James Salazar (Department of English)
CHAT Faculty Fellow 2019-2020

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"Embodying Time: Pedagogies of Rhythm in 19th Century American Culture"

This talk examines the emergence and importance of rhythm as a pedagogical instrument of childhood development and social reform at the intersections of the progressive education movement, experimental psychology, and physical culture movement of the late 19th century. I focus on a range of new pedagogies that emphasized the cultivation of the “sense of rhythm” as key to the understanding and negotiation of the different temporal orders that shaped modern life. These pedagogies, I argue, were founded on practices of rhythmic exercise premised on the mutually empowering cadencing of bodily movement and literary expression—or on what I call a “poetics of embodied articulation.” While such practices of rhythmic exercise have often been viewed as a new, proto-fascist form of disciplinary habituation inscribed ever more deeply in the practices and experiences of the body, I argue that rhythm was also valued in these movements because of its power to unsettle disciplinary forms and inculcated habits by cultivating new and diverse forms of kinesthetic awareness and embodied expression.

The Distinguished Faculty Lectures showcase new research by Temple faculty followed by open discussion.