Black Moves: New Research in Black Dance Studies
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Black Moves: New Research in Black Dance Studies engages a wide range of research topics and methodologies to confirm a vital discourse surrounding black lives and processes of dance production. Edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Tara Aisha Willis, this special issue of The Black Scholar re-centers dance as an activity that confirms presence, expands cultural horizons, and restores community. Subjects explored in the issue include second line dance in New Orleans and the trope of the “natural”; pedagogies of African-derived dance in higher education; experimental performance in New York and the implications of Blackness that surround its production. Also approached in this issue are spirituals as embodied acts of resistance; Katherine Dunham’s contribution to the archival quality of Black dance; the importance of dance as an affirmation of Haitian corporealities; queer stance realized in Black social dances including voguing and bone-breaking. Methodologies represented by the researchers in the volume include ethnography, literary and cultural theory, education studies, anthropology, and media analysis. Of special import to several authors is the construction of archive that confounds and surrounds discourses of Black dance. The wide range of methods and topics, as well as the diverse cohort of contributing authors, demonstrate an expansive range of excellence in dance studies; a range that will surely inspire further research within and through this urgent area of inquiry.
Talking Black Dance: Inside Out/Outside In
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This special edition of Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies grows from exchanges inspired by the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance (CADD) conference Dancing the African Diaspora: Theories of Black Performance held at Duke University February 7–9, 2014. That event grew from a meeting convened in April 2012, when the founding members of CADD— then called the African Dance Research Group—convened in Durham, sponsored by SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, to discuss current research projects and share ambitions for developing a group of scholars working in the areas of African diaspora dance. We envisioned a space where our work in corporeality studies, Black Dance, sexualities and dance, dance historiography, dance and healing, dance and pedagogy, the businesses of dance, and an array of other related topics could benefit from our collective engagement. The volume is guest edited by Takiyah Nur Amin and Thomas F. DeFrantz.