Kristin Buhrow

KRISTIN BUHROW, then a graduate student at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, was awarded funding in April 2022 to aid research on ‘The Performance of Ethnicity and the Development of a Double Consciousness: Chinese Dance as a Site of Identity Formation in the American South,’ supervised by Dr. Bruce Knauft. During the COVID-19 pandemic, statisticians observed a spike in Sinophobia and anti-Asian attacks across the United States. Centered in Atlanta, Georgia, this project explores the ways in which ethnically diverse Chinese Dance practitioners navigate shifting concepts of Chineseness, Americanness, self, and community after the pandemic. This research explores Chinese Dance as one activity which (re)creates Chinese American communities in the South by bringing together individuals with different relationships to Chineseness and different experiences of the legacies of racism in the region. By focusing on an “open” art form which includes practitioners from non-Chinese ethnic backgrounds, this research contributes to anthropological literature on race, ethnicity, and racism by considering who studies Chinese Dance across ethnic and racial lines, why, and what they understand themselves to gain (and lose) through their practice. These insights, as well as the demographic realities of former residential Chinatowns in the South reveal matrices of “veils” between the larger Chinese, Latin, Black, and White communities in the region. Ultimately, drawing on literature from psychological anthropology, this study identifies Chinese Dance as, among other things, a practice of empathy through which ever-growing adult personalities and diverse communities are being (re)built.