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This essay recounts and analyzes the Post Natyam Collective’s process of creating the contemporary abhinaya work, “rapture/rupture.” Working in a feedback loop between theory and practice, it researched ways to denaturalize Indian classical kathak’s script of idealized femininity to facilitate fluid, diverse possibilities for performing gender and cultural belonging in South Asian aesthetic contexts. “Rapture/rupture” produces a dancing subject whose ethnic mismatch, hybrid movement vocabulary, gender nonconformity, and same-sex love across cultural difference exceed the boundaries of a kathak discourse that calls for purist notions of culture, race, nation, religion, and femininity. In theoretically analyzing how gender, cultural belonging, and desire are conceptualized through abhinaya, postmodern dance, US identity politics, and poststructuralist critiques of identity, it argues that embracing lack—being “not enough”—is a mode of exceeding dominant boundaries that enables a multilayered, intersectional dance-making practice that queers gender, queers cultural belonging, and embodies queer female desire.

This chapter examines the noncommercial/commercial dichotomy that is supposedly inherent to developmental Indigenous media by focusing on two New Zealand television programs: The Summit and Waka Reo. More specifically, it considers how the two programs draw upon global reality television formats such as Survivor of the United States to articulate discourses of indigeneity and cultural belonging in New Zealand. It argues that claims to indigeneity remain a contested terrain, due to the usurpation of iwi (tribes) Māori settlement by processes of British colonization. It also contends that the contrasting style and themes of The Summit and Waka Reo reveal the intranational tensions of a nation where claims to belonging and indigeneity remain a controversial issue.

This chapter provides an account of Raquel Z. Rivera concerning the differential racialization history and trajectory of the four elements that make up hip-hop: MCing, writing, breaking, and DJing. It examines the construction of each constituent element of hip-hop as a particular kind of racialized space with implications for claim of cultural belonging and entitlement. According to Rivera, MCing and DJing is an extension of African American oral practices and traditions. Both elements are ethnic-racially identified with African Americans and closed to perceived outsiders by virtue of their reliance on dexterity in the English language. Similarly, breaking and graffiti writing emergence is rooted in the historical and structural conditions as well, with breaking coming from the Puerto Rican youth and writing out of the confines of New York City. In addition, the chapter examines the documentary Scratch which explores the culture of DJing.

This chapter explores the ways entertainment media work in conjunction with technology and the rhetoric of war to affectively shape experiences of corporality, temporality, and cultural belonging. Dance on television and dance video games are specifically explored for the ways they produce affective temporalities aligned with the physical and participatory vocabularies of the so-called war on terror: threat, precarity, responsibility, anticipation, and security among them. As viewers and gamers engage with these forms of entertainment, they incorporate domesticated and commodified versions of wartime’s temporal registers, imbricating themselves in the collective rhythms of post-9/11 socialities.

In Aotearoa-New Zealand, this haka is often taught in high schools, its message pitched at adolescent boys on the threshold of manhood. It both challenges a young man to address his difficulties with courage, and find within himself the resources to persevere and triumph. The haka is also commonly used at coming of age parties and graduation ceremonies, and may be performed at funerals (tangi) as a way of paying respect to someone who helped a youngster through hard times. Indeed, it can be argued that learning and performing haka is fundamental to a Māori person’s sense of self, cultural belonging, and wellbeing, both spiritual and physical, in early childhood as well as later life.