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Because dance materializes through and for people, because we learn to dance from others and often present dance to others, the moment of its transmission is one of dance's central and defining features. Valuing Dance looks at the occasion when dancing passes from one person to another as an act of exchange, one that is redolent with symbolic meanings, including those associated with its history and all the labor that has gone into its making. It examines two ways that dance can be exchanged, as commodity and as gift, reflecting on how each establishes dance's relative worth and merit differently. When and why do we give dance? Where and to whom do we sell it? How are such acts of exchange rationalized and justified? Valuing Dance poses these questions in order to contribute to a conversation around what dance is, what it does, and why it matters.

This section collects a series of short reflections on the life, camaraderie, and scholarship of Randy Martin, a longtime member of the Social Text editorial collective. In place of definitive, authoritative analyses of Martin's work, these pieces present a montage of personal snapshots by people that collaborated, moved, thought, wrote, edited, and learned with him.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- I DANCE AND CULTURAL STUDIES -- 1 Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies -- 2 Cultural Studies and Dance History -- II SOCIAL LIVES, SOCIAL BODIES -- 3 Reinstating Corporeality: Feminism and Body Politics -- 4 "The Story Is Told as a History of the Body": Strategies of Mimesis in the Work of Irigaray and Bausch -- 5 Classical Ballet: A Discourse of Difference -- 6 Ballet as Ideology: Giselle, Act 2 -- 7 Dancing the Orient for England: Maud Allan's The Vtsion of Salome -- 8 The Female Dancer and the Male Gaze: Feminist Critiques of Early Modern Dance -- 9 Some Thoughts on Choreographing History -- 10 Auto-Body Stories: Blondell Cummings and Autobiography in Dance -- 11 Dance Narratives and Fantasies of Achievement -- III EXPANDING AGENDAS FOR CRITICAL THINKING -- 12 Dancing Bodies -- 13 Spectacle and Dancing Bodies That Matter: Or, HIt Don't Fit, Don't Force It -- 14 Sense, Meaning, and Perception in Three Dance Cultures -- 15 Some Notes on Yvonne Rainer, Modernism, Politics, Emotion, Performance, and the Aftermath -- 16 Homogenized Ballerinas -- 17 Dance Ethnography and the Limits of Representation -- Vodou, Nationalism, and Performance: The Staging of Folklore in Mid-Twentieth-Century Haiti -- Notes on Contributors -- Permissions -- Index