Intercultural Communication and Creative Practice: Music, Dance, and Women's Cultural Identity

(Hardback)

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Lengel takes the reader on a journey from India and Romania, where women preserve cultural rituals through mourning songs, to South Africa, where the body is a site of struggle for meaning and power in contemporary dance. This volume examines the interrelationship of cultural and national identity, ethnicity, gender, performance, and lived experience. It offers an understanding of how music and dance function within the lives of its performers and audiences, and how they embody meaning, carry social value, and act as a vehicle for intercultural communication. This book analyzes the communicative impact of women's cultural products and creative practice and creates links across disciplines such as communication, cultural studies, and performance studies. Contributors have lived, researched, and performed in the United States, Australia, Belize, Barbados, Canada, China, England, India, the Pacific, Romania, and Yemen. Their chapters address women's creative performance as a means of political and ideological expression.

Reviews

Lengel throws down a gauntlet when she cites Jan Blommaert's 1998 assessment that "few fields are as fuzzy as ... the study of intercultural communication." That intercultural communication is a field in search of theoretical grounding is both exemplified and transcended by the essays in this volume....Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.-Choice
"Lengel throws down a gauntlet when she cites Jan Blommaert's 1998 assessment that "few fields are as fuzzy as ... the study of intercultural communication." That intercultural communication is a field in search of theoretical grounding is both exemplified and transcended by the essays in this volume....Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals."-Choice

Author Bio

LAURA LENGEL is Associate Professor, School of Communication Studies, Bowling Green State University. She began researching women and performance as a Fulbright Scholar in Tunisia. She is also the author of Culture and Technology in the New Europe (Ablex, 2000).