Contemporary Authors

LC control no.: n 94096111 Descriptive conventions: rda LC classification: PS3552.R777 Personal name heading: Browning, Barbara, 1961- Found in: Samba, c1995: CIP t.p. (Barbara Browning) data sheet, etc. (b. 12-7-61; on faculty at Princeton University) The gift, 2017: ECIP t.p. (Barbara Browning) Amazon.com, viewed on 10-13-2016: (Barbara Browning; teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University. She is the author of the novels The Correspondence Artist (winner of a Lambda Literary Award) and I'm Trying to Reach You (short-listed for The Believer Book Award). She also makes dances, poems, and ukulele cover tunes) ================================================================================ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES Library of Congress 101 Independence Ave., SE Washington, DC 20540 Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov

• rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2017/07/the-rumpus-mini-interview-project-93-barbara-browning/

  The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #93: Barbara Browning

  By Meagan P. Kavouras

  July 20th, 2017

  When I requested an interview from Barbara Browning to talk about her new novel, The Gift, she agreed and asked if I had a favorite song she could cover for me on the ukulele. Browning possesses many gifts—she is an accomplished dancer, novelist, performance artist, theorist, teacher, and self-described amateur musician—and The Gift is a rumination on the relationship between artistic giftedness and gift economies, an idea Browning borrowed from Lewis Hyde’s text by the same name. Like her previous two novels, The Correspondence Artist (2011) and I’m Trying to Reach You (2012), Browning’s latest is a work of metafiction built from bits and pieces of her own life.

  The book began as a gift-giving experiment, an experiment she continues today, where she sends ukulele covers to friends, students, even total strangers on the Internet. Barbara Andersen, Browning’s semi-fictional doppelgänger, follows this experiment wherever it leads her, from the Occupy camp in Zuccotti Park to the Midwest to a random doorstep in Germany. The result, for the reader, is a thoughtful mélange of ideas on art, politics, and human connection in a rapidly changing world.

  Browning and I corresponded via email one evening in March.

  ***

  The Rumpus: I want to start with what might be an obvious question, but I’m curious—I’ve always thought of the ukulele as a very unserious instrument, maybe simply because of its size, but you write about it and the covers you make for people so tenderly. What was it that drew you to the ukulele in the first place?

  Barbara Browning: Oh! I read your question, and I had to gasp because in fact it’s very meaningful today—a day when I’m feeling especially tender about the uke! When I was writing my last novel, there was a character who played the ukulele. He was a kind of anachronistic person, based very much on a real person—a guy with an uncanny resemblance to Jimmy Stewart—both physically and in temperament and personality. He was a musician who worked accompanying dancers, and I told him that I was a dancer, but that my dances were generally very minimalist, and I filmed them in my apartment. He said he liked small dances, and he played a small instrument. He suggested that I choreograph a dance in my bathtub and he would accompany me on the uke. I think he meant that to be a playful, slightly flirtatious joke, but I took him up on it, and then I began playing myself. The reason I’m feeling tender about that story is that my friend passed away just yesterday. It happened in the morning, and I learned later in the day. He was a very gentle, kind person. People attracted to the uke tend not to be grandstanders. It’s a little embarrassing now that there are so many girlish singers who have taken to the instrument. It can be really cloying. But there are plenty of true weirdos who have used it to great effect—George Harrison, Tiny Tim, Amanda Palmer, Taylor Mac… I certainly don’t count myself among those! I’m really terrible. But I can sometimes figure out a way to make my deficiencies work for me. I like to leave a lot of holes in arrangements. My dances are similarly deficient. I think writing’s the one place where I have some slightly higher standards for myself… Do you play anything? I ask in part because you live in Nashville.

  Here’s my friend playing, the one who just died.

  Rumpus: I’m so sorry to hear about your friend. I remember the Jimmy Stewart character and the bathtub scene. It felt so eerie in the book, but the video is charming. You include a lot of real people from your life in your books. In the case of your friend that passed, is it comforting to have a piece of him with you in your art, or does that make it harder?

  You asked if I play an instrument and then sent me a video of you dancing to your friend singing “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” which is strange because I briefly played in my friend’s band in college, and he does a really great cover of that song. You can listen to it here.

  Browning: I’m listening now to your friend’s cover—it’s so great!

  Yes, it’s helpful to me to hold the people I love in my fiction. Of course it depends also on their feelings about it. In the case of Jimmy Stewart (I didn’t know you read that one too! Thanks for that!), he liked being the villain in my novel—in fact he told me he wanted to be even scarier—but he was also a kind of discreet person, and he liked having a different name to hide behind and so on. So he remains hidden in that video, and a little hidden in the novel. Even in the acknowledgments, where his name is an anagram…

  In The Gift, there were a lot of very explicit negotiations about how people wanted or didn’t want to be represented, as you know. It’s part of the meta-narrative…

  Rumpus: Yeah, there’s a lot in The Gift about the lines between truth, lies, and fiction. You like to blur lines… the personal and the political, the reader and the writer, dancer and non-dancer, etc. I think my favorite thing about your writing is how seamlessly you move between scholar Barbara and artist Barbara. You touched on technique earlier, and I want to ask you about that. How do you employ technique in your writing? Because sometimes your prose feels very tightly choreographed and other times it feels more improvised.

  Browning: Oh that’s interesting. I’d have to say that my writing is the place I’m most interested in structure, constraints, and so on. But it’s interesting that you said “choreographed” because that’s a question I’m always asking, in my academic writing as well as my fiction—what can you say with dance that you can’t say with language? But in asking that, I’m kind of trying to push each medium in the direction of the other. In I’m Trying to Reach You, that’s also a preoccupation of my narrator, and there’s a reference to that beautiful dance by Lutz Forster in Pina Bausch’s Carnations, which is basically just him signing “The Man I Love” in ASL, which probably bears some relation to the dances I made to Sami’s voice messages.

  I’m not asking this as a trick question or to embarrass you, but did you happen to look at the dances for The Gift that are on Vimeo? In the advance copies of the book, the website and the password were sort of hidden on the copyright page, but in the actual book, I asked them to move that to the bottom of the page with the epigraph. Still, it won’t surprise me if people don’t go to look at them. I don’t mind, in fact, if people don’t want to see them, whether it’s out of principle or just disinterest. But I’m happy if people do go and look.

  I don’t think I quite answered your question yet. My writing is usually pretty highly mapped out, and I revise a lot. Some of this book, in the first draft, was written as events were unfolding, so it was improvised in so far as we improvise our way through life, but I knew at the outset more or less the trajectory I wanted. The very end, of course, is always open until the very end. Figuring out where a story ends gives me, always, both pleasure and pain.

  Rumpus: No, I totally missed that! But I’m looking at them now. You explain in the novel that these videos you send people are part of a creative gifting experiment that you hope will “jumpstart a creative gift economy that would spill over into the larger world of exchange.” But the book is full of other kinds of gift-giving, too, like Tye caring for his friend in the wheelchair, your doppelgänger dropping a copy of her (your) novel into the free library at the Occupy Wall Street camp, and the friends who drive supplies to Jersey after Hurricane Sandy. Small acts of kindness and compassion. With the country as polarized as it is today and everyone at each other’s throats, do you still think this idea of gift giving could create meaningful change?

  Browning: I just sighed audibly.

  In the period I’m describing in the book, there were these fleeting moments of so much optimism. And then these crushing disappointments. After I wrote the first draft, for a couple of reasons—some of which are obvious in the book, some not—I had to put it away for a while. When I came back to it to revise it, I wondered if it would make sense, since politically, the ground had shifted. And then, more recently, the ground didn’t just shift—it really imploded. But yes, of course, I still believe in those things, the possibilities of gift economies that aren’t based on notions of magnanimity but rather doing what’s obviously right. And for all that people want to frame Occupy as a failure, I think it modeled for a lot of us ways to deal with what we’re confronting now.

  Rumpus: Well, that was going to be my next question. The novel is set in 2012 and 2013, and you discuss some of the issues surrounding the Occupy and Pussy Riot movements, but it seems like a lot of the issues only recently bubbled up into the broader public consciousness during the course of the presidential campaign. I was going to ask if you think it would be beneficial for us to reexamine these movements within the context of our current political climate, but you kind of already answered that. What kinds of strategies and ideas do you think we can borrow from these movements moving forward?

  Browning: I see it happening already, in both deep and superficial ways. Actually, the ostensibly superficial things interest me most. I describe in the novel knitting a balaclava during the Pussy Riot trial. I ended up writing a piece in the journal Social Text about a little cottage industry I set up for a while, knitting colorful balaclavas for babies. Anyway, when they came up with the idea of those “pussy hats” for the Women’s March (ack, I wish they hadn’t called it that, but rather a March Against Misogyny, but oh well, they didn’t ask me!), I made a ton and gave them to all kinds of people. At first I was a little irked by the pink thing (like those banal breast cancer awareness ribbons—why such a cute and girly color?!), but I didn’t really agree with the people who thought it was “essentializing” to foreground anatomy. I thought it was quite the opposite: it meant the “pussy” was always already prosthetic, anybody could have one if they chose to identify that way, but the best part was, it was slow activism. I mean, I understand urgency, and I even understand the appeal of accelerationism, but I’m always interested in exploring durational acts—of art, and of politics—and I’m interested in inefficient, handmade actions whose value is largely sentimental. After that march, the pussy hats seemed to diminish in significance, because the immigration/travel ban issues became so urgent, but you still see some around. Anyway, I thought there was something really beautiful about walking into various yarn stores this winter and encountering really diverse groups of knitters sitting around making those silly hats together, talking about politics. Sometimes very impractical activities can have very significant effects in the world. There was little anecdote I ended up taking out of The Gift because it was a little too digressive, but it was about some ramifications of one ukulele cover tune I sent to somebody that may or may not have ended up instigating a kind of wave of Graeber-mania in a Latin American country. I probably wasn’t really responsible, but maybe I was—or maybe Leo Ferré was, since it was a Leo Ferré cover… Two attachments on this message…

  Rumpus: Amazing. There’s a yarn store in a suburb of Nashville that announced they didn’t want people buying their yarn to make pussy hats, citing the “vulgarity, vile (?), and evilness” of the movement, but the pussy hats are still pretty popular here. People wear them to the protests at the state capitol every Monday. Nashville has surprised me.

  I have one more question, and I’m going to switch gears here. I liked your phrase “inappropriate intimacy,” and it struck me as I was reading that it might make a good slogan for the Emily Books imprint. Your book is the third collaboration between Coffee House and Emily Books, which is described as a publishing project devoted to promoting “weird books by women.” All three books are really raw portraits of women dealing with the bane of everyday existence, or at least that’s how I read them. How do you feel your book fits with the Emily Books ethos?

  Browning: Oh, yes, definitely. I love Emily and Ruth. Actually they say they champion books by “(mostly) women.” That’s nice. But yes, I guess “inappropriate intimacy” would be pretty applicable to the first two books they published under their imprint—and many of the books they promoted and distributed before that. Hmm… I started to write about the word “raw” in relation to “cooked” and almost started lecturing you about Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Le cru et le cuit, but it’s late and that would be unbearably pedantic!

• TISCH NYU - https://tisch.nyu.edu/about/directory/performance-studies/3015339

  Barbara Browning

  Associate Professor

  Office Hours
  Fall 2017
  Tuesdays, 11:00am-1:00pm
  barbara.browning@nyu.edu

  +1 212 998 1637

  721 Broadway

  Floor 6

  Follow

  Photo by Eddy Walsh
  bio portrait

  Barbara Browning was studying, teaching and performing Brazilian dance during the period in which she was completing her PhD in Comparative Literature at Yale University, where she wrote her thesis on French ethnographic writings on Brazil. That bifurcated focus – between dance and literature – came together when she came to the Department of Performance Studies here at Tisch. She published Samba: Resistance in Motion in 1995, which quickly became a signal text in dance studies. While ethnographic in its methodology, the text employed many of the tools of textual analysis to perform close readings of several Brazilian dance forms.

  Her next book, Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture, took a wider perspective, both geo-politically and in terms of the forms of cultural expression, but was asking some similar questions regarding the ways in which performance allows for political counter-narratives. As with her first book, she employed both passages of lyricism and personal narrative to push her critique forward.

  These experiments in performative writing – that is, writing that doesn’t merely describe or analyze performance, but enacts it – came to the fore with the publication of her ficto-critical novels, The Correspondence Artist and I’m Trying to Reach You, both of which tell “stories” of performing artists, but also enact a kind of meta-performance on the art they analyze. Both were accompanied by ancillary performances created by Browning and posted online. In her teaching, she encourages students to experiment not only with ethnographic and ficto-critical approaches, but also with creating their own intermedia performances in relation to their scholarship.

  “Reader, I call you: hypocrite, my similar, my brother. Hypocrite because your ostensible passivity is a pretense - it’s you who’s in charge. My similar, because the hypocrite is also me, addressing you indirectly, rarely deigning to speak your name, calling out to you while I act like I’m speaking into the wind.”

  – Barbara Browning, “Dear Reader: The Novel’s Call to Perform”
  Education
  Yale University
  PhD 1989 - Comparative Literature
  New Haven, Connecticut

  Yale University
  Master of Arts 1986 - Comparative Literature
  New Haven, Connecticut

  Yale University
  Bachelor of Arts 1983 - Comparative Literature
  New Haven, Connecticut
  Specialized Areas of Research
  • Fictocriticism
  • Performative Writing and Feminist Theory
  • Performance on the Internet
  • Dance and Quotidian Movement
  • Performative Objects (Fetish)
  Publications and Awards
  Books:
  Samba: Resistance in Motion (Indiana University Press, 1995), winner of the De la Torre Bueno Prize for Outstanding Book on Dance.

  Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture (Routledge, 1998).

  Who Is Mr. Waxman? (audionovel, 2007).

  The Correspondence Artist (Two Dollar Radio, 2011), winner of the Lambda Literary Award.

  I’m Trying to Reach You (Two Dollar Radio, 2012), short-listed for The Believer Book Award.
  Awards & Distinctions
  · Lambda Literary Award for The Correspondence Artist (2011)
  · The Believer Book Award short list, I’m Trying to Reach You (2012)
  · Fulbright Fellow
  · Fellow, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
  · President’s Award for Teaching, Princeton University
  · Mellon Visiting Professor, Tulane University
  · De La Torre Bueno Prize for Best Book in Dance

• wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Browning

  Barbara Browning
  Small shot.jpg
  Born December 7, 1961
  Madison, Wisconsin
  Occupation Professor, Cultural Critic, Novelist, Performer
  Nationality American
  Genre Nonfiction (cultural analysis), Novels, Poetry, Chamber Choreography
  Notable works The Gift (or, Techniques of the Body) (2017); I'm Trying to Reach You (2012); The Correspondence Artist (2011); Who Is Mr. Waxman? (audiobook, 2007); Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture (1998); Samba: Resistance in Motion (1995)
  Notable awards Lambda Literary Award: Bisexual fiction (2011); De La Torre Bueno Prize for outstanding book on dance (Samba: Resistance in Motion); Runner-up, Yale Younger Poets Prize (1989); President's Distinguished Teaching Award, Princeton University
  Children Leo Oliveira
  Website
  admin.tisch.nyu.edu/object/BrowningB.html

  Barbara Browning (born December 7, 1961 in Madison, Wisconsin) is an American academic, award winning novelist,[1] dancer, and cultural critic.

  Contents

  1 Education and career
  2 Writing
  3 Works
  4 References
  5 External links

  Education and career

  Browning received her B.A. in comparative literature from Yale University in 1983, spent a year in Brazil on a Fulbright fellowship, where she studied dance, and then returned to Yale to complete her Ph.D. in 1989. She taught for six years in the English Department of Princeton University, where she was awarded the President's Distinguished Teaching Award,[2] and since then has taught in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, serving for a time as Chair.[3]
  Writing

  Her first book, Samba: Resistance in Motion (1995),[4] was an ethnographic account of her experiences studying and performing Brazilian dance. It was the 1996 recipient of the de la Torre Bueno Prize for an outstanding publication in the field of dance scholarship. Her second academic book was Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture (1998).[5] Browning began writing fiction in 2004, producing an audionovel in 2007 (Who Is Mr. Waxman?).[6] Her novel The Correspondence Artist was published in 2011 by Two Dollar Radio.[7] Her second novel, I'm Trying to Reach You, was published by Two Dollar Radio in June 2012.[8] It is a multimedia project linked to a series of "chamber choreographies" which she has published on YouTube.[9] Her third novel, "The Gift," is similarly accompanied by a series of dance videos posted online, ostensibly by the narrator. It was published by the Emily Books imprint of Coffee House Press.

  Readers of Browning's academic writing have noted that in addition to representing "a pioneering effort in bringing discussions about the popular culture of Brazil into the North American academy,"[10] it evidences "the imagination of a novelist."[11] By the same token, her novels take up such apparently academic concerns as the work of anthropologists Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas, the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, and the correspondence of Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren, as well as incorporating photography and referencing video art, leading one reviewer to characterize her work as "part memoir, part fiction, part epistolary, part metadata-existentialist philosophy, part art installation."[12]
  Works

  Cultural Criticism:

  Samba: Resistance in Motion (1995). ISBN 978-0253328670.
  Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture (1998). ISBN 978-0415919807.

  Audio novel:

  Who Is Mr. Waxman? (2007)

  Novels:

  The Correspondence Artist (2011). ISBN 978-0982015193.
  I'm Trying to Reach You (2012). ISBN 978-0983247111.
  "The Gift (or, Techniques of the Body)" (2017). ISBN 978-1566894685.

• new yorker - https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-inappropriately-intimate-exchanges-of-barbara-browning

  The Inappropriately Intimate Exchanges of Barbara Browning
  On the contrived mischief in the writing, and life, of the author of “The Gift.”

  By Alice Gregory

  June 9, 2017

  Browning describes her novels as “fictocritical,” meaning that each contains, in addition to traditional plot, elements of theory and essayistic analysis.
  ILLUSTRATION BY NATHANIEL WHITCOMB / PHOTOGRAPH BY KARI ORVIK

  In one of the first e-mails I received from the novelist and academic Barbara Browning, she asked me to call her and apologize. I hadn’t done anything wrong—at least, not yet—but she wanted to conduct a little creative experiment, what she describes as “an inappropriately intimate exchange of art.” Browning’s fiction comes with the warning that any encounter with her, even a brief one, might carry the risk of deeper involvement. Still, I was embarrassed as I left the voice mail, in which I said I was sorry in advance for this article and any imprecise or inadequate characterizations of her that might appear in it. In response, Browning sent me a video of herself dancing, semi-seductively, to the soundtrack of my monologue.

  Browning likes a bit of contrived mischief. Its pursuit is the force behind her writing and also, arguably, her life. In addition to writing four novels, and serving as an associate professor in the Performance Studies program at New York University, she has also spent years posting videos of herself online—singing, dancing, playing the ukulele—and then forging charged, creative relationships with the strangers who come upon them. This is almost exactly what happens in her latest novel “The Gift,” which was published last month, to a flurry of excited reviews, by Coffee House Press, in conjunction with Emily Books, a Brooklyn-based publisher that champions “transgressive writers of the past, present and future.” The protagonist of “The Gift” is a woman named Barbara who has in common with Browning her job, hobbies, habits, friends, and university-subsidized apartment. Barbara constructs a quasi-erotic online relationship with Sami, a virtuosic musician living in Cologne, who reveals himself to have Asperger’s syndrome, an amputated leg, and a chronic-pain problem. He and Barbara begin corresponding—sending each other e-mails, ukulele song covers, videos, voice mails—and, before long, Barbara’s infatuation with Sami has become the organizing principle of her life. They stay up late exchanging recordings; she knits him accessories and is beguiled by the sound of his breath. Barbara’s girlfriend gets jealous.

  Browning describes her novels as “fictocritical,” meaning that each contains, in addition to traditional plot, elements of theory and essayistic analysis. Browning’s early novels, which were published by the minuscule but respected family-run press Two Dollar Radio, based in Ohio, were, like her latest, peppered with casual, offhand references to concepts like “gift economies” and the “fort-da game,” as well as to cultural figures and thinkers, including Yvonne Rainer, David Graeber, Lauren Berlant, and Pussy Riot. But her novels are also, improbably, warm and funny, animated by friendships, flirtations, and love affairs, many of which are pursued doggedly online—in chat rooms, on Facebook, through e-mail exchanges. It’s tempting to compare her to popular writers of “autofiction,” such as Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, and Ben Lerner—all of whom she mentions in her work—but Browning exaggerates the genre to particularly postmodern, batty, and charming extremes.

  The literary critic Phyllis Rose has suggested that gossip “may be the beginning of moral inquiry,” and Browning’s body of work can be read as a demonstration of something similar: the idea that obsessive online research into the lives of other people is a generative intellectual and emotional endeavor. More than that, Browning’s novels—with their familiar tone, intermittently unreliable narrators, and intimate, extra-textual components (YouTube videos, MP3s)—invite the response that contemporary authors fear most: the reader will put down her book and spend the next three hours fiendishly Googling, reverse-engineering her entire imagination and proving that her fiction is, in fact, “merely” her life.

  That, in any case, is what I had done in the weeks leading up to our meeting. Browning, for whom wider recognition has arrived relatively late in her career, can sometimes seem less like a real person than like a character imagined by Rachel Kushner or Dana Spiotta—a heroine of downtown New York, whose performative life and prankish habits were invented to be written about. From the photos included in her past novels, and from her brazenly earnest YouTube videos, I learned that she had long hair and looked fifteen or twenty years younger than her age (she is fifty-five). I listened to her first non-academic book, “Who Is Mr. Waxman?,” an audio novel “about intimacy, loneliness, household cleaning products, e-mail, cunnilingualism and the commodity fetish,” which was released in 2007 and is read, intentionally, a bit too close to the mike. I played the lo-fi music she had uploaded to the Internet, and figured out who many of her friends were. (In “The Gift,” she mentions by name the queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, who died in 2013, but partly fictionalizes or purposely misidentifies others, such as the filmmaker Rebecca Miller.) I scanned decade-old reviews of art events obliquely mentioned in her books, and found the Facebook page of her twenty-four-year-old son, who also appears as a character in “The Gift,” in which Barbara takes “family values” cigarette breaks with him on the balcony of their adjacent apartments. It was just the kind of biographical research that journalists routinely do, except this felt less like work than like the urgent and resourceful state one enters upon developing a new crush.

  In an e-mail with the subject line “Maybe: Alice Gregory”—“That’s what it said on my phone under your number,” she wrote, adding, “I thought that was funny”—Browning proposed that we meet in a bar in lower Manhattan for Martinis, ostensibly to discuss our transaction. She suggested early evening, as her lover, who sometimes performs as “a semi-fictional French rockstar,” was in town, from France, visiting with his daughter. She arrived right on time. Browning possesses a feline beauty and the kind of sinewy body usually inhabited by dancers or drug addicts. We settled into the most remote corner of the dark, jazzy bar. We discussed her next book—about the Brazilian composer Caetano Veloso—and her academic history. Browning came to N.Y.U. in 1989, with a doctorate from Yale in comparative literature and a dissertation on French ethnographies of Brazil, at what she called “the last moment in academia when departments would just hire people because they thought they were interesting.” Only briefly did we discuss my voice mail. The dance she composed and recorded in response went entirely unmentioned.

  Browning is adept at intellectual seduction: she prolongs largely irrelevant anecdotes, pauses just before imparting crucial exposition, teasingly asks your permission to reveal information she knows you desperately desire. What I really wanted to know about was Sami. In the novel, against the advice of friends and family, Barbara goes to visit him, in Germany, where she is forced to realize that their rapport, which had been a performance of generosity, a kind of personified gift-giving, is something sadder and maybe not quite as symmetrical as it once seemed. My curiosity about what had really occurred felt misguided, a little unsophisticated, and, like the eagerness for mild slander that’s dislodged after a glass and a half of wine, impossible to contain. Browning seemed intuitively to understand my fascination with the real-life backstory of a person she had only sort of invented. After plucking an olive from her drink and eating it, she removed her sweater and revealed her lean arms, one of which was tattooed with an illustration from an André Breton novel. She started writing “The Gift” in 2011, during Occupy Wall Street, she said, and wrote the first draft in real time, while she was thinking about different forms of barter and exchange, and as her relationship with “Sami”—the character was, of course, based on a real correspondent—progressed. She paused. “I have to say, this is a rabbit hole that we could go down for quite a while,” she said. “Though I must also say that it is fascinating if we do”—here she lingered—“go down it.” I smiled and said, “Let’s go.”

  Upon completing her manuscript of “The Gift,” Browning learned that the man with whom she had been exchanging e-mails had plagiarized most, if not all, of the virtuosic songs he had sent her. As it turned out, almost everything else he told Browning during their correspondence was a fabrication, too. He was not an autistic man but a bipolar woman. She was married; she had a child. She was an illustrator, not a musician. She said that she had recently been under psychiatric care, and her therapist thought that it would be a good idea for her to come clean to Browning. The e-mail recounting all this was lucid, clearly written, apologetic.

  Catching herself in the rabbit hole, Browning interrupted her story to allow for a moment of self-consciousness. “I do worry that, when I tell the story, it sort of feeds into this cultural moment, into this anxiety about ‘catfishing,’ and it starts to sound a little banal,” she said. Her tone was that of someone still astonished by a recent trauma, not yet angry with the person who inflicted it. “If you were going to say what was really virtuosic about the performance, of course it was the construction of that persona,” she said. “And indeed that persona was extraordinary. It was extraordinary.” Browning seemed sad, but somehow also invigorated from talking about it. Was it possible, she wondered aloud, to be an “artist of life”? She ate another olive from her Martini, and smiled. “The degree to which this person had gone to create a really plausible character was remarkable,” she said. “I totally met my match.”

• catapult - https://catapult.co/stories/the-lie-in-my-novel-the-gift

  The Lie in My Novel
  “Where the fiction began—and who was authoring it—was getting confusing.”

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  How To | Turning Points

  This is a picture of me giving a public lecture in a silly hat:

  That’s a little embarrassing, but it could have been worse. I was wearing it because on the morning of my speaking engagement, I had a small basal cell carcinoma removed from my forehead. It was nothing serious—basal cell carcinoma is a very slow-growing, common form of skin cancer that’s easily treatable and doesn’t spread. My doctor said, “We see about three million of these a year.” He didn’t specify who “we” were, but you get the picture. Still, since the growth was just over my left eye, he thought I stood a good chance of getting a shiner from the surgery. Also, when he stitched me up he put on a pretty unseemly bandage.

  The talk I was giving that afternoon was on a panel with two conceptual artists, Aliza Shvarts and Jeremy Hutchison, and it was sponsored by the Whitney Museum. I figured somebody might be recording video or at least taking pictures, and I’m vain enough not to really relish the thought of my image with a big Band-Aid floating around forever on the internet (in fact, I was right—I filched this photo from documentation of the event on the web), so on the way home from my little surgery, before going to the talk, I stopped by a costume shop to see if maybe I could find a good cover-up. I didn’t want to look like somebody else—but it occurred to me that maybe I could play up my disfigurement—like get a really exaggerated bandage, gory with fake blood. Weirdly I couldn’t find one for the head. I did find a “biohazardous sticky body part”—a bloody fake nose that I considered attaching with spirit gum to my bandage. But on closer inspection it looked a little unhygienic and I thought it might fall off.

  It didn’t occur to me to get a Mardi Gras mask, or a rubber chicken face, or a floppy clown wig. I wasn’t looking for a disguise. But I didn’t mind the idea of stretching the truth a little, adding some unneeded surgical dressing or an extra sticky body part. Of course, I would have explained the situation to the audience—I wasn’t really going to try to convince them that my growth had been a biohazardous second nose. I often extend the truth a little to create fiction—but even when I do it in a novel, I say when I’m doing it. And if I say in a novel, “This really happened,” it really happened.

  Of course, anybody with an ounce of psychoanalytic theory under their belt—or just common sense—knows that nobody’s likely to have a complete grasp of the complete “truth” about anybody—maybe especially about him or herself. And I certainly don’t mean to suggest that there’s some moral imperative for other people to be constantly avowing their own truthfulness, or “confessing” to their fictions. Most people who write novels feel no compunction about assuming poetic license when “writing from life.” But I have some kind of George Washington and the cherry tree thing going on—it’s constitutional—not in the political sense. I just mean I really cannot tell a lie.

  But even now I have to interrupt myself to say that that’s a lie, though a tiny one—it’s almost true. If somebody gets a bad haircut, I’m capable of saying, “Oh, you got a haircut!” or even, “Cute!” because, let’s face it, what good is it going to do anybody to say “I see you got a bad haircut”?

  At the time of this talk, I had just finished writing a novel called The Gift. It was a very honest novel, but I did tell a lie in it. Still, right there in the book, I said I was lying. Here’s what really happened—the truth, at least, as I knew it: I was corresponding with one of my characters. We corresponded for two years. He said his name was Rafi (though I called him “Sami” in the novel) and he lived in Germany, though he was of South Asian descent and had grown up partly in the UK. He was a virtuosic musician, and he would send me musical recordings, to which I sometimes made dances, as well as many hours of voice messages. I also made dances to these. In addition to the recordings, he sent me a slew of photographs—some recent, some from his fraught and difficult childhood. Sometimes his messages—both written and spoken—were a little dissociative. He was on the autism spectrum, and he was also addicted to opiates, because of a painful neuroma he developed after losing a leg in a tragic street accident. I found him very affecting.

  I knit him a large “thigh cozy”—a sock for his stump. I made it out of organic green wool—his favorite color—and since there was some yarn left over, I also knit him the hat that I’m wearing in this photo, plus an iPod cozy. When I was going to send these items to him around Christmas, I carefully folded them, and I tucked into the package a tiny tester flask of a perfume that I thought he might like called “Realism.” One of the principal ingredients is “hay absolute,” which is more essential than an essence. It’s a very green smell, and very real. I thought it would be nice to know what he smelled like.

  I explained this in my novel, and I recounted the story of how I sent my gifts:

  I took the package to the post office at 11th Street and 4th Ave. There was a long line because of the holidays. As I was standing in line I saw a sign explaining what kinds of things you couldn’t send via airmail: obviously really hazardous materials like lighter fluid and firearms, but also alcohol, perfume, prescription drugs, and tobacco. Hm, perfume. But my flask was so tiny, and it was all wrapped up in the iPod cozy, plus the package was sturdy and all taped up. I couldn’t imagine that tiny vial would break open, and if it did, there were just a few drops in there—they’d surely evaporate right away. When I got up to the window, the clerk looked humorless. She weighed my parcel and looked me dead in the eye: “Any perfume in there?” I looked her dead in the eye and said: “No.” She put the necessary postage on the package and tossed it into a bin.

  Well, so you see I’m capable of telling a lie. But only if I really think it’s harmless.

  Why, you’ll be wondering, do I have the hat? It’s a long, sad story, longer and sadder even than the book I wrote, but I’ll tell you a very short version. The package was returned to me, ostensibly because of some clerical error, and imagine, I got on an airplane and went all the way to a German city and searched and searched for my character and even when any reasonable person would have come to understand that in fact he really was fictional, I continued to believe he was real. Until finally one day I was shown incontrovertible proof that the virtuosic musical recordings he’d been posting on the internet weren’t his own. He had also been collaborating with some other musicians, and through Rafi we’d been in occasional touch with one another. One of these musicians alerted me to the fact that some, if not all, of our friend’s tracks had been pilfered from YouTube videos performed by a plethora of other people. There had been small digital alterations of pitch, tempo, and EQ in order to mask the appropriation—particularly when vocal performance had been involved. The consistency of these digital alterations had rendered a deep, smoky, resonant voice that seemed to be unmistakably that of a particular, singular person. The voice messages I’d received had been similarly processed.

  When confronted, “Rafi” offered some information about his “real” identity. Maybe you can understand why I’m starting to use inverted commas here. The question of where the fiction began—and who was authoring it—was getting a little more confusing. The crumbs of information that “Rafi” offered began to coalesce into a somewhat different character. Just a bit of internet sleuthing led to more.

  Does it matter if I tell you that my character was, in “real life,” a woman? Not autistic, but bipolar, married, with a child, not a virtuosic musician, but a visual artist, not thirty-seven but forty, not South Asian but Northern European, not an amputee, but cut off in another sense? Like him, beautiful? Do you believe that story? Should I? If I were to play for you the dance videos that I made to my character’s voice messages, would you also fall in love with that deep, smoky voice? Would it matter to you from whose mouth it came?

  I told you, I’m not a moralist about truth telling—I just do it myself, compulsively. When there was the first glitch, about the mailing address, I told my character, “It’s okay if you say to me, ‘I can’t tell you the truth—what I’m telling you is a fiction.’ But tell me if it’s a fiction!” Well, he couldn’t do that. In retrospect, I can’t really blame him.

  But that other person, the musician who showed me that incontrovertible evidence—he had some very strong feelings about all of this, and he felt horribly betrayed. Not just by “Rafi,” but by me. Because, get this: He was convinced that I was the one who had fabricated everything. I found the accusation devastating, but you can almost understand his reasoning. I’m a weird postmodern novelist preoccupied with, perhaps more than anything else, the performance of gender, and the fiction of love, or the love of fiction. My first novel had been all about that, about the way so many of us compose our love lives through correspondence, increasingly in the digital realm. Gender in that book was mutable—as it is in The Gift—and, if you ask me, in life.

  But maybe you’ll find that a tad Lacanian for your taste. Maybe your idea of the “real” is a little less complicated than mine. And besides, since I already confessed to that little white lie at the post office, why should my accuser, or you, believe anything I say?

  But it’s all true.

Tip sheet
264.22 (May 29, 2017): p4.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Barbara Browning, author of The Gift, dives into the weird world of book blurbing. publishersweekly.com/blurbs

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Tip sheet." Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2017, p. 4. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA494500636&it=r&asid=8242a6ec7185f0689fc6cb052eb87477. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A494500636

QUOTED: "enigmatic and mysterious tale."

The Gift
June Sawyers
113.16 (Apr. 15, 2017): p19.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
The Gift. By Barbara Browning. May 2017. 248p. Coffee House, paper, $15.95 (9781566894685); e-book (9781566894777).

There's a literary tradition in which authors use alter egos as their main characters. Browning's stand-in is Barbara Andersen. She has just received some spam from a psychiatrist calling himself Dr. Mel, who specializes in treating obesity and who signs his electronic letter "Love Mel." Intrigued, Andersen sends him a "gift," a ukulele version in English of the song "I Wish You Love," which is heard in Francois Truffaut's film Stolen Kisses (1968). This leads to a series of inappropriate encounters, an erotically charged correspondence, and collaboration with a troubled musician in Germany. Browning's novel blurs the boundaries between life and fiction as well as dance, art, and video. She references real-time events and real people, from the Occupy movement to Pussy Riot, from the Nation's, Katrina vanden Heuvel to performance artist Karen Finley. Like Andersen, Browning also makes dances, writes poetry, and performs ukulele covers. Where does Barbara Browning end and Barbara Andersen begin? What is the difference between fact and fiction? Those are some of the intriguing questions raised by this enigmatic and mysterious tale.--June Sawyers

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sawyers, June. "The Gift." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2017, p. 19. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA492536103&it=r&asid=82365236a3ea0999fec23d8f12e3f143. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A492536103

QUOTED: "Browning is working at the edges of her craft, and it's utterly thrilling to watch."
"a delicious love letter to readers and co-conspirators everywhere."

Browning, Barbara: THE GIFT
(Mar. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Browning, Barbara THE GIFT Coffee House (Adult Fiction) $15.95 5, 9 ISBN: 978-1-56689-468-5

In this exquisite meditation on gift-giving, intimacy, the body, and performance, Browning (I'm Trying to Reach You, 2012, etc.) dashes the boundaries between autofiction and novel and offers daring readers something more intimate and muscular than a mere book.Barbara Andersen, a clear stand-in for Browning, teaches performance theory in New York City by day and records ukulele covers by night. Enthralled by Lewis Hyde's The Gift, Barbara sends recordings to strangers she meets by chance on the internet as well as to prominent public thinkers like David Graeber and Lauren Berlant. "The recent implosion of the global financial system made it evident that we needed to try something else," Barbara muses about her impulses. Her fascination with "inappropriate intimacy" ultimately draws her into an erotic long-distance relationship with musical virtuoso Sami, an autistic man who lives in Germany. But when Barbara finally flies overseas to meet Sami in person, he has a breakdown that prevents their meeting and causes Barbara to question everything. Against this development, Barbara traces the work of her friend Tye, a gifted performance artist and trans man, weaving descriptions of his performances into details about her own teaching, activism, and art. At one point, Barbara reveals her struggles with memory, transforming the act of writing--and reading--this novel into a collaborative performance of recovery and creation between writer and reader. "It's not just that I seem to have erased quite a few unpleasant memories," Barbara writes. "Sometimes I think this is what opened up some space on my hard drive for imagining things." Browning takes a book that could easily exist in hypotheticals, layers, and masks and instead grounds it in the chaos of its time, including the disruptive politics of the Occupy movement, the infamous Pussy Riot protests and arrests in Russia, and the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. The effect is indeed intimate but never inappropriate. Browning is working at the edges of her craft, and it's utterly thrilling to watch. A delicious love letter to readers and co-conspirators everywhere.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Browning, Barbara: THE GIFT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482911777&it=r&asid=a5fa47a93cfd3637cbabf990453425bc. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A482911777

QUOTED: "The narrator has an exceptionally graceful page presence: loony and profound, vulnerable and ingenuous."

The Gift
264.6 (Feb. 6, 2017): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* The Gift

Barbara Browning. Emily Books (Consortium, dist.), $15.95 trade paper (248p)

ISBN 978-1-56689-468-5

In this charming, erudite, and often devastating metafictional novel, a writer and academic from New York carries on an intense email correspondence with an autistic musician in Germany--who may or may not be who he says he is. Set in the early 2010s and centered loosely around Occupy Wall Street, Browning's (The Correspondence Artist) novel takes an unabashedly digressive form. The narrator, who calls herself Barbara Andersen, dances from highbrow topics (the gift economy, performance theory) to anecdotes about her family members, lovers, and friends to accounts of her ongoing "conceptual art project" (she makes ukulele covers of various pieces of music and sends them to friends and strangers). Meanwhile, she makes repeated reference to the very novel we're reading, a move that lends her pontifications about authenticity, fictionality, and representation--stirred by her fraught relationship with the musician, Sami--a sometimes comic, sometimes unsettling edge. All this might seem like so much postmodern hot air, but the narrator has an exceptionally graceful page presence: loony and profound, vulnerable and ingenuous, Barbara acts to unify the book's central concerns, giving its intellectual flights of fancy a palpable human pulse. Maybe nothing in this book is exactly what it seems. But the sadness, at least, is real. (May)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Gift." Publishers Weekly, 6 Feb. 2017, p. 42. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480593813&it=r&asid=a3cd414bbc12616ab6d4c7a0321929de. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A480593813

QUOTED: "a rewardingly offbeat novel that's by turns sexy, humorous, and insightful."

The Correspondence Artist
258.1 (Jan. 3, 2011): p34.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Correspondence Artist

Barbara Browning.Two-Dollar Radio (Consortium, dist.), $16 trade paper (168p)

ISBN 978-0-9820151-9-3

Browning toys with form in her quirky debut, an epistolary love story that, despite a few misfires--the images, for instance, sprinkled throughout feel like unfortunate clip art--should hook readers whose tastes run to the unconventional. The narrator, Vivian, recounts via e-mails her love affair with an artist, who, at different times in the book is an Israeli novelist, a Vietnamese multimedia artist, a Basque poet, and a Malian musician. The narrator creates these characters ostensibly to protect the privacy of her famous lover, and her accounts of her affair vary slightly with each incarnation to reveal incrementally the personality of her "true" paramour and build toward different versions of a betrayal--Vivian's kidnapping by Basque anarchists, a run-in with a Lycra-clad Medusa. Though the story sometimes becomes mired too deeply in its own concept, Browning relentlessly explores her theme of love's many faces, giving readers a rewardingly offbeat novel that's by turns sexy, humorous, and insightful. (Mar.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Correspondence Artist." Publishers Weekly, 3 Jan. 2011, p. 34. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA246347270&it=r&asid=a7e766c6a4789a6730e666df7a0beefe. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A246347270

QUOTED: "Browning's lyrical musings draw the reader into the exuberant world of carnival, the athleticism of capoeira, and the intricate choreography of candomble, "when the design of motion is ascribed to divine sources" (p. xxiv). Samba: Resistance in Motion, with its evocative, almost wistful personal style, its descriptive power, and its unabashed subjectivity, imparts a feel for Brazil that cannot be gleaned from a textbook. Its elucidation of the ways in which Afro-Brazilian dances have diverged and converged over time illustrates the mutability of forms of symbolic expression."

Samba: Resistance in Motion
Nancy Morris
34.1 (Winter 1999): p187.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 Latin American Studies Association
http://lasa.international.pitt.edu/eng/larr/editorial-policy.asp
By Barbara Browning. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Pp. 190. $29.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.)

Music's power to evoke time and place, its emotive force as both an individual experience and a representation of community fellowship make it a preeminent symbol for collectivities such as nations, ethnic groups, and subcultures. The supposed timelessness of musical traditions coupled with a mythical belief in the uniqueness of a given musical expression can lead to musical forms being deemed representations of the genuine essence - the identity - of particular groups. But claims for the purity of music or any symbol or tradition are unfounded. Neither identities nor traditions are static. Both change with changing circumstances and with the continuous interaction of peoples.

This review will focus on musical interaction and the continual modification of symbols and traditions. The seven books to be discussed here are revealing examinations of music and dance in Latin America and the Caribbean. Each provides a knowledgeable picture of its subject, and each takes into account the social role of music as a marker of collective identity.(1) Several of the books include detailed musicological analyses. All of them survey historical developments relevant to the music in question, address aspects of race in Latin America, and confirm the significance of music as popular expression. Additionally, each study demonstrates to a greater or lesser degree interaction among musical forms and the resulting incorporation of external elements into traditional styles.

Musical Repercussions of 1492: Encounters in Text and Performance, an edited volume based on a 1988 symposium organized by the Smithsonian Institution, begins with an overview of the musical styles and instruments of Christopher Columbus's time in the Americas and in Moslem, Jewish, and Christian Spain. Having clearly delineated the existing musical base, the book lives up to its title in presenting contributions that chart various effects of the events of 1492 on the musics of the Old and New Worlds. Several essays examine the possible effects on European musical exploration of the new understanding of space generated by geographical exploration; the successes and failures of European missionaries' attempts to supplant Native American musics; the appearance of the New World as a topic in European operas and nativism in Latin American operas; and the incorporation of myths and tales of the encounter with Europeans into music and rituals throughout the Americas.

Musical Repercussions of 1492 is beautifully prepared, featuring photos, illustrations, and musical scores. Some sections are technical, but there is still much to interest lay readers, and the detail gives the nonspecialist a glimpse into the realm of musicology. Altogether, from its title onward the book makes the fundamental point that cultural encounter can affect musical styles in diverse ways.

The mix of musics generated by the encounter of Old and New Worlds was augmented by new elements brought by the slave trade. Music and Black Ethnicity, edited by Gerard Behague, focuses on the African influence on Caribbean and South American music and the ramifications of this heritage in the present day. The essays in this uneven collection approach the central question of "the relationship of music expressions and black ethnicity" (p. vi) from different angles, keeping it in focus to varying degrees. Contributions on aspects of the music of countries with large black populations (such as Haiti and Brazil) as well as those with less-prominent black populations (such as Ecuador) reveal links and divergences between far-flung musical forms. The book's lack of an index, however, can frustrate attempts to trace these connections. Overall, Music and Black Ethnicity affords a wide-ranging look at the blending of musical traditions across continents and centuries.

Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae, by Peter Manuel with Kenneth Bilby and Michael Largey, succeeds in its aim to be "a readable guide to Caribbean music" (p. ix). The volume offers discussions of the region's musics and their contexts for a nonspecialist audience. In places this book has the feel of an undergraduate text, and indeed, classroom use is one of its stated purposes. The attendant desire to draw in reluctant readers may be the reason for the distracting personal anecdotes that appear throughout the book. Nonetheless, the scope and depth of Caribbean Currents make it valuable for anyone interested in the topic. The volume includes chapters on the musical fare of the larger Caribbean islands, "international pan-Latin salsa" (p. 78); the music of "the other Caribbean," particularly the Indo-Caribbean communities in Guyana, Surinam, and Trinidad; and themes in Caribbean music. The availability of a companion compact disc, allowing the reader to be a listener as well, is commendable.

As with the other books considered here, the subject matter of Caribbean Currents necessarily concerns much more than music. The thorough reviews of historical and social settings presented in each chapter convey the tremendous diversity of the region. Yet linking elements connect Caribbean musical styles, for although cultures, histories, and languages of the region differ, the islands share "a set of basic sociomusical attributes": African cultural elements, pan-Caribbean traditions such as Carnival, certain genres of Creole dance music, and "a history of musical syncretization" (p. 233). The creolization and syncretization highlighted throughout Caribbean Currents point again to the significance of interaction and cultural borrowing in the development of musical styles.

In contrast to the three survey volumes, the remaining four books each focus on a single country. Each studies a genre that originated in communities of low social status and later achieved wide acceptance nationally and internationally: Dominican bachata, Peruvian panpipe music, Cuban rumba, and Afro-Brazilian dance. Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music tells the story of a musical form that has been immensely popular among the Dominican lower classes since the 1960s but has received recognition in other strata of society and internationally only in the 1990s. Bachata is defined by its use of acoustic guitars and vernacular language in lyrics that focus on romance, its emotional singing style, and its distribution (until recently) through the informal economy. Developed by poor rural migrants to Santo Domingo, bachata gained a huge following in the city's shantytowns, where thousands of records were sold in stalls on street corners. But until successful mainstream musicians began to adopt bachata style in the early 1990s, bachata remained "a musical pariah" (p. 1), scorned by the rest of society, which had come to view the merengue style as the true representation of the Dominican Republic. Deborah Pacini Hernandez's masterful analysis yields a detailed examination of an unduly neglected genre, placing bachata in its social, political, economic, and musical contexts. Combining elements of Mexican, Cuban, Colombian-Ecuadorian, Puerto Rican, and Dominican genres, bachata exemplifies the syncretization of styles characteristic of popular music.

A Caribbean island would seem to have little in common with the Peruvian altiplano. Yet despite the differences in social and musical history, Thomas Turino's study of an Andean region merits juxtaposition with Bachata because both focus on Latin American musical styles from which poor rural migrants to urban areas derive a sense of community. Moving Away from Silence: Music of the Peruvian Altiplano and the Experience of Urban Migration is an ethnography of Peruvian highland panpipe music. It includes musicological detail - technical descriptions of instruments and playing styles - as well as a profound sociological examination of the construction of group boundaries through music. Turino, an ethnomusicologist, spent some twenty months as a participant-observer with musicians from the Lake Titicaca community of Conima and its environs. Each village in the Puno region has a musical ensemble, open to any man who wishes to take part. Turino followed the path of this music from the village to the district capital of Puno and eventually to Lima, as villagers joined the rural-to-urban migration that has burgeoned since the 1950s.

In Lima homesick students from Puno established a social club in 1970. Deciding that panpipe music was the best way to express their regional identity, they taught themselves to play and formed a musical ensemble. This initiative sparked the development of panpipe groups among other groups of rural migrants in Lima as well as back home in Puno. With increased migration, these clubs flourished, and the various urban and rural groups influenced one another and the evolution of musical styles. The familiar panpipe music now heard in the United States and Europe is a Westernized version of Andean highland music, developed by urban ensembles like those described in this book. Turino has pieced together the story of the increasing respect accorded highland music in Lima. Once stigmatized as a product of lower-class rural indigenous culture, this music has become a significant symbol of Peru to Peruvians and others as well.

Moving Away from Silence is a sensitive and poignant narrative, probing the ambiguities of participant-observation research and evoking the rhythms of rural life; the sense of membership in a tight community; and the experiences of long bus rides, late-night music sessions, and tinny loudspeakers in town plazas. In a stunning climax to a beautifully shaped narrative, Turino describes a meeting between members of a Lima panpipe ensemble and the Conimeno ensemble from which much of their repertoire had been adopted. The migrants to Lima addressed the group in Spanish, the Conimenos in Aymara. Language choices as well as differences in body language, attitudes toward elders, and handling of protocol illustrate strikingly the changes wrought by urban life. Turino's clear and nuanced exposition of how Peruvian panpipe music was adapted to changing circumstances provides insights into processes of musical transformation.

The final two books concern dances and the musical genres that are inseparable from them. Yvonne Daniel participated in an established dance group in Cuba, as did Barbara Browning in Brazil. Both have written accounts of their experiences that go beyond their personal stories.

The noise and abandon of local festivities are well captured in Rumba: Dance and Society in Contemporary Cuba, which analyzes the set of Cuban dances called rumba as well as rumba performance, formal and informal. Daniel's participant-observation research took the form of nearly a year as a dancer with Cuba's Conjunto Folklorico Nacional. Her book contains specialized technical descriptions of rumba's steps and rhythms as well as sociological and historical material. The movements of the dance are explained and charted in complex "labanotation" diagrams. The social role of dance in Cuba is also elucidated in Daniel's review of the history, performance, and cultural significance of rumba and its relatives.

Daniel recounts the development of rumba from its origins as disguised slave protest in the late eighteenth century through its nineteenth-century appearance as a dance form that was urban, lower-class, and predominantly black. As Daniel explains, "Poor Cubans, both dark- and light-skinned, created a music and dance of their own, neither totally African nor totally Spanish, that utilized singing, drumming, and dancing in specific configurations and within specific rules" (p. 19). Rumba has expanded and been codified and is now institutionalized and commodified with regular public performances by state-sponsored troupes as well as workshops for tourists and students. Three professional dance companies, each having specified emphases and tasks, operate under the direction of the Ministerio de Cultura. The ministry provides dance training at professional academies and neighborhood cultural centers, sends trained teachers to promote dance in schools, and organizes theatrical performances.

Of the many popular dances in Cuba, rumba has been selected, promoted, manipulated, and appropriated as a cultural symbol by the Cuban government. Daniel suggests that the reason is that because of its African roots and working-class origins, rumba "announces the class equality that the Revolution has sought to implement" (p. 145). In delineating the trajectory of rumba and other Cuban dances and showing how one genre has come to eclipse the others, Rumba illustrates the shifting fortunes of cultural symbols.

Barbara Browning studied Afro-Brazilian dance at the Universidade Federal de Bahia and also learned Brazilian dances from friends, through observation, and in community classes in Brazil and New York. Although Samba: Resistance in Motion includes some technical information and diagrams, its purpose is neither instruction nor documentation. Rather, the book is a poetic evocation of the force and prevalence of dance in Brazilian community rituals. In Browning's view, "The body says what cannot be spoken" (p. 9). A scholar of dance and literary theory, she set out "to try to heal the body divided from its intellect" by conveying through the medium of printed words the joy, absorption, and transcendence that dance can induce.

The book's subtitle, Resistance in Motion, is a subject that is loosely and sporadically treated. Resistance here refers to racial matters, a theme that is never far from the core of the book's narrative. Descriptions of Brazil's racial relations over time are linked to the evolution of samba, candomble, and capoeira and the interrelations among the three forms. Browning characterizes samba as a "story of racial contact, conflict, and resistance" (p. 2). based on African rhythms and sung in Portuguese, this dance form expresses opposition to domination, a point that Browning repeats but does not develop. Candomble, a syncretic Yoruba-Catholic religion, places dance at its center The predominant variant of candomble "allows black Brazilians to express their Brazilian nationalism while rejecting the existing social stratifications within their nation" (p. 25). Capoeira too originated in resistance. A choreographed Afro-Brazilian blend of martial arts and gymnastics set to drumming and music, capoeira was developed in the nineteenth century. Although it is called both a game and a dance, word choice "has never detracted from the fact that Africans in Brazil developed it with the potential to disarm whites, whether through literal blows or through the subtle art of seeming to be in meaningless motion while actually reinforcing a circle of cultural and political race consciousness" (p. 100).

Browning's lyrical musings draw the reader into the exuberant world of carnival, the athleticism of capoeira, and the intricate choreography of candomble, "when the design of motion is ascribed to divine sources" (p. xxiv). Samba: Resistance in Motion, with its evocative, almost wistful personal style, its descriptive power, and its unabashed subjectivity, imparts a feel for Brazil that cannot be gleaned from a textbook. Its elucidation of the ways in which Afro-Brazilian dances have diverged and converged over time illustrates the mutability of forms of symbolic expression.

In describing and analyzing music and dance, these books go beyond their immediate subjects to illuminate larger issues. Implicitly and often explicitly, they affirm that popular culture is inseparable from other social forces. The depth of historical material presented as explanatory background is notable. These seven works establish music as a potent carrier and marker of identity, whether it is imposed as an "invented tradition" (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), as with some aspects of Cuban rumba, or diffuses upward from lower social strata, as with bachata or Peruvian panpipe music, or moves laterally across social groups, as in Brazil. These studies also roundly demonstrate that because of innovation and exchange, no musical form remains constant.

Music and Society

The inability to explain musical styles and changes without considering their social and historical contexts underlines the interwovenness of popular culture with society. In Musical Repercussions of 1492, Anthony Seeger makes a strong argument for the links among music, politics, history, and economics: "If we are to understand music, we must understand the processes of which it is a part. If we are to understand those processes, we would do well to look to the music" (p. 459). All the authors under review adhere to this tenet.

Daniel's Rumba, for example, is premised on the "interconnections of an aesthetic system to other arenas of social life" (pp. 136-37), specifically the hypothesis "that social change can generate change in dance, and, conversely, that change in dance can be identified, analyzed, and understood in terms of social currents and societal conditions" (p. 1). Daniel supports this hypothesis in her conclusion that Cuban rumba "has emerged as a dance structure that coincides with socialist perspectives, a cultural symbol of social relations" (p. 141).

In Bachata, Hernandez asserts that "style is intrinsically related to the social context in which music or any other expressive event takes place" (p. 18). Among many examples of this relationship, she cites a move away from romantic themes toward crude sexual allusions in bachata songs of the 1980s. Hernandez attributes this shift to the economic crisis in the Dominican Republic, which hurt the poorer social sectors that gave rise to bachata performers and audiences. The change of emphasis in bachata song lyrics reflected the deterioration of social and family life caused by economic hardship (pp. 153-54).

Another illustration of how the patterns of popular culture reflect social values is supplied by Turino's observation on Peruvian highland ensemble playing: "When Conimenos say that a good ensemble is one that 'plays like one instrument' and that no individual's instrument should 'escape' from the dense, integrated fabric of the ensemble's performance, they are talking about sound, but they are also articulating a certain version of the relationship between the individual and the community. In Conimeno musical ensembles there is no place for highlighted soloists; in general, people are no more anxious to draw attention to themselves during music making than they are in any other public setting" (p. 55).

Music and Identity

Identity has become a prominent theme in contemporary society, and music can be a prominent component of it. Simon Frith has argued, "Music seems to be a key to identity because it offers, so intensely, a sense of both self and others, of the subjective in the collective" (Frith 1996, 110). Certainly, music has long been a constituent of the "mythico-cultural apparatus" of national identity (Schlesinger 1991, 168) and a vehicle for collective identity in general. Exemplifying this situation, Malena Kuss observes in Musical Repercussions of 1492, "From the earliest years of the Encounter, musical expression took center stage in the mediation and interplay of cultural identities." By the late nineteenth century, Latin American operas were "a medium through which composers built the complexities of the American experience into their musical codes" (p. 299).

Popular music codes of more recent times reflect identity in numerous ways. In Caribbean Currents, Peter Manuel notes that because of Puerto Rico's unsettled relationship with the United States, "Latin music and, especially, indigenous genres have taken on a special role in Puerto Rican culture as symbols of an independent national identity" (p. 53). Manuel also credits music in Cuba with playing a key role in forming a "national cultural identity that would unite the entire population" (p. 35). This theme is developed well by Daniel in Rumba. In Music and Black Ethnicity, Jorge Duany asserts, "merengue is recognized as an essential part of Dominican identity" (p. 80). In the same volume, Jose Jorge de Carvalho discusses the changing self-image of Afro-Brazilians and how "competing models of identity are shaped by the different song genres and singing styles" that they choose (p. 187).

Community distinctiveness in the Lake Titicaca region of highland Peru is primarily expressed through recognizable panpipe styles and tunings. According to Turino, in regional musical contests, subtle variations express each village's identity "in situations of competition among communities of basically equal social power" (p. 70). When members of these villages moved to Lima, the locus of their musical identity extended from the village level to the ethnic group. The charter of the Federacion de Sikuris y Sikumorenos de Residentes Punenos en Lima y Callao begins by asserting that their music "is the creation of our ancestors. It is a free and natural manifestation of community that expresses the living history of our Quechua and Aymara nations" (p. 188).

These examples indicate that the bond between music and identity relies neither on static music nor on static identity. As Seeger points out in Musical Repercussions of 1492, "the music through which a group establishes its identity can easily change from situation to situation and will do so in systematic and intelligible ways" (p. 456). Such change is not abrupt as it takes established musical tradition as its point of departure. But because music can be such a powerful symbol of group identity, even incremental musical change may spark fears that group identity is being jeopardized. The result is tension between tradition and innovation.

Musical Innovation

The importance of innovation in musical development is a recurring theme in these studies. Kenneth Bilby points out in Caribbean Currents that in Jamaican music, "stylistic experimentation continues and novelty is as valued as ever" (p. 179). Hernandez reports in Bachata that bachata musicians experiment with "new instruments, performance strategies, recording techniques, and other innovations" (p. 230). Innovation built on tradition contributes to the continuity of musical forms even as they change. According to Browning, the prestige of Brazilian musicians who are recognized as particularly knowledgeable about Brazilian dance forms "may be determined by a combination of a grasp of the tradition, an ability to interpret or theorize it, and a personal capacity for innovation" (pp. xi-xii). Even the self-consciously traditional Peruvian panpipe ensembles and their audiences value originality in composition and performing. Perhaps their seemingly contradictory dedication to the original within the traditional feeds the myth that their music has been unchanged for generations. Eric Hobsbawm noted that emergent, invented, constructed, or imposed social practices can take root very quickly (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983, 1). In the case of Peru, Turino points out that "in contrast to notions about the 'ancient,' static character" of rural Andean musical traditions, these traditions are in fact dynamic. As an example, he cites a certain panpipe harmonic sound that, despite its relatively recent adoption, is regarded "as the 'traditional' Conimeno style" (p. 136).

Innovation is self-generating. Change ceases only if it is artificially impeded and wells up if externally checked, emerging as circumstances permit. For example, to protect Cuban traditions, any alteration in the standard rumba performances of the state-supported Conjunto Folklorico Nacional is forbidden. Amateur public performers, however, are not bound by these strictures. Daniel points out that by combining "bits and pieces of popular, secular, and religious material," these dancers "create the mixtures that originally spawned rumba" (pp. 99-100).

Institutional damping of musical change was experienced in the Dominican Republic during the thirty-year dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. The Trujillo family's control of the economy, the media, and the music industry inhibited musical exploration. A musician credited by Hernandez with being one of the Dominican Republic's most innovative began performing a reworked version of merengue on the dictator's death in 1961. Speaking of the importance of external stimulus, he commented that after the "closed situation" that ended when Trujillo died, "we can't forget how significant it has been to merengue as a popular music to have come into contact with the popular music of other countries" (pp. 78, 79).

These books all illustrate signally the folly of regarding any musical form as a pure and unadulterated cultural tradition. Human creativity, social change, and social interaction continually yield new variations on established styles. In Peru, for instance, Turino reports that highland migrants to Lima formed musical associations to preserve ties to their rural communities, but the experience of living in the capital altered the ways they "think about, create and perform music" (p. 170). According to Hernandez, throughout a century and a half of existence, Dominican merengue "has undergone repeated and profound transformations in sound, instrumentation and social context" (p. 134). After only thirty years of existence, bachata is changing, and the growing popularity of bachata-merengue hybrids "represents a truly significant turn of events in the evolution of both genres" (p. 27). Such reshaping and blending of genres is a recurring theme in examinations of Latin American music.

Musical Interchange

The notion of cultural hybridization has featured prominently in recent Latin American cultural theory. Nestor Garcia Canclini has highlighted the "diverse intercultural mixtures" found in modern society across geographical borders but also among traditional and modern, high, popular, and mass cultures (1995, 11, n. 1). Hybridization is in a sense the descendant of other descriptors such as mestizaje, transculturalization, and syncretization, terms whose longstanding use in Latin American social analysis speaks to the inexorability of cultural mixing. The interchange of musical elements, as these books indicate in myriad ways, is an inevitable consequence of contact between groups.

In Musical Repercussions of 1492, Seeger notes that in the Americas, musical interchange dates back to pre-Columbian societies, which "traded with one another, conquered one another, massacred one another, and learned to perform one another's songs" (p. 453). In Music and Black Ethnicity, Duany points out that merengue, like the population and culture of the Dominican Republic, blends African and Spanish elements. Ronald Smith makes a similar point about Panamanian music in the same volume. Also in Music and Black Ethnicity, John Schechter describes African-Ecuadorian music in a region of highland Ecuador inhabited for over 250 years by Spanish-speaking mestizos, Quichua-speaking indigenous residents, and descendants of African slaves. The now-traditional bomba music combines African rhythms and improvisations, indigenous words and musical forms, and Spanish language and verse structure. Tan singing in Indo-Trinidadian weddings, discussed by Peter Manuel in Caribbean Currents, is a similarly complex mixture of "old folk songs from the Bhojpuri-speaking area of Northern India, somewhat garbled elements of North Indian classical music, and some features unique to Indo-Caribbean culture, all reinterpreted by local musicians who stress original composition and creation" (p. 215). According to Manuel, Cuban mambo is a 1940s "fusion of Afro-Cuban rhythms with the big-band format adopted from swing jazz" (p. 38).

Blending of cultural elements is not limited to musical traditions. Raymond Sokolov's comments about culinary traditions could be applied to music with a few word changes: "Cuisines evolve almost instantly when two cultures and their ingredients meet in the kitchen, and old cuisines never die, they add new dishes and ingredients to old recipes and slough off the losers" (Sokolov 1991, 15). Cultural hybridization has accelerated in the twentieth century. Garcia Canclini has suggested that traditional cultural forms are not disappearing but are being reformulated in response to social and technological change (1992, 31). Urbanization, modern transportation, and electronic media ensure that the age-old process of musical mixing is happening faster and with fewer intermediaries than ever before.

The massive migration of rural Latin Americans and Caribbeans to metropolitan areas has given rise to musical genres that combine multiple sources. Bachata is one example. Cumbia andina or chicha is another. Turino explains that the Lima-born children of Peruvian highland parents invented this combination of electric rock instruments, highland-mestizo wayno melodies and phrasings, and the rhythm of the Colombian cumbia (pp. 178-79). Hernandez points out that Brazilian rural migrants to Sao Paulo revamped their traditional music by introducing electric instruments and elements of popular Mexican and Paraguayan styles (p. 234).

Travel between countries by exiles, refugees, migrant workers, immigrants, and tourists abets cross-border musical blending. New York is recognized as the birthplace of salsa, defined by one musician as "the musical fusion of New York with Puerto Rico, with Cuba and with Africa" (Manuel, p. 74). But the city's importance to Latin American and Caribbean music extends still further. In Caribbean Currents, Bilby cites the example of Jamaican music: "The most obvious foreign influence on Jamaican music in recent years has been from hip-hop. The latest series of exchanges between urban African-American and Jamaican musics arose spontaneously out of contacts between black American and Jamaican communities in New York and other U.S. cities" (p. 179).

Urban areas have always been sites of cultural interaction. Many traditional Cuban rhythms, for example, derive from contact in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Havana among freed slaves, French fugitives fleeing the Haitian Revolution along with their servants and slaves, various Caribbean refugees, and settlers from different parts of Spain. Nineteenth-century Cubans did not travel in jet planes, however. Twentieth-century musical absorption of influences from all over the world is not limited to the interaction of groups or individuals gathered in one place. According to Bilby in Caribbean Currents, Jamaican musicians exemplify this trend as they "travel across the world, listening to all kinds of music, and return with new ideas that eventually make their way onto the local music scene" (p. 179).

Musical ideas also spread through mass communications. From MTV Internacional to the circulation of homemade cassettes, more cultures now have increased opportunities to be exposed to new musical ideas. Manuel in Caribbean Currents credits "the mass media, together with interaction of migrant communities in New York and elsewhere" with facilitating "all sorts of musical cross-fertilization and fusions. Some of these products, like Latin rap and Garifuna punta rock, mix local languages and styles with Yankee influences. Others are purely Caribbean fusions, like the Trinidadian and Puerto Rican adaptations of Jamaican dancehall style" (p. 234).

While many musicians and music lovers value the stimulation of contact with other musical currents, some fear that external influences will lead to the loss of the distinctive identities that musical styles and other symbols are felt to carry. The access to other cultures provided by modern technology has spurred recent attention to hybridization, not to mention alarm over it.

Jesus Martin Barbero, for example, has expressed concern about "cultural decentering," when cultures lose their distinctiveness by becoming overly market-oriented and absorbing too many outside influences (1997). Such concern is occasionally perceptible in these books. In Bachata, Hernandez notes that when merengue ensembles adopted aspects of rock and roll performance - moving toward an energetic and showy style, standing up to play rather than remaining seated in orderly rows, and dressing in flashy clothes - older Dominicans "were deeply disturbed by the intrusion of foreign elements perceived as incompatible with a more nationalistically defined image of Dominican identity" (p. 79). In Jamaica, according to Bilby in Caribbean Currents, "there is much talk of the potential threat that fusions such as ragga-hip-hop might pose to the integrity of Jamaica's local popular music should the process go too far" (p. 179).

Such fears seem to overlook the nature of musical development. As Caribbean Currents demonstrates, Jamaican popular music is itself a startling blend of a "rich fund of ancestral cultural resources" (p. 146). This blend includes African drumming, Afro-Protestant Revivalist hymns, European ballroom dance, Caribbean calypso and rumba, and (from another tributary of African influence) U.S. rhythm and blues.

Some styles of capoeira, a resolutely Afro-Brazilian genre, evidence elements of boxing and other non-Brazilian martial arts. According to Browning, "the apparent contradiction" of the inclusion of foreign elements "is resolved by the fact that the very strategy of appropriating extrinsic movement is intrinsic to capoeira" (p. 103). Extended beyond capoeira, this portrait of appropriation is a useful way of looking at the dynamism of culture and identity. The appropriation of extrinsic elements characterizes any meeting of cultures, and what is today considered intrinsic was once extrinsic. In this way, traditions evolve as they meet up with new influences.

Moreover, cross-cultural influences are not unidirectional. While some Jamaicans worry about losing their local style, anyone who listens to Top-40 radio stations can attest that reggae has swept the world. Jose Jorge de Carvalho notes the "strong influence" of Jamaican reggae on young black musicians in Brazil in Music and Black Ethnicity (p. 199). In the Southwestern United States, according to Joann Keali'inohomoku in Musical Repercussions of 1492, Native American youths "admire the reggae groups that visit and perform at the Hopi Community Center" (p. 448).

The multidirectionality of musical interchange can be seen in African music, which has had a pervasive impact throughout the Americas. Latin American music, in turn, has affected Africa. John Storm Roberts pointed out twenty years ago that in Africa, "the roughly coincidental arrival of the guitar and of recordings by Cuban guajiro groups . . . brought about the birth of an entire new family of popular styles" in the 1930s and 1940s (Roberts 1979, 217). Musical Repercussions of 1492 delineates early cross-influences of European and American musics. Contemporary Latin American music has also had enormous influence in the United States and Europe, as is amply demonstrated by Roberts (1979).

The fecundity of the world's cultural forms owes much to this ongoing interaction. Their continued evolution and at the same time their rootedness in their own cultures are illustrated by Manuel's comments in Caribbean Currents: "musics like salsa, reggae, and zouk have taken on lives of their own outside the Caribbean, becoming truly international. This process, however, does not signify a global co-optation of Caribbean music, for the region itself and its emigre musicians continue to be sources for the most dynamic innovations. For the most creative artists, Caribbean music now involves combining international sounds and Caribbean cross-fertilization, while often reaching deep into local traditions for inspiration" (pp. 242-43).

The seven books reviewed here demonstrate that innovation and cultural borrowing, overlaid on a foundation of tradition, are integral parts of artistic creativity. They provide no evidence to support the notion that alterations in traditional musical forms will lead to a loss of cultural identity. Rather, they provide many examples of robust traditions assimilating new elements and adapting to new circumstances while remaining recognizably linked to their communities. Fears of the effects of musical change on identity arise out of the unwarranted supposition that culture is immutable. The world changes, social conditions change, identities change, and music changes along with them. The interaction and adventurousness of innovative musicians expand the storehouse of elements of musical expression, nourishing vibrant cultural identities throughout Latin America and the Caribbean and beyond.

I would like to thank Jorge Duany, T.M. Scruggs, Philip Schlesinger, and Sandy Kyrish for their valuable comments.

1. See Duany (1996) for a review of seven books on Caribbean music (including three discussed here), stressing the importance of music as a component of Caribbean cultural identity.

REFERENCES

DUANY, JORGE

1996 "Rethinking the Popular: Caribbean Music and Identity." Latin American Music Review 17, no.2:176-92.

FRITH, SIMON

1996 "Music and Identity." In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, 108-27. London: Sage.

GARCIA CANCLINI, NESTOR

1992 "Cultural Reconversion." In On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture, edited by George Yudice, Jean Franco, and Juan Flores, 29-43. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

1995 Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Translated by Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (originally published in Spanish in 1989).

HOBSBAWM, ERIC, AND TERENCE RANGER

1983 The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

MARTIN BARBERO, JESUS

1997 "Cultural Decentering and Palimpsests of Identity." Media Development 44, no. 1:18-21.

ROBERTS, JOHN STORM

1979 The Latin Tinge. Tivoli, N.Y.: Original Music.

SCHLESINGER, PHILIP

1991 Media, State, and Nation: Political Violence and Collective Identities. London: Sage.

SOKOLOV, RAYMOND

1991 Why We Eat What We Eat: How the Encounter between the New World and the Old Changed the Way Everyone on the Planet Eats. New York: Touchstone.

NANCY MORRIS teaches in the Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications, and Mass Media at Temple University. She is the author of Puerto Rico: Culture, Politics, and Identity.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Morris, Nancy. "Samba: Resistance in Motion." Latin American Research Review, vol. 34, no. 1, 1999, p. 187. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA54169838&it=r&asid=20473bf1de177f15964d753d5c33773f. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A54169838

QUOTED: "Browning's movement analysis of the various forms is deep. She is both a performer and teacher, and although she only touches on the musicology, what she does say always illuminates central aspects of the play between movement and sound. She tropes constantly between language, movement, and sound in synesthetic discourse, which seems to privilege none of these domains over the others."
"She is graceful in her reading of Brazilian social and racial history, and although specialists may quibble that her figurative discourse (allegorical scenarios again) oversimplifies at times, many of those grumbling will envy the ease with which she gets to the main points. Over and over again, Browning captures the liberatory potential in Brazilian dance and music forms, without minimizing domination, poverty, or suffering."

Samba: Resistance in Motion
J. Lowell Lewis
40.4 (Winter 1996): p164.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1996 MIT Press Journals
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/
By Barbara Browning. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995; xxvi + 190 pp.; illustrations. $29.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.

The impossibility of capturing dance or movement adequately in writing has by now become more than a cliche; it is, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, "deja vu all over again." In this spins I could invoke Isadora and her famous assertion that if she could explain what it meant she wouldn't have to dance it. In many African traditions the banality of what we call cliche is often seen instead as the deep wisdom of a paradoxical proverb, which has the power to draw one back again as to a portentous crossroad. For most people, and especially for academic intellectuals, the dance paradox is proverbial, because it cannot simply be performed away. Clifford Geertz, the reluctant godfather of anthropology, captured the double-bind this way: "The surface bootlessness of talking about art seems matched by a depth necessity to talk about it endlessly" (1983:95).

This uncomfortable position occupied by the three authors under review is, I believe, one whose time has come. I say this not just because at last dance and movement generally are beginning to be taken seriously by social theorists, even though three books in the same year on Afro-Latin dance/music genres is certainly evidence for that. The more important reason is a theoretical one: this is a moment in which the problematic of embodiment in relation to discourse (or in union with it) seems compelling in nearly every "humanist" discipline (even for antihumanists). In this climate, students of cultural movement styles have an important role to play, since we are in a good position to know what we are dancing about and just what is involved in writing to those rhythms. Among these three authors, I believe Barbara Browning does the best job of negotiating the paradoxes involved. She realizes quite well the necessity for both new theory and new kinds of writing, which are capable of dancing readers across the page and into the feelings of embodiment. This is not just a matter of poetry, but of what she says some Brazilian capoeira(1) masters have--a kind of "strategic lyricism" (107). In her case, Browning uses lyricism to decenter overly rationalistic discourse, while also paying sufficient homage to the analytic project of academic practice. In order to re-embody the scholarly enterprise, it is not enough just to force scholars to do aerobics or to cut sugar cane; one must convince them it is necessary to embody these activities to "understand" them.

In her book on tango, Marta Savigliano applies new theories and quite dramatic new writing styles as well, using postcolonialism, postmodernism, feminism, and Lacanian psychoanalytic approaches to deconstruct tango, while also attempting " a tango about postmodernism--a tango in prose, melodramatic like the tango" (223). This book is the most theoretically ambitious and dense of the three and will be most interesting to those committed to versions of such theories. Readers of this journal may be quite taken with her intermittent, dramatic "scenes" (nine in all), which read like short playscripts, with characters and theatrical actions. Savigliano problematizes discourse and her own selfhood in an extremely reflexive way, such that any utterance (any thought?) is seen as necessarily entangled in (post)colonialism. She states repeatedly that one of her main projects is trying to decolonize herself. In order to achieve this, she wants to enact multivocality harshly and polemically at times, in the spirit of Franz Fanon (14) and at other times to adopt a more conciliatory, balanced view, which might seem contradictory. Consistency, however, is not a tenet she embraces, since that is the sort of theoretical strategy which colonizes. As she says, "Whom does the analytically precise fixation of the teems benefit?" (21).

With this question, she effectively preempts any possible critique by situating herself at once outside of rationalistic, phallogocentric, colonizing discourse and also within it, since she has no choice but to use the tools of the colonizer to subvert his project. I will argue that Savigliano's trap for the potential critic is also a trap she builds for herself. Indeed, I see many versions of "post-theory" to be autoreflexive traps which, if carried to their logical (dare I use the term?) conclusions, would silence dialog. My antidote to post-theory is a Peircean pragmatism which holds that the only academic sin is establishing impediments to inquiry. Readers who doubt that Savigliano's project potentially constitutes such an impediment should consider the following: "Colonialist tools already represent the colonized; colonialism goes hand in hand with the practice of representation; representation is a tool of colonialism in itself" (233).

Here we are all trapped in a nutshell. It is not only rationalist discourse which is inherently colonizing, but all representation itself. If this were true, then not only would Savigliano's own project of self-decolonization be impossible, but there would be no point in writing, dancing, or even doing anything at all in the hope of liberation from the godlike colonizer. And indeed "the colonizer" is referred to, in terms reminiscent of many versions of monotheism, as the One: "The Other is always a reflection, an illusion, a deflection of the One, of the colonizer" (166). The main problem with her vision of colonialism as demonic entrapment is that the tango, as a cultural performance genre, seems to get lost in this greater project. There is some movement analysis, which comes rather late in the book (149 ff.), but tango styles are not carefully delineated, and there is almost no musicological analysis. Song lyrics are extensively quoted and discussed, but many of the readings I found to be polemically univocal, lacking any sense of irony or ambiguity.

James Clifford (1986) is well known to anthropologists for arguing that ethnography could often be seen as a form of allegory, in which informants as characters in the narratives were taken to stand for abstract ideas and social categories. This critique applies even more clearly to Savigliano's book, as long passages are populated with personified, even capitalized, abstractions (Desire, Passion, One, Other, Exotic). Her overview of tango is dramatized this way in several places: "Tango was constituted as a sophisticated New World exotic that provided a particular kind of passion, one that was thrilling because it mirrored the process of `civilization' in its dance/struggle as revealed by the male impersonator of Desire and the female impersonator of Passion" (205). This sort of writing arguably has its place, but when it becomes the dominant rhetorical mode, I see it as a recipe for disembodiment. Reading through people's lives to psychodramas of the world stage can be paradoxically both overaggrandizing and belittling. Such discourse portrays bodies as "representatives" of national, economic, gender, and class forces, and in this sense people are much grander than their own actions. But by denying people any real autonomy, agency, or genuine embodied feeling, since all such feelings are only misrecognitions of their own positionality as puppets of forces beyond their control, their lives are diminished.

In this way, Savigliano denies Argentine men any pathos in their avowed suffering, a persistent theme of tango lyrics, since their positions of privilege as machos in patriarchy reduce all such pain to mere "whining" (e.g., 53). For such men, all women can only be "broads" to be used and cast aside. One might suppose that her sort of feminism would treat women better, finding for them some liberatory possibilities in tango dancing and singing. Instead, she repeatedly emphasizes their lack of voice and agency, their subordination in always following the male lead, their status as "a piece of passional inventory" (48). The reader is left with a grim view of always alienated gender relations that constantly recreate colonialism as disencounter: "The tango couple falls into the abyss of the colonizer's Desire. Exotic Otherness is precisely this condition of incompatibility (no shared pathos, no passion in common, no feeling together) that opens the necessary space for exploitation to develop" (82). If this is the scenario, one wonders why tango was ever invented in the first place and, when created, why anyone would ever want to dance it.

This review of Savigliano is sounding more negative than I intend it. She does an excellent job in showing how suspect genres like tango get taken up (and bastardized) in the metropoles as exotic imports, whereupon they can then get reimported back to the homelands and accepted by elites and others with the stamp of colonial approval. She captures the dilemma of Argentine artists having to "auto-exoticize" in order to promote themselves as tango experts on the international scene. She rightly questions and deconstructs the entire project of arguing about tango "origins," while at the same time doing justice to the various historical accounts. She has some wonderful insights about the unexpected affinity the Japanese feel with tango in a chapter devoted to that export. The vehemence of my critique is not a disagreement with the undeniable entrapments in colonial and male domination, but rather a reaction to seeing them as regimes of total entrapment from which there is no escape. I want to ask, what are the limits of colonialism? ("Decolonization is endless" [16]). Is colonialism a certain historical form of domination, or is it a metaphor for all forms of domination?

One of Savigliano's most original contributions is in extending and refining the concept of "exoticism," showing how central it is in the commodification of cultural genres from the centers of capitalist control. But again, she mars this work by seeing exoticism everywhere, so ubiquitous that it hinders her in explaining the differences between: Japanese views of Argentines, of Yanks; North American views of both of them; and Argentinean views of Japanese and Yanquis. Her concept of exoticization does her little service in nuancing these important differences, just as her hegemonic "colonialism" doesn't help her much in explaining the complexities of (formerly?) Imperial (but exotic) Japan, now a center of capitalist productive power. Again I ask, is it possible for groups and persons to encounter different Others without exoticizing them? ("Exotic aesthetics are reproduced, reappropriated, and re-exoticized among `exotics'" [206].)

I feel free to ask these questions because Savigliano herself wants to critique forms of post-theory using the tango but although she attempts this extentensively in the concluding chapter. I don't think she succeeds in disentangling herself from a paralyzing entrapment. At one point she cites Todd Gitlin, who saw postmodernism as "the passionate pursuit of the passionless" (218), and unfortunately I think this critique can be applied to her view of tango. By removing all joy or pleasure from the dancing, and any possibility that the partners might be sympathetically sharing feelings with each other, she has arrived at the passionless pursuit of "Passion." Regimes of domination do lead to persistent feelings of entrapment, but total entrapment leads to self-destruction. "I am decolonizing myself by biting my own head" (227). In Brazil, Browning also encountered the trope of cannibalism, but in her view it constitutes a from of (always problematic, and partial) empowerment, as it did for the intellectual Oswaldo de Andrade, who founded an Anthropophagy Movement (Browning, 149). But before I move there, I must first consider Yvonne Daniel's book on Cuban rumba.

Daniel is a professional dancer, and movement analysis is a central part of her work, beginning on page two with a "first portrait" in prose, and intensifying in later chapters with technical terms taken from Laban Movement Analysis and ballet. Although for the most part these descriptions of rumba are evocative, nondancers may occasionally be confused by such terms when they are not identified or explained. At times she uses highly interpretive, evaluative language ("diligent, serious, [...] daring, aggressive" [77]) without making it clear how such judgments relate to the details of a more descriptive movement analysis. At other times, language fails her altogether, as she relies on vague phrases like "swing energy," or gushes about "virtuosity." But, generally, one gets a good feel for rumba movement, and the basic stylistic differences are fairly well characterized. She also tries hard to deal with a very complex musical canon, providing notations for the named styles of rumba and documenting the ensemble of instruments. Although at one point she notes that the "indication of intervals is approximate" (82), she doesn't go on to discuss problems with Western notation of African-based musics (there are alternative notations), nor does she delve much into the intricacies of polyrhythmic play or dance. She does note in passing (77) that dancers play a lot with conventions of the "expected" accents (as do drummers), but she could have elaborated this into a central theme of the performance style. She says in a few places that rumba performance rules are frequently broken (e.g., 10), but she doesn't make the crucial link here between the microstructure of the music/dance and the playful attitude toward staged interactions.

What really lets Daniel down in her rumba project is a lack of a clear theoretical overview. She gives indications of a positivist faith in objectivity with references to a "physiological body," presents charts that purport to measure "ritual intensity," and appeals to the aid of neuropsychology. There is a pie chart that diagrams the Cuban "world view" (actually just a time division), but she gives no indication of knowing the intellectual history of that phrase or of the well-known distinction Max Weber made between the human and natural sciences. The central theme of social change is undercut by her inability to deal with the complexities of the Cuban position internationally, and of social diversity internally. We get very little about the way Cuban forms like rumba have circulated throughout the Caribbean, Latin America (even Argentina, as Savigliano reminds us), and the U.S. (not to mention Europe) since at least the early part of this century. She doesn't seem to realize that the adoption of the rumba internationally influenced the revolutionary government in its decision to promote it as a national dance. At one point she states that ballroom rumba "does not resemble" folk rumba (rumba del campo), which is surely at, overstatement. She also talks a lot about "organic" change within Cuba, and she doesn't have a word to say about the many rumberos playing it, places like Miami and New York.

Daniel deals extensively with the relations between "secular" dance forms like rumba and "sacred" styles from the Afro-Cuban trance practices. Again, there are many confusions that result from her reliance on this distinction, rather than showing, as many others have done, that (especially in Africanist forms) it never applied neatly in the first place. She notes that, in many contexts, rumba dancers use movements evocative of the orisha spirits, that there is a "new" form, batarumba, which freely combines the "two" domains, and that there is a "sacred" version of rumba called bembe. She also should have known the dangers of relying centrally on a category of "traditional" rumba dancer, versus "professional" and "public" performers (101), terms which cause confusion when the categories overlap. The same thing happens with "prepared" versus "spontaneous" rumba (and her category "prepared spontaneous"), which tend to distract her from closer attention to the details of performance settings, which influence rumba styles. For instance, she says very little about urban versus rural settings. In one section she discusses the commodification of rumba (her "commoditization," 124), as if it were basically a positive process, seemingly unaware of all the literature that takes a somewhat different view.

One change in rumba she mentions briefly is the occasional entrance of women into a formerly male style of competitive dancing (columbia). I found this extremely interesting, and I wish she had made more of it. She does point out that gender play is a central theme in rumba dancing, but she doesn't emphasize the conflict between Cuban machismo and the revolutionary ideology of gender equality. This is one place where tensions are being acted out in the dance, it seems to me, as women are "violating" a performative boundary to "assert" (enact?) that they are entitled to compete with men on the same ground. I want to underline with this example that there is a substantial amount of material in the book that shines through whatever theoretical and categorical difficulties Daniel has.

Let me turn at last to the book which I wholeheartedly recommend to readers as an example of what can be done in mediating the problematic of writing dance and dancing script, Barbara Browning's stunning work on Brazilian samba. Actually the book is not just about samba, but also has chapters on candomble (Afro-Catholic spiritual practices), on capoeira, and on Bahian carnival.(2) At first I was somewhat skeptical that a short book could cover so many movement styles, but Browning has no intention of being comprehensive; rather, she wants to evoke the interconnections of movement/thought in Bahian culture (what Peirceans call the "iconicities"), and this she does wonderfully well. Her writing is not so much clear as "translucent," even when dancing with theory:

If I could make you understand these multiple levels of meaning in the

body dancing samba, I would have written with the grace of the bamba,

the expert sambista. Teaching, not long ago, a class in recent literary

theory, it struck me that what I was doing was remarkably similar--and

nearly as difficult--as teaching samba. Literary theorists in the past two

decades have located the ground on which we establish significance.

Then we pulled the rug out from under our feet and showed that it was

merely a structure, then pulled the structure out from under that. We

have been doing a very fancy dance ever since in an effort to keep from

falling down meaningless. These levels of trip-steps and feints are as

difficult to keep going as the three separate rhythms articulated in the

feet, hips, and shoulders of the sambista. But of course we never really

wanted to lose a ground of significance. We just wanted a more naked

truth: down to the G-string of meaning! Myself, I have no problem with

exhibitionism. (xxv-xxvi)

Here the reader can see how she turns the trope of dance back onto theory with delightful results, while also theorizing dance. Perceptive readers should also note the connections between this quote and the first part of the review, in the debates about post-theory. Not only does she bring her own life clearly into the narrative in a way that helps illuminate the object of inquiry, she fearlessly uses her initiation into candomble practice to critique secularist and ethnocentrist academic interpretations, allying herself with pioneers old and new, Maya Deren to Karen McCarthy Brown.

Browning's movement analysis of the various forms is deep. She is both a performer and teacher, and although she only touches on the musicology, what she does say always illuminates central aspects of the play between movement and sound. She tropes constantly between language, movement, and sound in synesthetic discourse, which seems to privilege none of these domains over the others. While samba speaks "a complex dialogue in which various parts of the body talk at the same time, and in seemingly different languages," narrative histories are also a kind of "polymeter--the layering of rhythmic times" (2). She is graceful in her reading of Brazilian social and racial history, and although specialists may quibble that her figurative discourse (allegorical scenarios again) oversimplifies at times, many of those grumbling will envy the ease with which she gets to the main points. Over and over again, Browning captures the liberatory potential in Brazilian dance and music forms, without minimizing domination, poverty, or suffering:

She [the sambista] can be funny, terrifying, painfully beautiful--but

above all she must be eloquent. She is committed to saying something that

has not been and cannot be spoken. Wherever she is, whatever color she is,

her feet have to speak, and they have to speak not only of beauty

but also of her own belief and resistance. (34)

Here I am in my own dilemma, with so much to say and no more space. I want to mention the awesome feminist power she finds in the "whirlwind hips" of Iansa, the orisha of women's blood struggles, and also the heartbreaking tale of Oba, who cuts off her own ear in an abject misapprehension of love. I want to note how well she uses my work on capoeira, and how she goes beyond it by insistently thematizing an upside-down view of the world. She captures truths in wonderful puns, like those phallic masters of Angola, a capoeira style which "speaks softly but carries a big stick" (107). But as the reader can see, she busts my chops when it comes to speaking about dance, and any more review here becomes an excuse for plagiarism: "I have tried to keep up with her, but her feet move incredibly quickly" (159). Axe Barbara, and power to all those whose pens take on the dance.

Notes

(1.) Capoeira is an acrobatic, dancelike martial art which is played as a circle game to the accompaniment of a percussion ensemble and singing. Browning has a chapter on it in her book. and I have a book on the subject (Lewis 1992). (2.) Bahia is a state in northeast Brazil--the capital is Salvador--which is generally acknowledge as the center of Afro-Brazilian culture in the country.

References

Clifford, James 1986 "On Ethnographic Allegory." In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus, 98-121. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Geertz, Clifford 1983 Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.

Lewis, J. Lowell 1992 Ring of Liberation: Deceptive Discourse in Brazilian Capoiera. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

J. Lowell Lewis is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney in Anthropology and Performance Studies, with a PhD from University of Washington (Seattle). His book on Brazilian capoeira, Ring of Liberation, was published in 1992 by University of Chicago Press. Articles on mass public ritual in Queensland, Australia, include "The Maleny Fire Event," in The Australian Journal of Anthropology, and "Genre and Embodiment" in Cultural Anthropology.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lewis, J. Lowell. "Samba: Resistance in Motion." TDR [Cambridge, Mass.], vol. 40, no. 4, 1996, p. 164+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA19020650&it=r&asid=5b5aebaf99e4b466e104b3c4402ce31f. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A19020650

QUOTED: "Through this addictive, brainy and vibrant novel, which straddles nonfiction and fiction, Browning celebrates an unabashed passion for art and togetherness in a world muddled by assumed intimacy and inherent skepticism."

Finding connection by sharing her gifts; FICTION: NYU performance studies prof reflects on life and love with conceptual art
(May 14, 2017): Lifestyle: p8E.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Star Tribune Media Company LLC
http://www.startribune.com/
Byline: LAUREN LEBLANC

Special to the Star Tribune Reflecting, oI myself am an extremely moderate person,o Barbara Browning oddly offers a contradictory yet incredibly modest assessment of her talent in the opening pages of her novel oThe Gift.o Through this addictive, brainy and vibrant novel, which straddles nonfiction and fiction, Browning celebrates an unabashed passion for art and togetherness in a world muddled by assumed intimacy and inherent skepticism. Our narrator, Barbara Andersen, is not unlike our author, a performance studies professor at NYU. Comfortable at midcareer, she starts to record cover songs on the ukulele for friends. What began as a unique series of gifts turns into a consuming oconceptual art piece,o one that drives her work and personal life. oGifts never make me feel obligated, though they often make me feel inspired, so I make something in response but never out of a sense of debt.o In post-Occupy New York City, Andersen uncovers a new relationship to community and connection. Brownings ever crackling mind leaps from inspiration to analysis. She delightfully connects e-mail spam to Lewis HydeAEs oThe Gift,o a book that expands on the interplay between Marcel MaussAE anthropological exploration of gift economies as well as the larger idea of creative ogiftedness.o This linguistic and anthropological play encourages Andersen to accept requests and share the recordings online. Reader may indulge in their own multimedia relationship with the novel through the authorAEs prolific online catalog of songs and dances. Just try to close this book without feeling a creative pull. The book would succeed on its own as a unique meditation on creativity, but Browning introduces a collaborator whose troubling and muddied history challenges AndersenAEs notion of empathy. Sami is an autistic, amputee music prodigy in Germany who also posts his musical catalog online. Their wholly democratic fascination with music of all stripes (ofrom the sublime to the ridiculouso) feeds a compulsive conversation. Their unique courtship, consummated only through freely given gifts of art, rattles our perception of belonging. Despite the darkness that complicates Sami and BarbaraAEs entanglement, oThe Gifto is infused with humor and tremendous emotion. As Andersen falls deeper into a world of shared intimacies, she bravely explores the extent to which we can be honest with ourselves and others. Reflecting upon a colleagueAEs observation that love is, in many ways, an aspiration to remain in sync with another person, Andersen comes to recognize that oall of us are more trapped in ourselves than we like to pretend, and love is simultaneously what makes us want to get out of the bottle but also feel how stuck in it we are.o Life itself makes a mess of our ambition, our health, our happiness, but itAEs the gift of our commitments to one another, felt through collaboration, that liberates us. Lauren LeBlanc is an independent book editor and writer, as well as a nonfiction editor at Guernica magazine. A native New Orleanian, she lives in Brooklyn.

The Gift By: Barbara Browning. Publisher: Coffee House Press/Emily Books, 235 pages, $15.95.

LAUREN LEBLANC

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Finding connection by sharing her gifts; FICTION: NYU performance studies prof reflects on life and love with conceptual art." Star Tribune [Minneapolis, MN], 14 May 2017, p. 8E. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA494392317&it=r&asid=e86dff1d08d03315b32b91881516e39a. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A494392317

"Tip sheet." Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2017, p. 4. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA494500636&asid=8242a6ec7185f0689fc6cb052eb87477. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. Sawyers, June. "The Gift." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2017, p. 19. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA492536103&asid=82365236a3ea0999fec23d8f12e3f143. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. "Browning, Barbara: THE GIFT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA482911777&asid=a5fa47a93cfd3637cbabf990453425bc. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. "The Gift." Publishers Weekly, 6 Feb. 2017, p. 42. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA480593813&asid=a3cd414bbc12616ab6d4c7a0321929de. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. "The Correspondence Artist." Publishers Weekly, 3 Jan. 2011, p. 34. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA246347270&asid=a7e766c6a4789a6730e666df7a0beefe. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. Morris, Nancy. "Samba: Resistance in Motion." Latin American Research Review, vol. 34, no. 1, 1999, p. 187. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA54169838&asid=20473bf1de177f15964d753d5c33773f. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. Lewis, J. Lowell. "Samba: Resistance in Motion." TDR [Cambridge, Mass.], vol. 40, no. 4, 1996, p. 164+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA19020650&asid=5b5aebaf99e4b466e104b3c4402ce31f. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. "Finding connection by sharing her gifts; FICTION: NYU performance studies prof reflects on life and love with conceptual art." Star Tribune [Minneapolis, MN], 14 May 2017, p. 8E. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA494392317&asid=e86dff1d08d03315b32b91881516e39a. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.

• lambda literary
  https://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/fiction/08/29/gift-barbara-browning/
  Word count: 703

  QUOTED: "While it is easy to be critical of a novel wherein the main character is, at least in part, an author-insert, there is nothing lazy about this choice, and no denying that Browning is an extremely intelligent and masterful writer."

  ‘The Gift’ by Barbara Browning
  Review by Christina Tesoro
  August 29, 2017

  The Gift by Barbara Browning is a strange novel in a lot of ways. The overall feeling it inspires is one of quiet intimacy–which is fitting, given that the narrator builds her life around the creation and performance of “inappropriate intimacies.”

  These intimacies take the form of ukulele covers of songs from every imaginable genre, from classical guitar to Nicki Minaj; as well as “hand dances” (choreographed videos of her hands, shot and performed in the nude, with the narrator’s bare torso visible for the recipient). Barbara sends these pieces to people in her life–students, friends, lovers, long distance internet acquaintances; even as replies to the spam in her inbox.

  The concept of inappropriate intimacies is an odd one. As a reader pretty firmly grounded in fiction-as-fiction, without much knowledge of art, and little-to-no knowledge of performance art outside of Marina Abramovic and Yoko Ono, Barbara’s particular flavor of performance art was new to me, and a little discomfiting. Barbara herself acquiesces that the classifications for what is art can be nebulous, adaptive, ever-changing. What counts as art, then? And does it matter?

  My immediate reaction was one of faint concern about consent: Where is the opportunity to consent to this intimacy, especially if the recipient is a stranger thousands of miles away, or someone completely unknown to the narrator? (To be clear, Barbara does not send nude images to anyone not consenting to receive them.) This question is one that Barbara also considers, both to herself, and at length with the correspondent the novel is built around: Sami, a trouble musician who lives in Cologne, with whom she spends the better part of a year developing a profound and intricate relationship.

  Sami, we slowly learn over the course of the novel, struggles with Asperger’s, chronic pain associated with an amputation years prior, and the loneliness of trying to survive in a world that is structured to be deeply inhospitable to both of these ways of being. Barbara’s inappropriate intimacies bring them together, but it is her willingness to be vulnerable, hold space, and experiment with unorthodox and uncommon ways of relating (long, painstakingly complex emails describing the nature and boundaries of their relationship; lengthy voice messages in which Barbara sometimes simply listens to Sami sleeping) that is most poignant and lovely about the relationship between them.

  The concept of novel-as-performance-art, and the gauzy line between fiction, non-fiction, and not non-fiction, was occasionally distracting. The distraction, however, was only temporary, and was mostly relegated to the beginning of the novel. Both Barbara the character and, I suspect, Barbara the author, are compelling, engaging, and contain a faint glow of innocence and good-naturedness that even the grumpiest of readers (ones who, like me, tend to want their fiction to be firmly fiction and their memoir to be memoir) couldn’t stay cranky for long. And while it is easy to be critical of a novel wherein the main character is, at least in part, an author-insert, there is nothing lazy about this choice, and no denying that Browning is an extremely intelligent and masterful writer.

  The question of how much is “true” and how much is fiction ceases to matter within the first twenty pages of the novel; and besides, how many of us can answer that question in our own lives? Much more worthwhile would be to ask questions about intimacy and isolation, vulnerability and courage, and the earnest love that it takes to reach out to other human beings, both across thousands of miles and within our own circles at home, and meet each other exactly as we are, rather than how we wish each other to be.

  The Gift
  By Barbara Browning
  Coffee House Press
  Paperback, 9781566894685, 248 pp.
  May 2017

• star tribune
  http://m.startribune.com/review-the-gift-by-barbara-browning/422043593/?section=variety%2Fbooks
  Word count: 528

  Review: 'The Gift," by Barbara Browning
  Barbara Browning Photo by Kari Orvik Tintype Studio

  By Lauren LEBLANC , Special to the Star Tribune
  May 12, 2017 - 7:30 AM

  Reflecting, "I myself am an extremely moderate person," Barbara Browning oddly offers a contradictory yet incredibly modest assessment of her talent in the opening pages of her novel "The Gift." Through this addictive, brainy and vibrant novel, which straddles nonfiction and fiction, Browning celebrates an unabashed passion for art and togetherness in a world muddled by assumed intimacy and inherent skepticism.

  Our narrator, Barbara Andersen, is not unlike our author, a performance studies professor at NYU. Comfortable at midcareer, she starts to record cover songs on the ukulele for friends. What began as a unique series of gifts turns into a consuming "conceptual art piece," one that drives her work and personal life.

  "Gifts never make me feel obligated, though they often make me feel inspired, so I make something in response but never out of a sense of debt." In post-Occupy New York City, Andersen uncovers a new relationship to community and connection.

  Browning's ever crackling mind leaps from inspiration to analysis. She delightfully connects e-mail spam to Lewis Hyde's "The Gift," a book that expands on the interplay between Marcel Mauss' anthropological exploration of gift economies as well as the larger idea of creative "giftedness." This linguistic and anthropological play encourages Andersen to accept requests and share the recordings online. Reader may indulge in their own multimedia relationship with the novel through the author's prolific online catalog of songs and dances. Just try to close this book without feeling a creative pull.

  The book would succeed on its own as a unique meditation on creativity, but Browning introduces a collaborator whose troubling and muddied history challenges Andersen's notion of empathy. Sami is an autistic, amputee music prodigy in Germany who also posts his musical catalog online. Their wholly democratic fascination with music of all stripes ("from the sublime to the ridiculous") feeds a compulsive conversation. Their unique courtship, consummated only through freely given gifts of art, rattles our perception of belonging.

  Despite the darkness that complicates Sami and Barbara's entanglement, "The Gift" is infused with humor and tremendous emotion. As Andersen falls deeper into a world of shared intimacies, she bravely explores the extent to which we can be honest with ourselves and others. Reflecting upon a colleague's observation that love is, in many ways, an aspiration to remain in sync with another person, Andersen comes to recognize that "all of us are more trapped in ourselves than we like to pretend, and love is simultaneously what makes us want to get out of the bottle but also feel how stuck in it we are."

  Life itself makes a mess of our ambition, our health, our happiness, but it's the gift of our commitments to one another, felt through collaboration, that liberates us.

  Lauren LeBlanc is an independent book editor and writer, as well as a nonfiction editor at Guernica magazine. A native New Orleanian, she lives in Brooklyn.

• NY TImes
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/books/review/the-gift-barbara-browning.html
  Word count: 937

  QUOTED: "a smart, funny, heartbreaking and often sexy delight of a novel that presses hard against the boundaries of where literary and artistic performances begin and end."
  "As author/narrator, Browning/Barbara is delightfully shrewd, if a little daft—an intellectual with scrupulous ethics and a love of organic wool."

  A Smart, Heartbreaking Novel at the Crossroads of Performance and Art

  By JENNY HENDRIXMAY 26, 2017
  Continue reading the main story
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  Photo
  Credit Kari Orvik

  THE GIFT
  (Or, Techniques of the Body)
  By Barbara Browning
  Illustrated. 235 pp. Coffee House Press/ Emily Books. Paper, $15.95.

  There are times, in our encounters with art, when we find ourselves on the receiving end of an unasked-for gift: the gaze of a girl in a 16th-century portrait; a sustained low note on the cello; the naked muscle of a dancer’s straining limb. In these moments, we may stumble upon what the dancer, writer and performance theorist Barbara Browning, in her blithely metafictional third novel, “The Gift (Or, Techniques of the Body),” refers to as “inappropriate intimacy” — an accidental partnership or exchange, perhaps uncomfortable, yet full of possibilities. Browning, for her part, relishes the creation of such unusual, erotically charged encounters throughout daily life: email spam, performance art, YouTube videos and academic panels each provide opportunities in “The Gift” that she seizes with zest. The result is a smart, funny, heartbreaking and often sexy delight of a novel that presses hard against the boundaries of where literary and artistic performances begin and end. Perhaps no surprise from an artist who likes to “recuperate what might appear to be wasted time by thinking of it as conceptual art.”
  Photo

  “The Gift” is narrated by one Barbara Andersen, an artist and professor of performance studies in early 2010s New York and an obvious stand-in for Browning herself. She is, among other things, engaged in a continuing art project that involves recording ukulele covers as unsolicited gifts for strangers and friends. In typical artless fashion, she reasons that her uke covers “could possibly help jump-start a creative gift economy that would spill over into the larger world of exchange.” In fact, what the project does do is lead her into a longdistance collaboration with Sami, an autistic music virtuoso in Cologne, Germany. This relationship intensifies, via an online exchange of dances and other gifts, into an intimacy mediated by layers of fiction, vulnerability and lies. Before long, Barbara is forced to wonder whether Sami really is who he claims to be, and the novel tumbles toward an emotional climax no less devastating for turning on an arbitrary linguistic quirk. Meanwhile, Barbara lectures on Pussy Riot, tends her ailing mother, leads workshops through the Occupy movement’s Free University and deepens her friendship with a talented trans performance artist whose work concerns “economic transactions that make art possible or impossible.”

  Early on, Browning quotes the cultural critic Lewis Hyde: “In the world of gift … you not only can have your cake and eat it too, you can’t have your cake unless you eat it.” There’s a similar toothsome reciprocity to “The Gift” itself, which takes its title from Hyde’s beloved opus on artistic “giftedness.” While the novel is in one sense part of the recent era of autofictions, several examples of which — “How Should a Person Be?,” “Leaving the Atocha Station,” “I Love Dick” — are mentioned in its pages, there is a sense that “The Gift” is directed outward, toward the reader, rather than toward the writing self. A gift, after all, is a gesture of extension, a concept Browning plays with through Barbara’s “digital” communiqués, whether text, email or erotic “hand dance,” as well as ideas of surrogacy and prostheses — a violin bow, a silicone leg, a rubber phallus. As a novel, “The Gift” incorporates some extended technique as well: Barbara’s dances, stills from which appear in the book, are dances Browning seemingly made in response to and in conjunction with the story she tells.

  As author/narrator, Browning/Barbara is delightfully shrewd, if a little daft — an intellectual with scrupulous ethics and a love of organic wool. One tragicomic set piece has her fretting, at length, over something to do with a perfume called “Realism,” not a quality, as it turns out, that concerns her overmuch. The novel’s events bear an uncertain relationship to life, and all of her characters are apparently versions — with varying degrees of authenticity — of actual collaborators, family members, lovers and friends. Some, she writes, gave her input on earlier drafts; some are completely fictional. Such metatextual confessions are, like the rest of the novel, conveyed in a charmingly procedural tone that surprises, at times, with how vulnerable it can be.

  “My body is an extension of my body,” Browning writes. The statement has something to do with erogenous zones, something to do with technique, something to do with the way art changes the meaning of things and the ways a person might love. Sometimes, there is no one there to meet the extended hand. Still, as “The Gift” shows, it’s possible for the reaching itself to act as a down payment on a new economy of pleasure.

  Jenny Hendrix has written for Slate, The Believer and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications.

  A version of this review appears in print on May 28, 2017, on Page BR9 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: No Strings Attached.

• slate
  http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/06/barbara_browning_s_dance_novel_i_m_trying_to_reach_you_reviewed_.html
  Word count: 1514

  QUOTED: "What Browning does with the form is genuinely creative and feels rightly reflective of a moment when dance is pushing the boundaries of what constitutes a performance space. Now that more and more mainstream museums are presenting choreographers—Sarah Michelson took over the fourth floor of the Whitney for its 2012 Biennial—why shouldn’t a book be a home for dance too?"
  "Browning’s book also makes clear what a treasure trove the Internet is for fans of dance, who can view performances once thought lost forever with the click of a mouse. I’m Trying to Reach You is a fun and dishy read for those fans—and also a daring and deep exploration of performance and the way it collides with, and is enriched by, the Web."

  Dance Dance Evolution
  M.J., Merce, and Pina all died in 2009. A unique novel and its companion YouTube choreography make the deaths the center of a conspiracy.
  By Julie Bloom
  1207_SBR_TryingReach_ILLO

  Illustration by Matt Kindt.

  In The Artist is Present, a documentary about Marina Abramovic and her 2010 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the curator of the show, Klaus Biesenbach, explains that “Marina is always performing. She’s never not performing.” The same could be said for I’m Trying to Reach You, a provocative novel by Barbara Browning that blurs the boundaries between life and performance, dance, art, and viral video. The novel is also framed in the world of performance art and is itself its own kind of performance—an experiment in form that is entertaining and clever, if not always as much as it hopes to be.

  The novel’s great first sentence immediately sets the scene and introduces one of its preoccupations: “I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died.” (Had the novel been set just a year later, the protagonist, Gray Adams, could easily have been introduced as one of the many reperformers to appear in Ms. Abramovic’s MoMA show, lying naked and still beneath a skeleton for hours.) A former ballet dancer trying to come to terms with his post-stage life, Gray is now a graduate student in performance studies transitioning to a teaching career. On this fateful day, he’s at a fittingly obscure conference in Croatia. Its theme: “Misperformance: Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading.”

  Gray spends most of the novel texting loving emoticons to his boyfriend in Stockholm, listening to Satie on the StairMaster, and procrastinating while trying to turn his dissertation into a book. The dissertation’s title: Semaphoric Mime From the Ballet Blanc to William Forsythe: A Derridean Analysis, or, I’m Trying to Reach You.

  It’s this procrastination that leads him to YouTube and the discovery of a series of dances by a mystery choreographer who goes by the handle falserebelmoth, setting off an absurdly fun conspiracy linking the deaths of major figures of the cultural world from 2009—Michael Jackson, Pina Bausch, Merce Cunningham, and Les Paul. A sinister figure named James Stewart who looks like James Stewart gets involved, too. Gray’s paranoid (or is it?) compulsion to connect them all loosely drives the book.

  Browning calls the whole enterprise not a novel but a multimedia project linked to a series of chamber choreographies. All 12 of “the moth’s” dance videos are available on YouTube and star the author with the occasional guest. (The fact that the videos themselves can’t be fully integrated into the text makes I’m Trying to Reach You the rare instance where a digital version of the book might really be better than print.) But what Browning does with the YouTube dances themselves is truly inventive. The choreography ranges from balletic to samba to a seemingly drug-fueled spastic freak-out, with music from Satie to Carole King. For the most part, they’re entrancing. Describing dance is never easy, but Browning makes these miniworks vivid. The first, a response to M.J.:

  The mudra-like hand gestures (“okay”), which morphed into antlers, and then something like a map of her ovaries; a little Charlie Chaplin walk, ending with a swat at her ankles; a delicate circling of her index finger over her head, as though it were a phonographic needle sounding the clunky little score. And then I saw it: looking down at her feet, she swiveled to the side, and discreetly moonwalked backwards across the floor.

  It definitely wasn’t virtuosic, but it did have a hint of the uncanny, as the moonwalk inevitably does.

  Browning plays with form and language in other ways too. Commenters on the videos become players in the plot—their responses are cribbed from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Browning used the Internet Anagram Server to construct her characters’ monikers, and suggests that readers use the site to retrace her steps. You may feel that this interactive sleuthing is more effort than necessary, but it’s hard not to admire her enthusiasm.

  “Even when a dance appeared to be relaying a very clear message,” Gray says, “it was always already saying something altogether different.” On the surface they are quick, slightly shabby, DIY experiments: The moth poses in a bathtub; the moth and another woman, who sits on a chair, raise their arms in straight lines up and down. But watching them closely you see how each one enables Browning to tease apart aspects of performance and the major artists who shaped the form, making the novel and its accompanying choreography a sort of short history of modern dance.
  I'm Trying to Reach You by Barbara Browning.
  I'm Trying to Reach You by Barbara Browning.

  One spurs a comparison to Merce Cunningham’s Septet: “They both featured Satie compositions, and, if anybody at YouTube actually cared about such things, they displayed a certain similarity in spirit, if not precisely in choreographic style. Merce’s, admittedly, was more technically refined. … What the moth lacked in technique, I felt she made up for in straightforwardness.” The commenters’ reactions to the dances also serve as a microcosm for an audience, and here Browning plays with ideas about perception, race, sexuality, and gender—all topics with which the performance world is in constant conversation, or battle.

  Gray’s obsession with the moth’s videos also allows the novel to dive deep into the dance and performance art world, of which Ms. Browning—a member of the faculty in the department of performance studies at the Tisch School of the Arts—has a smart and clear grasp. Above all else, I’m Trying to Reach You serves as a snapshot of a certain slice of New York high culture at this particular moment. Even without the back-cover blurbs from Karen Finley and Vaginal Crème Davis, Browning shows her cred, dropping all the right references, from Ann Liv Young to Yvonne Rainer, flash mobs to Performa. (Let’s leave aside her sometimes daffy bits of gossip about critics, some of whom I, er, work with.) It’s clear she recognizes the often hilarious self-seriousness that pervades this world. (Another conference paper: “Peter Sellars: Snake-Oil Salesman or Enfant Terrible?”)

  Browning’s fully-drawn characters, particularly Gray, are the constant that keeps this occasionally ridiculous book engaging. Gray is a sweet lost soul, whose dependence on the Internet and its power to feed this obsession offers a powerful commentary on the isolating effects of the Web. His need to get lost—whether in old Merce clips or in just Googling the “politics of lurking”—serves as a cautionary tale on the dangers of an always-mediated online life. And the people that surround Gray—his sick boyfriend, his fellow academics, his elderly neighbor and friends, even the commenters—are all confronted with loneliness too. Through them (and though, of course, M.J., Pina, Merce, and Les), Browning writes—sometimes movingly and subtly, sometimes clumsily and outrageously—about illness, loss, and death.
  Barbara Browning.
  Barbara Browning.

  Photo by Ken Jones.

  The often silly murder-conspiracy plot really isn’t what makes this book special. What Browning does with the form is genuinely creative and feels rightly reflective of a moment when dance is pushing the boundaries of what constitutes a performance space. Now that more and more mainstream museums are presenting choreographers—Sarah Michelson took over the fourth floor of the Whitney for its 2012 Biennial—why shouldn’t a book be a home for dance too?

  After all, Gray’s YouTube habit may reveal his loneliness, but Browning’s book also makes clear what a treasure trove the Internet is for fans of dance, who can view performances once thought lost forever with the click of a mouse. I’m Trying to Reach You is a fun and dishy read for those fans—and also a daring and deep exploration of performance and the way it collides with, and is enriched by, the Web.

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