CATHERINE GUNTHER KODAT is the dean of the Division of Liberal Arts and a professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

"This book is a tour de force, a grand jetÉ, a series of sustained arabesques introducing a new and exciting way of thinking through the relation between aesthetic and political forms in twentieth-century American culture." - Virginia Jackson (University of California-Irvine) "Don’t Act, Just Dance is an exceptional study of cold war culture. Americanists will find indispensable Kodat's brilliant meta-political analyses of works by George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, Stanley Kubrick, and Marianne Moore. I cannot recommend this book too highly." - Harilaos Stecopoulos (author of Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898-1976) "An important manifesto for dance as a subject of serious scholarly attention in academic disciplines beyond dance history and dance studies … the book's final case studies are brilliant comparative meditations on the complex, multilayered relationship between Cold War art and politics." (Dance Chronicle)

• PrefacePart I          Rethinking Cold War Culture1          Combat Cultural2          History: From the WPA to the NEA (through the CIA)3          Theory: Adorno and RanciÈre (Abstraction, Modernism, Gender, Sexuality)4          Dancing: “Don’t Act, Just Dance”Part II         Rereading Cold War Culture5          Figures in the Carpet: Balanchine, Cunningham, “Persia”6          Spartacus7          From Art as Diplomacy to Diplomacy as Art: The Red Detachment of Nixon in ChinaNotesBibliographyIndex

CATHERINE GUNTHER KODAT is the dean of the Division of Liberal Arts and a professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

"This book is a tour de force, a grand jetÉ, a series of sustained arabesques introducing a new and exciting way of thinking through the relation between aesthetic and political forms in twentieth-century American culture." - Virginia Jackson (University of California-Irvine) "Don’t Act, Just Dance is an exceptional study of cold war culture. Americanists will find indispensable Kodat's brilliant meta-political analyses of works by George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, Stanley Kubrick, and Marianne Moore. I cannot recommend this book too highly." - Harilaos Stecopoulos (author of Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898-1976) "An important manifesto for dance as a subject of serious scholarly attention in academic disciplines beyond dance history and dance studies … the book's final case studies are brilliant comparative meditations on the complex, multilayered relationship between Cold War art and politics." (Dance Chronicle)

• PrefacePart I          Rethinking Cold War Culture1          Combat Cultural2          History: From the WPA to the NEA (through the CIA)3          Theory: Adorno and RanciÈre (Abstraction, Modernism, Gender, Sexuality)4          Dancing: “Don’t Act, Just Dance”Part II         Rereading Cold War Culture5          Figures in the Carpet: Balanchine, Cunningham, “Persia”6          Spartacus7          From Art as Diplomacy to Diplomacy as Art: The Red Detachment of Nixon in ChinaNotesBibliographyIndex