Overview

On many Sundays, Black New Orleanians dance through city streets in Second Lines. These processions invite would-be spectators to join in, grooving to an ambulatory brass band for several hours. Though an increasingly popular attraction for tourists, parading provides the second liners themselves with a potent public expression of Black resistance. Rachel Carrico examines the parading bodies in motion as a form of negotiating and understanding power. Seeing pleasure as a bodily experience, Carrico reveals how second liners’ moves link joy and liberation, self and communal identities, play and dissent, and reclamations of place. As she shows, dancers’ choices allow them to access the pleasure of reclaiming self and city through motion and rhythm while expanding a sense of the possible in the present and for the future. In-depth and empathetic, Dancing the Politics of Pleasure at the New Orleans Second Line blends analysis with a chorus of Black voices to reveal an indelible facet of Black culture in the Crescent City.

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9780252045974

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“A triumphant exploration of dance as public expression of Black culture-in-motion, Dancing the Politics of Pleasure at the New Orleans Second Line combines ethnography and careful historical recovery to theorize pleasure as an urgent valence of collective aesthetic action. Carrico reveals how parading moves Black sovereignty through the streets of New Orleans, modeling defiance and self-actualization as essential aspects of Black social dance.”--Thomas F. DeFrantz, Founding Director, Collegium for African Diaspora Dance

Author Information

Rachel Carrico is an assistant professor of theatre and dance at the University of Florida.

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