The Oxford Handbook of Black Dance Studies
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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The Oxford Handbook of Black Dance Studies
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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The Oxford Handbook of Black Dance Studies

The Oxford Handbook of Black Dance Studies

by Thomas F. DeFrantz (Editor)
The Oxford Handbook of Black Dance Studies

The Oxford Handbook of Black Dance Studies

by Thomas F. DeFrantz (Editor)

Hardcover

$196.00 
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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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780197600832
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication date: 02/04/2026
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Pages: 784
Product dimensions: 6.50(w) x 1.50(h) x 9.50(d)

About the Author

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

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 “Women of a Certain Age” and Urban Line Dances
Raquel Monroe

8. HBCU's Danceline: Not Your Mama's Majorette's
LaQuinda Grimes

9. Krump Time: Kinetic Affect, Resurrections, and Black Reorientations of Temporal Feelings
Stephanie Leigh Batiste

10. Disnegatif and the Cinematic Labors of Black Dance
Will Rawls

11. Making Men: Personhood and Selfcraft in Screendance
Tawanda Chabikwa

12. Become Flesh/Enflesh Spirit: Significant Histories in Black Christian Liturgical Dance
P. Kimberleigh Jordan

13. Exquisitely Normal: Jermone Beacham and jumatatu m. poe's Interventions
Jasmine Johnson

A Black Break Across Time and Space

14. Scriptive Things and Aesthetic Displacements in Sankofa Danzafro's La Mentira Complaciente
Melissa Blanco Borelli

15. Katherine Dunham and the Building of Diaspora
Joanna Dee Das

16. Katherine Dunham and Mercedes Baptista: Forging Black Concert Dance Diaspora
Ágatha Oliveira

17. The Turning Point of Black Dances in Brazil: Creative Annunciations and Political Interrogations
Luciane Ramos-Silva

18. Performing Peruvian Blackness: Perú Negro's Choreography
Luis Paredes

19. Baile Funk and Kuduro: Embodied Articulations of National Belonging in Brazil and Angola
Katya Wesolowski

Black Sovereignty On Stage

20. Eleo Pomare and the Black Arts Movement
John O. Perpener III

21. Citing Ancestral Source: Abdel R. Salaam's Black Aesthetic Healing in Rhythm Legacy
Charmian Wells

22. World Making: African Mothers in Contemporary Dance
Rainy Demerson

23. Virtual Virtuosity: The Corporeal Orature of Camille A. Brown
S. Ama Wray

24. Delores Browne: Ballerina Dancing on the Edge
Joselli Deans

25. Liberty Covered in Lights: How the Great Black Way Became White
Brynn Shiovitz

26. Juanita Pitts: Race, Gender, and the Female Hoofer
Margaret Morrison

27. The Lady Dianne Walker
Constance Valis Hill

28. On Semiotics and Spectatorship of the Black Male Dancing Body in the Choreography of Kyle Abraham
Carl Paris

Re/membering Toward Together

29. Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (FESMAN)
Esailama G. A. Diouf

30. Imagining an Embodied Past: Gĩkũyũ Power, Colonial Ideologies, and Iconic Dances, 1920s-1960s
Cécile Feza Bushidi

31. Dancing Through Difference: West African Dance in Italy
Claudia Brazzale

32. Fanga, Dance of Welcome: The Journey from Africa to the United States of America
Thea Nerissa Barnes

33. Bantabas of Resistance and Acts of Reconsecration
Ava LaVonne Vinesett

34. Toward a Phenomenology of Epic Memory
C. Kemal Nance

35. Standing on the Shoulders of Black Dance Educators
Nyama McCarthy-Brown

Making Black

36. From DoDah to DoWop When the Gods No Longer Spoke: Reflections on the Legacy of the Ring Shout
Katrina Hazzard-Donald

37. Writing Dance in the AfroNow
Halifu Osumare

38. Kujichagulia to the Max: Tracing the Legacy of a Solo Dance Journey
Andrea E. Woods Valdés

39. Choreographers in the Commons Sipping Coffee: A Radio Show
Tanya Wideman-Davis/Thaddeus Davis/Dahlia Nayar

40. When and Where We Enter: The Black Avant Garde
Cynthia Oliver

41. Luxurious Performance and The Stakes of Black Excess
Nadine George-Graves

42. The Future Has Always Been Black
Thomas F. DeFrantz

Index
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