Grime and Fury: Dances in Natural Histories of the Americas

Early modern European writing and visual culture represented dance in the Americas in wide-ranging genres. Among these were natural histories confecting colonial categories of being. Drawings and descriptions invited pre-modern considerations of evidence and witness in the telling of history. This paper explores ecology, movement, and the non-human in early modern dance writing’s complex racial-sexual representations connecting histories of the body with ecology and colonialism. Taking up northeastern North America and French colonial projects addresses corporeal counter-histories as ways engagement with ongoing struggle over incommensurate ontology and sovereignty. This history resonates in a twenty first-century context with the effort and failure to give an account of epidemic and epistemic crisis as well as anxieties regarding race, gender, make-up, conversion, and transformation.