Baring Unbearable Sensualities: Hip Hop Dance, Bodies, Race, and Power

by Rosemarie A. Roberts

Overview

Theorizing the experiences of Black and Brown bodies in Hip Hop dance

Short Listed for the 2022 de la Torre Bueno© First Book Award

Short Listed for the 2022 Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research

Baring Unbearable Sensualities brings together a bold methodology, an interdisciplinary perspective and a rich array of primary sources to deepen and complicate mainstream understandings of Hip Hop dance, an Afro-diasporic dance form, which have generally reduced the style to a set of techniques divorced from social contexts. Drawing on close observation and interviews with Hip Hop pioneers and their students, Rosemarie A. Roberts proposes that Hip Hop dance is a collective and sentient process of resisting oppressive manifestations of race and power. Roberts argues that the experiences of marginalized Black and Brown bodies materialize in and through Hip Hop dance from the streets of urban centers to contemporary worldwide expressions. A companion web site contains over 30 video clips referenced in the text.

Publication of this book is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819500052
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	10/05/2021
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

ROSEMARIE A. ROBERTS (New London, CT), Dayton Professor of Dance at Connecticut College, holds an endowed professorship in the interdisciplinary study of the arts.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Rosemarie A. Roberts has constructed a sturdy and urgent study of how Hip Hop dance reflects particular cultural imperatives that are often elided in the construction of false theoretical universals. She masterfully explores the scholarly construction of the question of body and the 'ways that histories of social inequality are borne' across several areas of research. Ultimately, this book confirms the myriad complexities at work in the deployment of Hip Hop dance in theatrical and learning environments circumscribed by differences among people too often ignored or denied."—Thomas DeFrantz, professor, Duke University

"Baring Unbearable Sensualities is methodologically groundbreaking, theoretically incisive, and politically inspiring...a major contribution to Hip Hop dance scholarship."—Joseph G. Schloss, author of Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls and Hip-Hop Culture in New York

Editorial Reviews

"Rosemarie A. Roberts has constructed a sturdy and urgent study of how Hip Hop dance reflects particular cultural imperatives that are often elided in the construction of false theoretical universals. She masterfully explores the scholarly construction of the question of body and the 'ways that histories of social inequality are borne' across several areas of research. Ultimately, this book confirms the myriad complexities at work in the deployment of Hip Hop dance in theatrical and learning environments circumscribed by differences among people too often ignored or denied."—Thomas DeFrantz, professor, Duke University

"Baring Unbearable Sensualities is methodologically groundbreaking, theoretically incisive, and politically inspiring...a major contribution to Hip Hop dance scholarship."—Joseph G. Schloss, author of Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls and Hip-Hop Culture in New York

From the Publisher