White Screens, Black Dance: Race and Masculinity in the United States at Midcentury

White Screens, Black Dance analyzes the film and television dances of male screen stars in the United States during the mid-twentieth century. Unpacking the complex physical and visual codes performed by four case studies—the Nicholas Brothers, Gene Kelly, Elvis Presley, and Sammy Davis, Jr.—it argues that each employs Black (Africanist) dance and movement vocabularies in distinct ways, all using them to construct shifting models of masculinity over the course of their careers. In so doing,...