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Presenting a rich mosaic of embodied contemporary narratives in spirituality and movement studies, this book explicitly studies the relationship between spirituality and the field of Somatic Movement Dance Education. It is the first scholarly text to focus on contemporary spirituality within the domain of dance and somatic movement studies.

Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities brings together prominent authors and practitioners in order to elucidate how a wide range of sacred narratives/spiritualities are informing pedagogy, educational and therapeutic practice. As well as providing new insights and promoting creative/artistic awareness, this seminal text de-mystifies the spiritual/sacred and brings clarity and academic visibility to this largely uncharted and often misrepresented subject.

Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture is Douglas Robinson’s study of postcolonial affect—specifically, of the breakdown of the normative (regulatory) circulation of affect in the refugee experience and the colonial encounter, the restructuring of that regulatory circulation in colonization, and the persistence of that restructuring in decolonization and intergenerational trauma. Robinson defines “somatics” as a cultural construction of “reality” and “identity” through the regulatory circulation of evaluative affect. This book is divided into three essays covering the refugee experience, colonization and decolonization, and intergenerational trauma. Each essay contains a review of empirical studies of its main topic, a study of literary representations of that topic, and a study of postcolonial theoretical spins. The literary representations in the refugee essay are a novel and short story by the Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat; in the colonization essay a short film by Javier Fesser and a novella by Mahasweta Devi (translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak); and in the intergenerational trauma essay novels by James Welch and Toni Morrison and a short story by Percival Everett. The first essay’s theoretical spins include Deleuze and Guattari on nomad thought and Iain Chambers on migrancy; the second’s, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and theories of postcolonial affect in Bhabha and Spivak; the third’s, work on historical trauma by Cathy Caruth and Dominic LaCapra.