Dancing the New World

"The textual, iconographic, and linguistic analyses demonstrate Scolieri's depth and breadth of understanding of the historical and cultural implications of the European colonizing of Mexico. With glossy color plates, well-reproduced black-and-white images, and ten appendixes of translated source material, the book provides a great example of in-depth research using primary sources."

~Choice magazine

"Paul A. Scolieri’s beautifully illustrated Dancing the New World is breathtaking in its intellectual breadth and depth. The book examines the ways in which dance and power were mutually imbricated in a signal moment of modern history—the European colonization of the Americas. Scolieri’s scholarship is rigorous and detailed, but his analyses are particularly compelling because of the theoretical questions he brings to bear on previously under-examined materials. Dance historians always need to grapple with the problem of limited archival sources. Scolieri manages to turn a particularly problematic research site—an archive devastated by the processes of colonization itself—to his advantage, making it an occasion for reflecting on the complexities of all attempts to describe, document and contain dance. For this reason, the book adds significantly not only to “New World” scholarship, but also to theoretical debates in dance history."

~de la Torre Bueno® Prize Committee, Society of Dance History Scholars

"...an excellent addition both to conquest scholarship and to the cultural history of colonial Mexico.This is a clearly written work that will appeal to a variety of readers, from the sixteenth-century Mexicanist to the upper-level undergraduate student. . . . Scolieri’s interdisciplinarity is another ofthe book’s strengths; the fields of dance and performance studies, art history, ethnography, and history come together seamlessly in this very fine contribution to conquest historiography."

~Hispanic American Historical Review