She is Cuba

Melissa Blanco Borelli is a Senior Lecturer in Dance in the Drama and Theatre Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. She created the first joint honours programme in Drama and Dance at Royal Holloway. She is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen (OUP, 2014).

• Prologue, Entre Familia/Between Family ; Introduction ; Chapter 1: Historicizing Hip(g)nosis ; Interlude 1: Echando Cuentos/Telling Stories ; Chapter 2: Hip(g)nosis at Work: Rumors, Social Dance and Cuba's Academias de Baile ; Interlude 2: A Marriage Proposal ; Chapter 3: Hip(g)nosis as Pleasure: The Mulata in Film ; Interlude 3: Lost Baggage ; Chapter 4: Hip(g)nosis as Brand: Despelote, Tourism and Mulata Citizenship ; Conclusion or Rear Endings ; Index

"This triumphant offering invigorates dance scholarship with an outstanding coordination of historical method, performative writing, and coherent, compelling analysis of dance practice in Cuba. Written with authority, literary drive, and compassion, She Is Cuba answers a call for carefully considered research to explore the racialized feminine, the powers of the State, and to demonstrate the centrality of the living body in the construction of socialidentity." --Thomas F. DeFrantz, Duke University, Professor of African & African American Studies and Dance, Duke University"The mulata body dances off the page. Blanco Borelli writes her way through the Cuban siren-call of the hips. Her bi-lingual and seductive language privileges rumor and corporeality while engaging with rich histories sprung from archival research."--Anita Gonzalez, Professor of Theatre and Drama, University of Michigan