Innehåller bibliografi och index

Obscuritas antiquitatis: institutions, affiliations, marginalia -- Madness after Foucault: medieval bacchanals -- Translatio: St. Vitus's Dance, demonism, and the early modern -- The Convulsionaries: antics on the French Revolutionary stage -- Mobiles, mobs, and monads: nineteenth-century crowd forms -- Médecine rétrospective: hysteria's archival drag -- 'Sicily Implies Asia and Africa': tarantellas and comparative method -- Ecstasy-belonging in Madagascar and Brazil -- Ghost dancing: excess, waste, and the American West -- 'The Gift of Seeing Resemblances': cargo cults in the antipodes -- Monstrous grace: blackness and the new dance 'Crazes' -- Coda: moving fields, modernity, and the Bacchic chorus

At once a catchall term to denote spontaneous gestures and the unruly movements of crowds, choreomania emerged in the nineteenth century at a time of heightened class conflict, nationalist policy, and colonial rule. In this book, author Kélina Gotman examines these choreographies of unrest, rethinking the modern formation of the choreomania concept as it moved across scientific and social scientific disciplines. Reading archives describing dramatic misformations of bodies and body politics she shows how prejudices against expressivity unravel, in turn revealing widespread anxieties about demonstrative agitation. This history of the fitful body complements stories of nineteenth-century discipline and regimentation. As she notes, constraints on movement imply constraints on political power and agency. In each chapter, Gotman confronts the many ways choreomania works as an extension of discourses shaping colonialist orientalism, which alternately depict riotous bodies as dangerously infected others, and as curious bacchanalian remains. Through her research, Gotman also shows how beneath the radar of this colonial discourse, men and women gathered together to repossess on their terms the gestures of social revolt