African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
266 p, This study spans several linguistic areas of the Caribbean and parts of the Atlantic coast of the U.S., Mexico, and South America; it examines historical, national, popular, parading, sacred, and combat dances to reveal both meanings and consequences of performance. Beyond unfolding important physical and cultural significances of each genre, the analyses deepen to understand core motivations for African diaspora performance; the results are transcendence, resilience, and citizenship among dancing and music-making participants. The study repeatedly acknowledges Katherine Dunham, who began teaching the citizenship of Caribbean dance/music practices and reviews the literature since her original trilogy on Caribbean dance practices. Analyses also place local Caribbean dances as viable commodities within crucial Caribbean tourism and both cultural and economic globalization.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Explores the vexed relationship between popular dance and value. In a critique of the Western art canon, it traces the shifting value systems that underpin popular dance scholarship and considers how different dancing communities articulate multiple and often paradoxical expressions of judgment, significance, and worth through their embodied practice. Employing a cultural theory approach, it focuses on the choreographic content of neo-burlesque striptease in London and New York, the dance styles of British punk, metal, and ska fans, and the vernacular dances of a British-Caribbean dancehall to interrogate how value is produced, negotiated, and reimagined. Yet this is not to assume that they are autonomous values untouched by the social frameworks in which they exist. Rather, the corporeal enunciations of value constructed by those engaged in popular dance forms are informed by a complex matrix of aesthetic, economic, political, and social values that are already in circulation
