Overview

The Oxford Handbook of Black Dance Studies encompasses the thinking that considers how people in motion craft worlds beyond worlds of imagination, culture, desire, intellect, and practice. Black Dance Studies, which brings together thinking and moving, is foundational to any manner of Black expression and political action. This handbook offers a broad look into it as a form of intellectual inquiry. The twinned dynamic of dance as a practice replete with reflection as well as elaboration offers a prismatic assessment of how Black Life emerges and moves, and how our lives expand in multiple directions through gesture. Encouraging well-being within the activity of embodied wondering, Black dance constructs counterbalances to everyday worlds of disavowal and disconnection; under-appreciation and material lack. Black Dance Studies takes on the task of narrating how dancing matters as a technology of feeling and participation in a political process of embodied Black Life. The volume includes forty-two chapters of original scholarship that cultivate an awareness of dizzying abundance in Black dance practice. They stretch through many genres of analysis and intellectual methods. With unflappable confidence, each chapter tells of differential relations to an African diaspora in motion. There might be few areas of endeavor that Black Dance never touches. The rising connectivities of Black Dance Studies offer moments to savor the source codes of activities that emerge in expressive gestures cast in relation to the ever-presentness of Black Life.

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9780197600832

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Thomas F. DeFrantz, Professor at Northwestern University, directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, a humanities and creative research lab. Believes in our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. Convenes the Black Performance Theory working group and is founding director of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance. Faculty and teaching at the University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; ImPulsTanz; SNDO; Juilliard; New Waves Institute; Bennington College; faculty at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, Duke, the University of Nice. DeFrantz contributed concept and a voice-over for a permanent installation on Black Social Dance that opened with the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture in 2016. slippage.org

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