Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in New York and Dakar, this book explores the Senegalese dance-rhythms Sabar from the research position of a dance student. It features a comparative analysis of the pedagogical techniques used in dance classes in New York and Dakar, which in turn shed light on different aesthetics and understandings of dance, as well as different ways of learning, in each context. Pointing to a loose network of teachers and students who travel between New York and Dakar around the practice of West African dance forms, the author discusses how this movement is...

Staging Citizenship explores a wide range of Roma performances and representations-from live music and cultural performances to Gypsy soaps and reality TV shows, demonstrating how disenfranchised urban Roma claim cultural citizenship and belonging in music, dance, activism and everyday encounters.

The songs of the beloved Irish poet Maire Bhui Ni Laeire (Yellow Mary O'Leary) explore themes of colonial subjection, oppression and injustice, representing an integral contribution to the development of anti-colonial thought in Ireland. Singing Ideas explores the significance of her work, and the immense power of her chosen medium.

Considered by many to be the greatest Irish song poet of her generation, Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire (Yellow Mary O’Leary; 1774–1848) was an illiterate woman unconnected to elite literary and philosophical circles who powerfully engaged the politics of her own society through song.  As an oral arts practitioner, Máire Bhuí composed songs whose ecstatic, radical vision stirred her community to revolt and helped to shape nineteenth-century Irish anti-colonial thought. This provocative and richly theorized study explores the re-creative, liminal aspect of song, treating it as a performative...