Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 9 Number 3, December 2008
___________________________________________________________________
Noland, Carrie & Ness, Sally Ann (eds.), Migrations of Gesture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 296 pp.
9-780816648658 (paperback). $25.
Reviewed by
University of Granada
In Migrations of Gesture, we find a comprehensive analysis of the politics and implicatures of gesture and bodily language from its most purely physical and original sense to the different meanings it has acquired throughout the destinations – or migratory movements – it has been subjected to.
Approaching the fields of ritual to contemporary dance, poetry intertwined with painting and calligraphy, filmic discourse, gang walking, philosophy, or mimique performances, the book offers a rich insight into the multifarious implications adhered to the insufficiently theorized phenomenon of gesture. As well as from a wide variety of perspectives or migratory territories, these implications are explored diachronically – by means of the study of the semantics of gesture in its historical evolution, as in the case of ritual dance or gang walking.
Throughout its nine chapters, strategically chosen by the editors, the book invites the reader to contemplate the multifarious possibilities of meaning of bodily or facial gesture. Thus, a quite revealing analysis of classical dance as a system of quasi-linguistic inscription in the body inaugurates this manifold exploration of gesture. The dancing body is hence viewed insofar as it interacts in a permanent dialogue with the language of dance. Hereby, the author argues, whereas it is the vehicle through which the language of dance is enabled, at the same time, the dancing body is affected by the dynamics of dance, which visibly models the body exposed to it.
This idea of a dialogue between the body and its performance is also the centre of Katrak’s essay on Indian dance. Katrak considers the migratory transference of the gestures originally at the core of ancient Indian dance throughout its historical evolution and into contemporary practices of dance and yoga. This all serves her to conclude on the non-linear translation of gesture, which, as a consequence of evolution and migration becomes modeled and re-defined in each of its forms.
A particular awareness of gesture and its representational value underlies the poetics of mimique, as Franko’s chapter holds. Resting on notions such as Derrida’s theory on deconstruction and the politics of mimicry and exaggeration, mimique takes the reality of gesture to the extreme in order to produce meaning as a result, precisely, of the saturation of its semantic capabilities.
As in the case of Indian and classical dance, a fascinating examination of physical graffiti and gang walking provides a revision of the evolution, on this occasion, of African dances and the slave traditions during the time of colonial plantations towards contemporary forms of gang performances and even the utterly globalized swings of hip hop music. The chapter deals with some crucial aspects of slave history to carefully detail how the politics of these anti-slave vindications, or occasionally, the aspirations of slaves themselves, constituted the scaffolding of the politics of gesture underlying the dances emerged throughout the 1960s and 1970s within the African community in America, as well as their later development.
A very different approach is proposed by Stimson, whose essay represents a reflection on the philosophical dimension of gesture in relation to photography. On the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s assertion of the critical distance enabled by the photographic image, or Riis’ concept of “reportage”, Stimson regards photography inasmuch as it is an instrument for analytic detachment and examination of the self, rather than for a flat, linear contemplation of the photographed object.
Noland and Ness’ volume also offers an analysis of gesture as bedrock in cinema. Accordingly, the book includes an analysis of filmic gesture as “digesture”, in an effort to disassociate the purely visual aspect of gesture from its kinesthetic reality and thus discover the subversive semantics underneath the artificiality of some of these gestures in experimental cinema. Likewise, although taking as a basis some samples from Chinese cinema, the ghost-like presence of gesture and the emptiness that haunts Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Good Men, Good Women is brought to the fore as a particular case in which the gesture – or motional language of the camera – rather than the movement of the actors and characters becomes the major signifying element to produce the core meaning of the whole production.
In Noland’s study on Michaux’s series of signs, it is not saturation, but rather a deliberate deprivation of symbolical – or linguistic – meaning that endows his creation with a particularly suggestive power. Noland’s chapter, which analyses the drawings of Michaux, in between the primitive sketches of Modernist painters and the calligraphic designs of Chinese artists, enriches the volume with the reproductions of Michaux’s creations. His series of pseudo-calligraphic signs or, in some cases, diagrammatic pictorial sketches, invite to reflection and to the inevitable attempt of interpretation and attribution of meaning. This is probably a further dimension of the book which, at the same time as it theorizes on the implications and meanings of gesture, encourages the reader to reflect on the mechanism that, almost unconsciously, operates beneath other conscious mental processes and compels us to provide meaning for any gesture we may observe – either on the printed or photographed page, on the cinematic screen, or on the body of the other. Migrations of Gesture indeed induces us to consider all these questions.