Dances with Darwin, 1875-1910: Vernacular Modernity in France

Examining the influence of Darwin's evolutionary theory on French thought, Rae Beth Gordon weaves the history of medical science, ethnology, and popular culture into an exploration of the cultural implications of gesture in dance performances in Parisian café-concerts and music-halls. She illuminates the blurring of racial lines in the representations of the primitive and of nervous pathology that informed dances like the Cake-Walk. These dances with Darwin, she contends, constituted an aesthetic of disorder long before Dada and Surrealism.