peer-reviewed article / 2001
“Nostalgia” or “Newness”: Nihon Buyō in the United States
Barbara Sellers-Young
Description
This article examines Nihon buyo in the United States as a diasporic practice that is neither simple nostalgia nor simple innovation. Sellers-Young focuses on how Japanese classical dance carries lineage, hierarchy, etiquette, gesture, repetition, and teacher-student authority through the iemoto system, while also taking on new meaning for Japanese American communities shaped by migration, wartime incarceration, assimilation, and generational change.
The essay is a major contribution to her theory of embodied transmission. Cultural identity is not treated as an idea held in the head, but as a discipline learned through posture, timing, stillness, costume, respect, and repeated imitation. For later-generation Japanese Americans and non-Japanese students, Nihon buyo becomes a way of negotiating layered subjectivities. Sellers-Young's key insight is that diaspora tradition can produce new bodies and new forms of belonging precisely through practices that appear conservative.
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Barbara Sellers-Young’s essay on Nihon buyō in the United States begins from a distinction that, in the abstract, can seem almost self-evident: art may look backward in nostalgia, or it may produce a hybrid “newness” adequate to the complex in-between conditions of diasporic modernity. What gives the article its force is that it refuses to let this distinction remain abstract. Once dance is taken seriously as a corporeal practice—as something transmitted “via the body of one person to the body of another”—the conceptual neatness begins to fray. Sellers-Young’s intervention is not simply to argue that diasporic traditional forms can also be innovative. More...