We see that javascript is disabled or not supported by your browser - javascript is needed for important actions on the site. Read more

What's New - Home - Login

Member $avings: $81,599,271.09 | Books Available: 784,723 | Members Online: 254

Swap Used Books - Buy New Books at Great Prices!

How To Swap Books Sign Up Search submenu

PBS Market (New Books)

Gift Buying Guide

Book Browser Advanced Search Books Posted Today Member Book Reviews Award Winning Books NYT Best Sellers Amazon Best Sellers Most Traveled Copies Club Wish List

Discussion Forums Book Lists

Club Lists My Book Lists My Watched Lists Create a List

Blog Donations

School Donation Program In Memory of... Military Donation Program Friends of PBS

Box-O-Books Maps The Eclectic Pen Fun Stuff

20 Questions Sudoku Bookmark Creator

Top 100

Requests Posts Swappers Referrers Reviewers

Pulse of PBS Spread The Word

Invite Friends Bookmarks Facebook Page Facebook App More Ways...

Photo Gallery Recipes Club Tag Cloud Member Testimonials

Help Center submenu

How To Swap Books Browse Help Docs Ask the Librarian PBS Member Icons Live Help

Kiosk

PBS Market (New Books) Go Shopping Buy Credits Buy PBS Money Upgrade Membership Gift Certificates Transfer Credits

Need Help?

Search - Modern Moves: Dancing Race during the Ragtime and Jazz Eras

Modern Moves Dancing Race during the Ragtime and Jazz Eras
Author: Danielle Robinson

Modern Moves traces the movement of American social dance styles between black and white cultural groups and between immigrant and migrant communities during the early twentieth century. Its central focus is New York City, where the confluence of two key demographic streams - an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe and the growth of the city... more »'s African American community particularly as it centered Harlem - created the conditions of possibility for hybrid dance forms like blues, ragtime, ballroom, and jazz dancing. Author Danielle Robinson illustrates how each of these forms came about as the result of the co-mingling of dance traditions from different cultural and racial backgrounds in the same urban social spaces. The results of these cross-cultural collisions in New York City, as she argues, were far greater than passing dance trends; they in fact laid the foundation for the twentieth century's social dancing practices throughout the United States.

By looking at dance as social practice across conventional genre and race lines, this book demonstrates that modern social dancing, like Western modernity itself, was dependent on the cultural production and labor of African diasporic peoples -- even as they were excluded from its rewards. A cornerstone in Robinson's argument is the changing role of the dance instructor, which was transformed from the proprietor of a small-scale, local dance school at the end of the nineteenth century to a member of a distinct, self-identified social industry at the beginning of the twentieth. Whereas dance studies has been slow to connect early twentieth century dancing with period racial politics, Modern Moves departs radically from prior scholarship on the topic, and in so doing, revises social and African American dance history of this period. Recognizing the rac(ial)ist beginnings of contemporary American social dancing, it offers a window into the ways that dancing throughout the twentieth century has provided a key means through which diverse groups of people have navigated shifting socio-political relations through their bodily movement.

Modern Moves asserts that the social practice of modern dancing, with its perceived black origins, empowered displaced people such as migrants and immigrants to grapple with the effects of industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of North American modernity. Far more than simple appropriation, the selling and practicing of "black" dances during the 1910s and 1920s reinforced whiteness as the ideal racial status in America through embodied and rhetorical engagements with period black stereotypes.

ISBN-13: 9780199779215
ISBN-10: 019977921X
Publication Date: 8/3/2015
Pages: 224
Edition: 1
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Oxford University Press
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Genres:

Humor & Entertainment >> Music >> History & Criticism
Arts & Photography >> Performing Arts >> Dance >> Classical

Back to the Top ↑

Search - Modern Moves: Dancing Race during the Ragtime and Jazz Eras

Loading...