Excursions into Otherness: Performative Cosmopolitanism and Movement Culture

Embarking on an interdisciplinary study of movement practices that transcend traditional spaces and modes of transfer, I ask if it is possible to politicize our use of Yoga, Muay Thai and Capoeira. Can framing these practices as part of movement culture allow us to view the complexity of performative cosmopolitanism? Introducing my project, Chapter One argues for the importance of theorizing practices we use to regulate our bodies and express our identity. Chapter Two offers theoretical backbone – a literature review of cosmopolitan theory and scholarship on consumerism, Neo-Primitivism and Orientalism. Exploring how cosmopolitanism is signified by consumption of otherness, I suggest alternatives highlighting the terms of cultural exchange. Chapter Three analyzes how each practice is framed through advertising and social media in order to signal specific lifestyles and identities. I consider how myths are activated in order to consolidate whiteness. In Chapter Four a performance analysis of cultural festivals allows me to position cosmopolitanism as performative – generating difference as much as embracing it. Displaying, performing and consuming otherness at festivals simultaneously butts up against more resistant challenges to dominant culture also being created. Embodiment of form is my focus in Chapter Five. Through autoethnography I consider classes as performances of everyday interculturalism. Describing how practices function to perpetuate myths of Neo-Primitivism and Orientalism and become vehicles to inscribe power and consolidate whiteness, I also consider the forms of resistance created at the level of individuals and communities. My conclusions analyze how movement culture highlights the performative nature of cosmopolitanism, and the power embodiment has in de-centering, challenging and re-positioning us in intimate ways. I suggest that recognizing the structures of inequity we live through, marking the myths of otherness we consume and seeing the places where power is subverted through practice can describe a form of embodied postcoloniality that reflects our globalized, networked world and moves us toward interconnection.