Choreographing in Color

Choreographing in Color

Filipinos, Hip-hop, and the Cultural Politics of Euphemism

The book chronicles 50-years of Hip-hop culture with roots in transnational, interracial, and postcolonial formations across the Philippines, Japan, Singapore, New Zealand, and more. 

Dr. Perillo offers insights from over 80 key artists to provide a behind-the-scenes look at the intersections of Black and Filipino cultures. 

The book uncovers the structural dynamics of racism and patriarchy necessary for understanding how arts address social fragmentation, human displacement, and cultural dispossession.

In Choreographing in Color, J. Lorenzo Perillo investigates the development of Filipino popular dance and performance since the late 20th century. Drawing from nearly two decades of ethnography, choreographic analysis, and community engagement with artists, choreographers, and organizers, Perillo asserts the importance in shifting attention away from the predominant Philippine neoliberal and U.S. imperialist emphasis on Filipinos as superb mimics, heroic migrants, model minorities, and natural dancers and instead asks: what does it mean for Filipinos to navigate the violent forces of empire and neoliberalism with street dance and Hip-Hop?

Employing critical race, feminist, and performance studies, Perillo analyzes the conditions of possibility that gave rise to Filipino dance phenomena across viral, migrant, theatrical, competitive, and diplomatic performance in the Philippines and diaspora. Advocating for serious engagements with the dancing body, Perillo rethinks a staple of Hip-Hop’s regulation, the “euphemism,” as a mode of social critique for understanding how folks have engaged with both racial histories of colonialism and gendered labor migration. Figures of euphemism—the zombie, hero, robot, and judge—constitute a way of seeing Filipino Hip-Hop as contiguous with a multi-racial repertoire of imperial crossing, thus uncovering the ways Black dance intersects Filipino racialization and reframing the ongoing, contested underdog relationship between Filipinos and U.S. global power.

 

–Honorable Mention for the 2022 Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research, Dance Studies Association

 

–Longlist for ICAS Book Prize 2021 – Best Book in the Social Sciences, International Convention of Asia Scholars,  International Institute for Asian Studies

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Reviews

"Choreographing in Color is a milestone in Filipino Studies, cultural studies and the transnational study of dance as a world-making process."
Martin F. Manalansan, IV, PhD, Beverly & Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts and Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Martin F. Manalansan, IV, PhD, Beverly & Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts and Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin CitiesAuthor of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora.
"With its keen understanding of how video and social media disseminate Hip-Hop as a form of global resistance, Perillo’s book is a key contribution to the understanding of how the choreopolitical undercurrents of Hip-Hop dance help shape diverse formations of national and racial identity."
Dance Studies Association
Dance Studies Association2022 Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize Honorable Mention
"Perillo’s book fills a gap in the field, and I recommend this book to any readers who would like to learn more about Filipino culture through contemporary and diverse hip-hop practices. It is not a coincidence that there is a dearth of Anglophone scholarship on Filipino cultures, performances, and identities...His decolonial approach and critical examination of Black performance in the context of neoliberalism and neocolonialism offer readers a holistic knowledge of Filipino engagement in hip-hop dance. After reading this book, readers will have a better understanding of the structural dynamics surrounding race, gender, class, and colonialism as they inform Filipino identities and hip-hop dance practices.
Maïko Le Lay, PhD
Maïko Le Lay, PhDInterdisciplinary French and Japanese dancer, educator, scholar of embodied, hip hop, peer, and social justice pedagogy; digital humanities and bridge the fields of education, dance, Asian and African diaspora studies
"Choregraphing in Color provides broad and in-depth sociohistorical context and is useful in expanding upon the link between hip-hop’s globalization alongside the Philippines’s diasporas. A relationship between the globalization of hip-hop and street dance alongside Filipino bodies and the (im)possibility of self-reflexivity is one of the book’s key strengths."
Al Evangelista, MFA
Al Evangelista, MFAAssistant Professor of Dance at Oberlin College
"Choreographing in Color is as much a dance studies text as it is a critical race and Asian studies project; it also has much to offer sociology and anthropology as well. Certainly, its chapter on prisons cuts to the core of Foucaultian analysis, extending it into questions of colonialism. The book’s sharp attention to migration, empire, diaspora, labor, gender, and class will teach scholars not familiar with dance studies the value of this field in centralizing the body, movement, and choreography as tools for making sense of structure and power."
Kareem Khubchandani, PhD
Kareem Khubchandani, PhDAuthor of Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2020)
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