Crowded Choreographies: From Assembly to Association and Back Again

Abstract

Motivated by Melissa Ziad's balletic protest within Algeria's Hirak demonstrations, this article recuperates a distinction between the right to assembly and the right to free speech, constitutional guarantees blurred under contemporary rhetoric of association. By applying methods of dance studies to legal interpretation, it shifts crowd theory away from an anxiety of touch toward a copresence that allows for constituent power of the people to be reclaimed. Therefore, it intervenes within a broader discourse of the legal humanities that privileges the logocentric over embodied ways of knowing.