DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION: BOOK REVIEW
Literary works, by nature, explore the relationships between culture, meaning, and language. However, few draw such astute attention to their importance and fragility as Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution. Published in 2007, this collection weaves deftly between poetry, history, and prose fiction. Adrienne Rich selected it for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, recognizing an “exceptional second collection of poems written by an American who identifies as a woman,” in 2006. It draws on the work of feminist thinkers like Gloria Anzaldua, examining the tragedies and reinventions that arise from cross-cultural conflict. It reflects on migration, globalization, and revolution through a compact and fragmented narrative, as a tour guide and a historian meet in the gaudy, cosmopolitan Desert and begin to parse their interconnected past.
Dance Dance Revolution intermittently follows the guide and the historian, two women who go primarily by these occupational titles instead of their names. In 2016, the historian arrives in the Desert, a tourist location fused from hybridized, larger-than-life recreations of major world cities. The historian gets a tour of the St. Petersburg Hotel from the guide, who gradually narrates her past as a revolutionary in the 1980 Kwangju Uprising against the oppressive South Korean government and its United States military allies. She tells the historian about a similar revolution fomenting amongst the Desert’s native people. Meanwhile, clips of the historian’s autobiography inform readers about her privileged but lonely childhood in boarding school and Sierra Leone. A past love between the historian’s father and the guide becomes clear, but the collection ends without resolving this relationship or the Desert’s mounting revolution.
I first read Dance Dance Revolution in the classroom context, just before the spring 2020 breakout of COVID-19. We were analyzing it with the lens of utopian fiction, reading the Desert through genre tropes and Thomas More. However, I found that it connected more easily to second and third-wave feminist ideas on globalization and identity, and I knew I wanted to revisit it soon. When I got back to it this fall, it did not disappoint.
There’s an immense amount to parse in Dance Dance Revolution’s 120 pages, including the language itself. In her sections, the guide speaks a fictional and poetic language called Desert Creole, which draws from hundreds of languages and dialects including Spanish, Middle English, and Caribbean Patois. The narrative flows in a non-linear fashion, intercutting the guide’s tour of the Desert’s St. Petersburg Hotel with her own past and that of the historian. It uses real and fictional examples, in the Kwangju Uprising and the unrest of the Desert’s native people, to explore the havoc that colonization wreaks on cultures and individuals alike. Every page is rich with detail and gorgeous wordplay, captivating for both craft and meaning. The book’s entire construction conveys fragmentation, but light shines through the cracks in masterful poetics and poignant moments of recognition between the main characters.
Dance Dance concerns itself greatly with diaspora and globalization. The Desert serves as a metaphor for a modern age rife with connection and colonization – a place where cultures shift and smash together for the entertainment of ignorant American tourists. New Town, the home of the Desert’s natives and exiled workers, sits at the crowded and land-mine-ridden border. Guardsmen and guides enforce separation between the Desert and New Town, but impostor guides frequently sneak into the Desert to lead tourists out into the land mines. The Desert exists as a cycle of spectacle and violence at the heart of global power dynamics. It reflects the guide’s past in South Korea, but her life has forced her to switch sides – no longer an active revolutionary, she serves a system of colonization while she waits for another chance to revolt. She recalls the personal experiences of revolutionary radio broadcasting, working in a forced labor camp, and finding love in between the artificial details of her tour.
The reader learns less about the historian and her place in global power dynamics, but her past mirrors the guide’s in surprising ways. Following a childhood in several different boarding schools, the historian feels disconnected from place and culture. She struggles to connect with her father, the guide’s past love and revolutionary partner, who escaped to Sierra Leone after the Kwangju Uprising. She grapples with the bloody, unforgiving story the guide tells her, but she relates to the guide’s disconnection from family and home. As she annotates the guide’s speech in Standard English, her tone grows less scholarly and more empathetic. She frames the text to make it more accessible to readers, but it also allows her to frame the guide’s story and reconcile it with her life. The historian never addresses the reader, or her emotions, directly; unlike the guide’s vibrant language, hers remains academic and remote, conveyed through the forms of annotation and autobiography instead of direct address. Nevertheless, she holds a fascinating counter-presence in the narrative to the guide.
Dance Dance Revolution has much to offer in terms of perspective and poetry. I’d recommend it to readers of feminist philosophy and inventive poetry. Don’t let the page count fool you – this is a dense and often difficult text, but phonetic and symbolic curiosity will serve any reader well. It’s a book I’ve returned to before, and it’s one I’ll return to again.