the way that these are expressed, negotiated, or offers a tentative step forward, although, as is subverted in popular culture. These concerns, as frustratingly common in studies of popular mu- always, are a little late coming to musicology, sic, the music itself is still left out of much of the but they are coming. discussion or sketched in with such vagueness Country is white working-class music, still that it evaporates upon scrutiny. I am left with largely associated (although much too narrow- a nagging sense of dissatisfaction with most of ly) with the American South. It is still “white the essays. There is nothing unworthy about any trash,” beneath notice, and it has consequently of them. It is not that they are historically inac- suffered from scholarly neglect. It is a field that is curate; it is simply that, even within the tight still largely untouched, and much mapping and confines of a book chapter, I feel that there’s so marking remain to be done. A Boy Named Sue much more that could be said. Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance. By Tomie Hahn. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007. 224 pp. WENDY HSU After the recent release of Steven Spielberg’s onlookers’ gaze by revealing and concealing her blockbuster movie Memoirs of a Geisha, Björk’s body . to reappropriate the fan, kimono, and CD Homogenic, and a series of music vid- hair ornaments to tell a very different story of eos by Madonna, Missy Elliot, Ginuwine, and Japanese performing women” (14–15). Christina Milian, the kimono-clad Asian wom- Hahn’s monograph on the embodied trans- an has become one of the icons of Asian chic mission process of Japanese dance (nihon in pop America.1 With the nineteenth-century buyo)—narrating while analyzing the author’s French fad of Japanese art and culture known fieldwork and experiences of learning the dance as japonisme in our nearly remote hindsight, for over thirty years—is rhetorically captivating the exoticized and eroticized bodies of Japanese and intellectually nuanced. Hahn draws method- women are certainly not a new trope in Europe ological and theoretical ideas from a number of and North America. One wonders what cultural disciplines, including “ethnomusicology, dance impact this Western fascination with the Asian/ studies, anthropology, performance studies, and Japanese female body has on women who prac- Asian philosophies of the body” (2). As Hahn tice traditional arts in Japan. indicates, the book’s organization poetically cor- Tomie Hahn’s ethnography Sensational responds to the unfolding movement of a sensu, Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japa- a paper fan supported by a bamboo backbone, nese Dance provides a powerful dissonance often used in nihon buyo. The first chapter, to the widely circulated objectifying images of “Introduction—Sensual Orientations,” outlines Japanese women. In the introduction Hahn in- reflexive ethnographic methods and the frame- vokes her subversive impulse to “reappropriate work of cultural transmission with a focus on the exotic mystique of the ‘fan dance’ stereotype body knowledge and multisensory experience. of the demure ‘Oriental lady’ who entices the The second chapter, “Moving Scenes,” narrates the recent social history and structure of the practice of traditional Japanese dance. Chapter 1. Specifically, the cover of Björk’s Homogenic features a portrait of Björk with white facial foundation and deep 3, “Unfolding Essence,” elucidates the relevant red lipstick in a kimono-like outfit. And these music vid- concepts and aesthetic principles of Japanese eos are of Madonna’s “Nothing Really Matters,” Missy arts. Chapter 4, “Revealing Lessons,” details Elliot’s “Get Ur Freak On,” Ginuwine’s “In Your Jeans,” and Christina Milian’s “Dip It Now.” the transmission process, with a substantial sec- 110 Women & Music Volume 12 tion devoted to discussing each of the senses in- Abu-Lughod, Ruth Behar, and Michelle Kisliuk volved. The last chapter, “Transforming Sensu,” to write with vulnerability and reflexivity.4 explores issues of codeswitching, identity for- Rather than making passive, nonparticipatory, mation and articulation, and cultural transfor- quantifiable, and objectifying observations, mation involved in the embodiment practices of Hahn foregrounds social relationships, revolving fieldwork and performances. around those with her teachers. Her framework Hahn locates her body as a deposit of her field and analysis are informed by the poststructural- experience. The field site is conceived as a broad ist and feminist critical requisite of elucidating landscape, at the center of which is her own authorial positionality. In relevant ways Hahn body and from which extend other important explicitly exposes her identity and authorship, social actors such as her teachers, colleagues, allowing her reader to position herself or him- and the audience of her performance. This frame self in relation to her point of view to navigate of knowledge appears and disappears, depend- through the passages. The social particulars of ing on how her body engages with the history of Hahn’s position(s) within her research field shed the dance and the memories of her dance teach- light on “the complex process of comprehending ers (xiv). Echoing recent feminist dance and per- the relationship of self to other, and the embodied formance scholarship, Sensational Knowledge’s knowledge of the participant-observer-research- emphasis on the body as a key epistemological er, as a resource within the research” (10). locus diffuses the historical mind-over-body Dance, expression, and embodiment are baggage in Western scholarship.2 Hahn’s adher- all multisensory experiences. In chapter 4, ence to the cultural specificity of the Japanese “Revealing Lessons—Modes of Transmission: traditional practice and principles—the in- Visual, Tactile, Oral/Aural, and Media,” Hahn terdependence of mind and body, theory and analyzes the transmission process of nihon buyo practice—illuminates her implicit critique of the by providing a multisensory account of physi- masculinist Western Cartesian split. cal and social structure of her dance school in Sensational Knowledge confronts the chal- Tokyo and then unfolding the embodied process lenging task of translating movement into text based on each of the senses involved. In the sec- head-on with keen descriptive details written in tion on oral/aural transmission Hahn discusses elegant prose. “I crave specificity and a semblance dance and music as one inseparable practice. of physical presence in dance scholarship. Limbs. Many dancers learn a musical instrument in Breath. Shoulders. Muscles. Gaze” (6). Inspired by the dance writing of Barbara Browning and order to understand the nuances of the musical other dance ethnologists since the mid-1980s, composition and musical vocabularies. During the moving quality (physically and affectively) of transmission dance teachers sing a dance lan- Hahn’s prose achieves kinesthetic sensation and guage comprised of “instrumental mnemonics evokes the reader’s empathy.3 In Hahn’s writing blended with fragments of the vocal line and dance is not just composed of movements and verbal dance directions (instructional and emo- techniques but is a stream of sensations, experi- tive)” (122–24). To nihon buyo practitioners ences, meanings, and emotions. musical knowledge is translated into an oral Hahn follows feminist ethnographers Lila form of dance instructions and then transmitted through embodied gestures. 2. See Barbara Browning, Samba: Resistance in Motion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). See also 4. These citations include Lila Abu-Lughod, “Writing Diedre Sklar, Dancing with the Virgin: Body and Faith in against Culture,” in Recapturing Anthropology: Working the Fiesta of Tortugas, New Mexico (Berkeley: University in the Present, ed. Richard G. Fox (Santa Fe: School of California Press, 2001); and Michelle Kisliuk, Seize of American Research Press, 1991); Ruth Behar, The the Dance!: BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); and Kisliuk, Seize the 3. Browning, Samba. Dance! Reviews 111 Hahn recognizes the recent incorporation ing stylized stereotypes in Japanese dance is con- of video technology and media in nihon buyo tentious. Hahn argues against the assumption pedagogy as she self-consciously incorporates that these women merely perpetuate or are con- them in her field research and ethnographic rep- fined to stereotypical images of themselves and resentation. The ability to rewind and watch the thus reinforce male domination in their society. video in slow motion allows a close-up access to She asserts: the subtlety of the transmission process and the embodied practice of dance. The metaphoric shifting present in nihon buyo choreography empowers women through the Curiously, kinesthetic sensations (the sense transformative, shared, embodied experience of motion and orientation) often fell over me of multiple identities as well as flexible notions when I observed the videotapes, and some of self, within a society that has historically re- guided me through the analysis. It seemed that stricted their expression. (162) the videotapes were reinforcing my physical understanding of movement/sound while my Codeswitching, a self-conscious performance body also informed the analytical process. (78) and shifting of identities in creative and every- day life, is