Full Description
DISCO! Music, Image, Dance takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring disco's untold stories--sonic, visual, and kinetic--from its popular heyday to its many afterlives. The book attests to disco's irrepressibility in cultural practices from the 1970s to the 2020s, tracing its histories and instantiations as these traverse geographies, affects, and memories, and exploring the reaches of disco as an expansive field of music, image, and dance.
Illustrating how disco shows up in multiple and surprising ways across its times and spaces, chapters track the ubiquity of disco not only in relation to music and nightlife but also fashion, film, literature, poetry, dance, performance art, digital media, museums, exercise, activism, and community. DISCO! offers an expanded and necessarily ambivalent view of the value of disco-its embrace of both the ridiculous and the sublime, and its involvement in both progressive and reactionary social tendencies.
Stretching disco studies towards a more capacious logic of valuation, contributors reveal disco to be as frivolous as it is urgent, as fanciful as it is (under)grounded, as much to do with oppression as liberation. DISCO! attests to the undisciplined and inclusive attention which disco, as a tentacular global cultural phenomenon, duly deserves and requires.
Contents
Section I. Music
Chapter 1: Alex Jeffery: Cinderella in Eurodiscoland: Donna Summer's Once upon a Time and the Progressive Rock Connection
Chapter 2: Barbara Lebrun: In Defense of Dalida: Nostalgia, Dancing, and Vulgarity in French Disco
Chapter 3: Jack Parlett: The First Days of Disco: Nostalgia, Fire Island, and Dancer from the Dance
Chapter 4: Daniel Kane: The Best Minds of My Generation Go Bang!: On Arthur Russell and Allen Ginsberg
Chapter 5: Mimi Haddon: June 1982, from Disco to Dance: Progressive Urban Contemporary and the Aesthetics of Play
Chapter 6: Lucy Robinson: Disco as Community, Space, and Memorialization: Jimmy Somerville Fights AIDS in Four Albums
Chapter 7: Jaap Kooijman: Dancing in the Dead Boys' Club: 1990s Retro-Disco and the Memory of AIDS
Section II. Image
Chapter 8: Adrian Loving: Reflections on Aesthetics and Black Excellence in the Disco Era
Chapter 9: Joe Wlodarz: "Caught in the Act": Village People and the Crossover of Gay Macho
Chapter 10: Ryan Powell: Disco's Suck: Discophobia and the Foreclosure of Blow Job Temporality in Looking for Mr. Goodbar
Chapter 11: Silpa Mukherjee: Contraband Nights: Disco and Film Culture in 1980s Bombay
Chapter 12: Jakub Machek: Between the Discothèque and the Screen: The Role of Disco in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia
Chapter 13: Tamara Tomi'c-Vajagi'c: Disco as Open Image: Internet Sightings, Cryptic Denotations, and Disco Dancing Girls
Chapter 14: madison moore: Brown Disco!: madison moore in Conversation with Nao Bustamante
Section III. Dance
Chapter 15: Keith Gildart and Rosalind Watkiss Singleton: The English Civil (Disco) War Northern Soul, Club Culture, and Saturday Night Fever in Wigan and Wolverhampton, 1973-1981
Chapter 16: Ivan L. Munuera: Rushin' in the Sky
Chapter 17: Michael Lawrence: Burn, Baby, Burn-Disco Aerobics!: Working It and Working Out
Chapter 18: Qian Wang: All about My Mother: A Family Narrative of Nostalgia and Time-Space in Chinese Disco
Chapter 19: Arabella Stanger: Disco Pessimism: A School Disco at Tate Modern
Chapter 20: Kareem Khubchandani: "The Land of Disco": Arshia Haq's Insurgent Curation at Discostan
Thomas F. DeFrantz: Afterword: Disco! After the Dance
