came to see dance as a space existing beyond race, gender and sexuality (DeFrantz, 2004).
50
Covering dance studio mirrors, as is Naharin’s usual practice, was impossible in AAADT’s new studio
(floor to ceiling mirrors), so Naharin asked Ailey dancers to turn their backs to the mirror.
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these improvisational tactics take on special significance, given the histories of
representational and subjective stillness that their bodies have been subjected to in the
American racial imagination.
As I discussed earlier in this chapter, tropes of racial authenticity prevail in the
U.S. dance industry, ensuring that the racialized subjects they engage occupy immobile
subjectivities. As a company that features primarily dancers of color and participates in
the U.S. dance industry, as both a commercial and politically diplomatic organization,
AAADT must negotiate the racial scripts that accompany their funding institutions. That
Ailey dancers must consistently be legible as people of color (usually as black),
performing racial transcendence and triumph, preserving American modern dance, and
acting as national ambassadors is a feat of racial stillness. The bodies of AAADT must
inhabit strict racial epistemologies, avoiding the risky transformation and excess that self-
possessed subjects are privileged to access. When these same bodies, however, are
choreographed for Gaga-style improvisation, this stillness is significantly complicated.
This is exactly what takes shape on stage when AAADT performs Naharin’s Minus16.
Two specific routines from Minus 16 demonstrate this well. In one, we see a
semi-circle of male dancers, all dressed in ill-fitting black suits, using their bodies as an
imperfect, jerky yet rhythmic wave up and down the stage. In consecutive motion, they
each explode off their seats, briefly opening up their chests to the illuminated ceiling and
just as quickly landing back down. The explosions seem urgent if also, instantaneous,
propelled by something the audience can only speculate about. The dancer at the end of
the line collapses to the floor, as if drained by the act of tapping into internal recesses and
then revealing his findings, only to slowly return to his seat. The line of dancers
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continues, gaining a frantic anxiety as they proceed, eventually all rolling their necks,
simulating a kind of inaccessible and overwhelming affective possession. Any semblance
of uniformity is superficial here, denying the dancing body’s claim to an authentic
membership in any cohesive racial experience. Instead, the effect is one of flailing body
parts and individual journeys, loosely held together by the neat line of their seating
arrangement, enabling the dancing body to perform outside of closed racial identity, to
undertake its own trajectory of movement and presence.
In another Gaga routine, a male dancer stands alone at the forefront of the stage,
swaying to the sounds of Cha Cha and Mambo. He quickly picks up speed and his
awkward, jarring moves and tremors become frenzied and unpredictable. Asantewaa
explains:
Manic yet joyful in his childlike silliness, he seems to have taken to heart that
popular expression, ‘Dance like nobody’s watching,’ because he’s hardly self-
conscious. In due time, the stage gradually fills with identically attired dancers, all
with the same nutty, herky-jerky itch to dance (Asantewaa, 2012, para.10).
The critic is in part correct: no one is watching. That is the premise of the Gaga
method, enabling dancers to inhabit unpredictability, unruliness and excess; a kind of
corporeal anti-narrative, driven by sensitivity to the personal interior and rendered on the
exterior as something that is perhaps illegible or jarring. With Minus16 the performances
of AAADT dancers here are reminiscent of Daphne Brooks’ work on postbellum black
musical theater. Brooks argues that dancers of this period worked to critically
defamiliarize their own bodies from the racialized stillness imposed on them in order to
write the possibility of alternative racial epistemologies. Brooks's archive reveals that
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dancers frequently looked to phantasmagoria, hysteria, and spectacle in their dance
choreography, symbolically rendering a corporeal unruliness that refuses to defer to
existing racial scripts of immobility and predictability (Brooks, 2006). The objective was
an embodied performance that would challenge the “powerful stillness” and the attendant
dispossession that were imposed on bodies of color during this period. Leaning on the
aesthetic sensibilities made available through Naharin’s Minus 16, AAADT dancers
manage something similar, writing their bodies outside of their prescribed racial roles.
Improvisation is key here as it mobilizes subjectivities in movement, wherein the
dancing body writes the transformations of the subject. The performance of ‘becoming’
that is a prerequisite for the act of improvisation allows dancers to both write and
articulate the heterogeneity of their own identities, alienating “authentic” racial scripts.
Instead of these temporarily discarded racial scripts, dancers move across the varied and
often contradictory structures of feeling that inform racial existence. Embodied by
AAADT dancers, whose bodies are gripped by the repositories of a uniquely American
racial memory and compelled to embody a mobile national archive, Naharin’s aesthetics
and the Gaga language become the engines of racial corporeal transformation (rather than
the spectacles of individualism and universal humanism that Naharin intended).
Moreover, the audience participation – the break with theater’s fourth wall – that
is the signature ingredient in both Minus 16 and Naharin’s U.S.-destined work in general,
forces U.S. audiences to participate in the dancers’ mobility across racial possibilities.
Characteristic of Naharin’s choreography, AAADT’s rendition of Minus 16 included
dancers venturing into the audience to select participants. These participants were then
brought on stage to act as partners to the repertory dancers, to participate and contribute
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to the improvisation taking place on the stage. Again, in an instance of unintended
performative excess, the Ailey audience’s participation is not simply a break of theater’s
fourth wall. It forces the audience to not just witness but to partake in the momentary re-
writing of racial bodies; to feel their own complicity in the spectacularization of race on
the American theater stage. Performing Naharin’s Minus 16 gives AAADT dancers the
space to articulate transformative subjectivities, as their bodies unravel across the
uncertain and risky terrain of improvisation that then lures dance patrons into spaces of
unscripted and unexpected racial knowledge.
The relationship between Naharin’s Gaga and the Ailey dancers is a tricky one.
As I have argued, Naharin’s selection of pieces (including Minus16) that rely on the non-
linear abstractions of Gaga are strategic for the U.S. market and its investment in a
particular racial ideology in the dance industry. Naharin’s core aesthetics undergo a pop-
up transformation, assembling into strategic dance compositions that are conducive for
travel to the U.S. Unlike Sadeh21, for example, the Gaga-heavy Minus 16 focuses on
individual movement, on borders of theater (rather than geopolitical and racial borders),
on a frenetically heterogeneous soundtrack, avoiding all references to political identity, to
land, or to border conflicts. These are the tropes that make it safe and legible in the U.S.
market. However, when these same movement aesthetics and themes are adopted by
dancers of color, by the African American dancers of AAADT, the aesthetics take on a
new morality, transforming again, this time unintentionally. Inasmuch as AAADT’s
performance of Naharin’s dance allows for typically illegible racial structures of feeling
to emerge on the bodies of Ailey dancers, Naharin’s aesthetics are endowed with a new
morality. The performance of this morality is something of an excessive hegemonic leak.
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It is paradoxically born out of the cultural encounters made possible by the economic
conditions of global creative mobilities, but also exists in excess of those conditions,
shaping extemporaneous performances of race out of aesthetics that were designed to
avoid exactly that. The moment of encounter, in other words, is one that the neoliberal
markets cannot contain wholly; not insofar as that encounter requires performativity.

295

CONCLUSION: TRICKSTER ARTISTS: THE MARKET CLEANS UP DIRT
RITUALS
The musician, international recording artist and mogul, Jay-Z has said that artists
often play with existing racial scripts, putting on identity performances, taking small
charge over situations that are far out of their reach of power. He calls those
performances strategic masks: "Sometimes the mask is to hide and sometimes it's to play
at being something you're not so you can watch the reactions of people who believe the
mask is real. Because that's when they reveal themselves” (Carter, 2010, p.55). That art,
that alchemy, for the artist, is where both misunderstanding and transformation sit
perched in anticipation; the mask can go either way. It can plunge the artist into
misapprehension or it can provoke, turn arrangements of power temporarily on their
heads. “So many people,” Jay-Z says, “can't see that every great rapper is not just a
documentarian, but a trickster” (Carter, 2010, p.55).
That is how this dissertation began, with the trickster figure. Specifically, it began
with the mobile trickster figure, the one who transforms, disguises, and performs in order
to pass through doorways structured by geopolitical and ideological scripts of power.
Like Jay-Z and like Lewis Hyde, I began by analyzing contemporary artist tricksters;
those artists who perform their own racial identities and the identities of their works
compulsively, in order to purchase their own passage through the global doorways of
their industries. The contemporary trickster artist, I have argued, adapts her aesthetics and
her own identity to pop-up logics in response to the arts industry’s mandates for travel.
The aesthetic body appears as a flexible and adaptive pop-up as the trickster artist pops
up all over maps and circuits of exhibition. The trickster makes for a useful metaphor.
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The trickster artist is at once compliant with the power-inflected requirements imposed
by the conditions of mobility and travel and at the same time, works to re-imagine those
conditions through performance. It is a dynamic that finds artists at once subjected to
their industries’ governing architectures of power and resistant to those architectures. The
case studies in this dissertation have explored precisely this complicated dynamic.
The contemporary trickster artists are undeniably subject to the conditions of
mobility imposed by their increasingly neoliberal and global industries. As industries like
fashion, visual art, and dance increasingly adopt free-market, neoliberal economics and
begin to imagine themselves more and more as “global” corporate entities with
accelerated mobilities and ever-widening global reach, the artists who participate in these
industries have to adjust their aesthetics and their own biographies to accommodate these
transitions. For artists who arrive from what is understood by each industry as their “off-
center” and for artists who are racially-marked as other, these adjustments happen on the
terrain of racialization. To be visible and viable in their respective arts industries, artists
must be mobile; each industry’s unique adoption of neoliberal logics dictate this mobility.
To be mobile, these artists have to constantly shift their own racializations and the racial
moralities espoused by their works. They have to accommodate each market that they
enter by mounting site-specific, temporary exhibitions, performing and then folding up
their wares to move on to the next location, recalibrate, re-imagine and re-mount.
These processes are different for every industry discussed in this dissertation. In
the fashion world, geographies maintain a stronghold on meaning-making and value.
While visibility has been granted to fashion weeks and fashion hubs from across the
globe, the gatekeeping power to attribute value is still centralized and Eurocentric. To be
297

visible, in this schema, is to be accepted and visible in what are considered the traditional,
mainstream geographies of the fashion world. For Pakistan’s fashion industry, then,
becoming a full-fledged neoliberal industry means focusing on “emergence” and
“projection,” with a specific destination in mind (Europe). The Pakistani fashion
industry’s objective is to visibly pop up alongside French, Italian, U.S., and English
fashion industries. The question for mobility and race in the fashion world, then, is: how
does the off-center become mobile? I have argued that the off-center gains projection by
strategic pop-up performance; by Orientalizing their global ambitions into economic
harmlessness and timidity; by transforming the gendered labor of garment workers into
the gendered labor of artisan “Third world women”; and by prioritizing Islamic
aesthetics.
The performances engaged by the fashion world’s off-center are just one aspect of
the processes of racialization that dominate global cultural and arts industries. The visual
art market offers another aspect of this relationship. Rather than projection or emergence,
the global visual art industry asks for a constant “wandering.” That is, in the visual art
industry, mobility is far less directional, more diffuse, and certainly, more constant and
accelerated. Visual artists who aim to participate in the markets of this industry, are
constantly on the move, popping up and disappearing, constantly tweaking their
aesthetics accordingly. Collections are on a never-ending tour of the globe, and the artists
behind these exhibitions are involved in an equally never-ending adjustment of their
aesthetic grammars of race and their own racialized bodies. Artists like Sofia Maldonado
and Máximo González look to the logics of the pop-up, re-assembling and re-organizing
the particles of their aesthetics to yield a site-specific and market-specific regime of racial
298

representation. Building out their aesthetic temporary pop-ups, the number of
permutations they can produce are endless; there are as many permutations as there are
market destinations. And the impact this has on the artists’ ability to articulate racial
structures of feeling and to possibly make interventions into racially-informed structures
of domination are not insignificant. Maldonado transforms her “girls” from “jungle”
divas whose bodies are gripped by legacies of biological racism to ambiguously
racialized “chicas” who render race through style, suggesting with the latter, that
racialization happens through costuming. Meanwhile, González uses Mexican “papel
picado” banners to speak to imagined Mexican folk culture in one place, to colonial
violence in another, and to abstracted liberal humanism in yet another. The strategic
shifting is necessary and ensures their visibility, but also elastic and obliging of market
capriciousness.
The third major domain of the relationship between race and mobility in
contemporary global cultural industries comes courtesy of the dance world. Dance,
because of its unique funding structures, remains in most countries a national enterprise.
In dance industries, government subsidy and private foundations are significant
testimonies of legitimacy even when corporate sponsorship increasingly makes up a
larger slice of each dance company’s revenue source. Dance companies, consequently,
become mobile national archives, dragging a vision of racial formation that is privileged
by the nation-state wherever they travel. Both the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
and Ohad Naharin’s Batsheva Dance Company are great examples of the ways in which
public diplomacy and the nation’s imagined racial scripts impact contemporary dance
companies (even when those dance companies are sponsored by multinational banks) and
299

facilitate their mobility across the global dance world. The funding maze of the dance
industry, and many performing arts industries, ensures that the racial affect on
choreographic display in movement praxis is one that is conducive to both the nation and
to corporate interests. In the U.S., this means that a company like AAADT performs a
very narrow rendering of what is presented and understood as African American lived
experience; the company dancers deliver an “authentic” black life that benefits the
nation’s racial imagination because funding structures dictate it. Meanwhile, Batsheva
demonstrates that this economically-conditioned racial climate in the U.S. dance industry
also impacts dance imports. Companies like Batsheva must turn to their own pop-up
strategies in order to transform their aesthetics to accommodate the U.S. climate. And
transform they do. Batsheva goes from a company with choreographic narratives about
racial and geopolitical citizenship, statehood, and mutual pain, to narratives of spectacle,
abstraction, and folk reverie.
Throughout these case studies, I have argued that artists from the discussed
industries undertake forms of pop-up performance deliberately and strategically. The
global economics embraced by their parent industries require it, but the artists
nevertheless engage the pop-up as a tactic of mobility. Far from a moralizing argument
on commercial artists or commercial aesthetics, I view the artists’ use of the pop-up
mechanism as compulsory; as necessitated by the industries that retain the power to dole
out visibility and viability. When industries attach themselves to “global” ambitions, the
artists, if they are to participate in industry circuits, must make-do. They must make their
industry conditions more habitable by purchasing their own visibility and mobility
through constant pop-up performances of race. These contemporary artists – those who
300

hail from the off-center and those whose bodies and aesthetics are inevitably racially-
othered by their industries – are tricksters.
But the work of tricksters, as I have shown, is slippery business. Their power lies
in their ability to remake and re-envision their habitus (industry) through constant
performance. Racial performance may be necessary in these industry circuits, but it is
also an inherently unstable enterprise. As Jay-Z said, sometimes these performances are
misunderstood, sometimes they confirm expectations, but other times, they’re
transformative. The transformative potential is in the “dirt” of transgressive artistic
practice (Hyde, 1998). It is in the messiness that results when performances of race are
not quite; when they are excessive; when they implode their own conditions of existence.
In this dissertation, I have been invested in finding those moments as a way of
understanding how neoliberal logics condition artistic expressions of race but also how
the performativity that makes up those conditions can sometimes lead to transgressive
articulations. In the chapters on fashion and dance, I argue that transgressions are
possible. The Islamic veil, made visible as an object of fashion by the global economics
that default to Orientalism, is a fashion object that tends to symbolically and
economically resist the very conditions that make it globally visible in the first place. It
recasts and refashions the terms of global Islamic citizenship. In the dance world, the
encounter of two public diplomats and their nation-based racial agendas creates a
collision with productive performative excesses. AAADT, conditioned by its own
economies, performs the choreography that Batsheva brings to the U.S. in order to
accommodate the U.S. dance economy. The result is an AAADT performance of racial
301

affect that choreographically challenges the dispossession and racial authenticity that is
typically demanded of AAADT.
These two examples remind us that where there are tricksters, there is dirt. But, as
I have argued, the chapter on visual art tempers this optimism and signifies exactly what
is at stake when specifically neoliberal, global logics become so closely imbricated with
artistic aesthetics and their global circulations. In the industry of visual art, the artist’s
racial brand subsumes and neutralizes the dirt of artistic transgression. That visual artists
are increasingly encouraged to understand their own racial identities as market categories
and branded entities is only the beginning of this relationship. These brands, their
ambivalence and flexibility with regard to race, manage to absorb whatever spillover the
artists might produce in their work. As the case of Delphine Diallo demonstrates, the
artist’s racial brand expands to capture whatever potentially-productive inconsistencies
the artist’s work might produce; it puts racial transgression to work for the neoliberal
racial brand. For this project, the visual art case study has been an instructive one. If
trickster artists change the world by performing and making art in global, popping up
inside geopolitical doorways, then what happens when their performances are contained
by and in some cases, determined by those doorways’ market logics? What happens when
each doorway presents the trickster artist with yet another, different market formation to
accommodate? Can those performances hold onto enough “dirt” to change their worlds?
The pop-up performance analytic is useful for understanding that forms of power
exist in global cultural and arts industries in complicated ways. The industries’
economies impose structures of domination, demanding particular racial permutations
from artists, but artists also make strategic decisions to accommodate those demands in
302

order to be visible in their industries and in order to survive professionally as artists.
Certainly, while this power is not strictly centralized, it is also not symmetrically
distributed. Artists work at the behest of industries and no matter how much transgression
they are able to sneak in (whether deliberately or not), these processes happen on
landscapes tilled by the global economy. But thinking of the pop-up as a mechanism
deployed by global artists is also useful for understanding artists’ racial performances as
something that approximates pathology. Artists are not only forced to perform, they are
forced to perform constantly and manically. The speed and regularity of racial
transformations that occur in these formations can produce possibility, but can also
produce aesthetics that are so deeply elastic that they are not much at all. If we are to be
invested in forms of artistic practice as spaces where, per Hyde, hooks and others, the
world is changed, then this endless, performative variability changes what is at stake in
the very notion of artistic practice.
Certainly, I am not suggesting that artists are either the sole “authors” of their
aesthetics and works, or that the variability of aesthetic articulations cannot stitch
together a productive body of racial epistemology. As Chapter 1 (Castiglione and Indita)
has shown, in this project, I have understood racial and gender identity as mobile, as
taking up varying subject positions for the purposes of articulation, as manifesting a kind
of “becoming” by being able to move across subjectivities. Consequently, the strategic
performances taken up by contemporary artists in these case studies have been illustrated
as sometimes disruptive and generative. However, performativity’s lack of guarantee,
coupled with the examples provided in Chapter 3 (visual art), ask us to confront the
limitations of performance in the context of industry. When it comes to performances
303

commissioned by global cultural and arts industries, the multiplicity of subject positions
taken up by artists with the help of pop-up performance, can lead to simply pathologized,
even evacuated multiplicities. As artists imagine and re-imagine themselves endlessly
and in the vision of yet another new market, the dirt can escape but it can also be made to
disappear, its political and racially-motivated moralities lost through the endless travel
from one authenticity to the next.

304

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Asset Metadata

Creator Arzumanova, Inna (author)

Core Title The pop show: racial performance and transformation in global arts industries

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 07/31/2015

Defense Date 04/24/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag arts industry,culture industry,dance,fashion,OAI-PMH Harvest,performance art,racial performance,visual art

Format application/pdf