Critical Race Theory and Copyright in American Dance: Whiteness as Status Property

by Caroline Joan S. Picart

The effort to win federal protection for dance in the United States was a racialized and gendered contest. Picart traces the evolution of choreographic works from being federally non-copyrightable to becoming a category potentially copyrightable under the 1976 Copyright Act, specifically examining Loíe Fuller, George Balanchine, and Martha Graham.

Genres: Philosophy, History, American

255 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Caroline J. S. Picart, an associate professor of English and a courtesy associate professor of law at Florida State University, is an authority on German Romanticism and horror films, she is the author of nine other books, including the two-volume Holocaust Film Sourcebook. Picart is also a philosopher and a former molecular embryologist educated in the Philippines, England, and the United States. She has received numerous awards and fellowships.

Reviews

[Winnie Ha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Insightful and made me think of the relationship between dance, copyright, race, and gender in ways I (and probably many others) haven’t really thought of before. That being said, this book is very dry and I had to read several sections multiple times to get what the author was saying, and even after that, I’m not fully convinced of her argument even as somebody who is aware of the institutionally discriminatory nature of the law.

[Mills College Library]

346.73048 P5867 2013