Modern Moves

Abstract

Abstract This book examines the movement of American social dances between black and white cultural groups and immigrant and migrant communities during the early twentieth century. It is structured by five overlapping case studies drawn from the disparate and yet related dance scenes of Manhattan, a black Atlantic capital into which diverse people and dances flowed and intermingled, and out of which new dances were marketed globally. By looking at dance as social practice across conventional genre and race lines, this book demonstrates that modern social dancing, like Western modernity itself, was dependent on the cultural production and labor of African diasporic peoples—even as they were largely excluded from its rewards. The book builds upon prior scholarship on the topic, and in so doing, revises the African American and popular dance history of this period. Recognizing the racial thinking at the heart of contemporary American dancing, it offers a window into the ways in which social dancing throughout the twentieth century has provided a key means by which diverse groups of people have navigated shifting sociopolitical relations through their bodily movement. The book asserts that the social practice of modern dancing ultimately empowered displaced people like migrants and immigrants to grapple with the effects of industrialization, urbanization, and indeed the rise of North American modernity.

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