Full Description
The Oxford Handbook of Black Dance Studies encompasses the thinking that considers how people in motion craft worlds beyond worlds of imagination, culture, desire, intellect, and practice.
Black Dance Studies, which brings together thinking and moving, is foundational to any manner of Black expression and political action. This handbook offers a broad look into it as a form of intellectual inquiry. The twinned dynamic of dance as a practice replete with reflection as well as elaboration offers a prismatic assessment of how Black Life emerges and moves, and how our lives expand in multiple directions through gesture. Encouraging well-being within the activity of embodied wondering, Black dance constructs counterbalances to everyday worlds of disavowal and disconnection; under-appreciation and material lack. Black Dance Studies takes on the task of narrating how dancing matters as a technology of feeling and participation in a political process of embodied Black Life.
The volume includes forty-two chapters of original scholarship that cultivate an awareness of dizzying abundance in Black dance practice. They stretch through many genres of analysis and intellectual methods. With unflappable confidence, each chapter tells of differential relations to an African diaspora in motion. There might be few areas of endeavor that Black Dance never touches. The rising connectivities of Black Dance Studies offer moments to savor the source codes of activities that emerge in expressive gestures cast in relation to the ever-presentness of Black Life.
Contents
Oxford Handbook of Black Dance Studies
F. FOREWORD: Black Dance Studies
Takiyah Nur Amin
A. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
L. LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
0. INTRODUCTION: Dancing the African Diaspora
1. Thomas F. DeFrantz
Lands of the Maroon Resistances
1. The Pleasures of Primitivism: Les Ballet Nègres and Queer West Indian Migrancy
Amanda Reid
2. Bals Nègres, Sites of Performance or Spectacle: From Kalenda to Biguine, Marronage or Commodification?
Jacqueline Couti
3. Dance Like Douen
Makeda Thomas
4. Yanvalou for Haiti: An Affective Ethnography of Ayikodans' Anmwey Ayiti Manman
Mario LaMothe
5. The Sacred Mapou: Landscape and Choreography at Souvnans
Ann Mazzocca Bellecci
6. Dancing Black Radical Presence: Intimate Geographies and Proximal Memories in Contemporary Haitian Performance
Dasha A. Chapman
Moving Towards a Sacred Social Self
7. The People Keep Dancing: Black
