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Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History

Online ISBN:
9780252051234
Print ISBN:
9780252042393
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press
Book

Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History

Christopher J. Smith
Christopher J. Smith
Texas Tech University
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Published online:
19 September 2019
Published in print:
1 May 2019
Online ISBN:
9780252051234
Print ISBN:
9780252042393
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press

Abstract

This book is a social history, theorizing participatory dance in New World public spaces as a tool that has enabled subaltern communities’ political resistance to hegemonic control. Drawing upon musicology, ethnomusicology, iconography, anthropology, dance studies, and folklore, and spanning examples from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century, it identifies recurrent strategic patterns in the music, movement, and “noise” that political minorities--including persons of color, economic underclasses, women, gays, and other resistance movements--have employed to oppose, contest, and transgress dominant cultures’ social control. The book applies multidisciplinary analytical practices to movement and sound in historical idioms, little documented by period scholarship, whose data are indirect, inferential, and reconstructive. Case studies include frontier Pentecostalism; Native American resistance; Shakerism; African American communities; the English- and French-speaking Caribbean; film and theatrical dance; the Stonewall Uprising and Chicago 1968 protests; twentieth-century noise ordinances; and punk-rock, hip hop, and twenty-first-century global protest movements. Examples in diverse media, from prose description to watercolor to film, are selected in order to showcase the consistency of these political understandings across diverse situations and to demonstrate the synthesis of analytical approaches, which this topic mandates. The book argues for understanding participatory music and motion--bodies and sound interacting in contested public spaces--as a central, intentional, effective, and recurrent resistance strategy in American social history.

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