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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Thomas F. DeFrantz (Professor of Performance Studies and Theatre, Professor of Performance Studies and Theatre, Northwestern University)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint:   Oxford University Press Inc
Weight:   0.003kg
ISBN:  

9780197600832

ISBN 10:   0197600832
Pages:   822
Publication Date:   09 January 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   To order  

Table of Contents

Oxford Handbook of Black Dance Studies F. FOREWORD: Black Dance Studies Takiyah Nur Amin A. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS L. LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 0. INTRODUCTION: Dancing the African Diaspora 1. Thomas F. DeFrantz Lands of the Maroon Resistances 1. The Pleasures of Primitivism: Les Ballet Nègres and Queer West Indian Migrancy Amanda Reid 2. Bals Nègres, Sites of Performance or Spectacle: From Kalenda to Biguine, Marronage or Commodification? Jacqueline Couti 3. Dance Like Douen Makeda Thomas 4. Yanvalou for Haiti: An Affective Ethnography of Ayikodans' Anmwey Ayiti Manman Mario LaMothe 5. The Sacred Mapou: Landscape and Choreography at Souvnans Ann Mazzocca Bellecci 6. Dancing Black Radical Presence: Intimate Geographies and Proximal Memories in Contemporary Haitian Performance Dasha A. Chapman Moving Towards a Sacred Social Self 7. The People Keep Dancing: Black

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Author Information

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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