Revenant Genealogies: Dance, Critical Theory, and the Future(s) of the Humanities

. . . Like the figure of the undead returning to another time or place, revenant concepts reappear in a different form than they originally occupied in the cultural imaginary. Unlike the human revenant, which tends to evoke feelings of dread, horror, or the vertiginous nausea of the uncanny, the cultural revenant allows for elision, even erasure. However, these sites contain traces of a historical/ideological cartography, one I call revenant genealogy . . . This paper traces the path of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale from playtext/scripted drama to dance as a means of understanding the complex arterial system that revenancies create and traverse. . . Freed from linguistic logic and etymological lineage, danced Shakespeare offers unique insights into this alternative form of historical genealogy and provides a model for a more capacious form of humanities-based analysis.

Professor Amy Rodgers (Mount Holyoke) teaches classes on film and performance history and theory, adaptation studies, gender and sexuality in film and media, Shakespeare and performance, and the history of trauma on stage and screen. She is a co-founder of the Shakespeare and Dance Project and the director of the Bread Loaf School of English’s Global Humanities Seminar at Monterey, CA. Her research encompasses the fields of audience studies, adaptation studies, and interdisciplinary influences across artistic and narrative forms, such as dance, music, literature, film and media.

Her first book, A Monster with a Thousand Hands: The Discursive Spectator in Early Modern England was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2018, and she has published numerous articles on Shakespearean adaptation in film, television, dance, and music. Currently, she is working on a monograph with dance critic Leigh Witchel on ballet and critical theory entitled Embodying the Signifier: Classical Ballet, Critical Theory and Performance.