No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Dancing on the Canon: Embodiments of Value in Popular Dance by Dodds. 2011. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 235 pp., photographs, notes, bibliography, index. £50.00 cloth.
Abstract
Dancing on the Canon: Embodiments of Value in Popular Dance by SherrilDodds. 2011. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 235 pp., photographs, notes, bibliography, index. £50.00 cloth. - Volume 45 Issue 1 - Juliet McMains
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Salsa and merengue are now so popular that they are household words for Americans of all ethnic backgrounds. Recent media attention is helping other Caribbean music styles like bachata to attain a similar status. Yet popular Mexican American dances remain unknown and invisible to most non-Latinos. Quebradita, meaning “little break,” is a modern Mexican American dance style that became hugely popular in Los Angeles and across the southwestern United States during the early to mid 1990s. Over the decade of its popularity, this dance craze offered insights into the social and cultural experience of Mexican American youth. Accompanied by banda, an energetic brass band music style, quebradita is recognizable by its western clothing, hat tricks, and daring flips. The dance’s combination of Mexican, Anglo, and African American influences represented a new sensibility that appealed to thousands of young people. Hutchinson argues that, though short-lived, the dance filled political and sociocultural functions, emerging as it did in response to the anti-immigrant and English-only legislation that was then being enacted in California. Her fieldwork and interviews yield rich personal testimony as to the inner workings of the quebradita’s aesthetic development and social significance. The emergence of pasito duranguense, a related yet distinct style originating in Chicago, marks the evolution of the Mexican American youth dance scene. Like the quebradita before it, pasito duranguense has picked up the task of demonstrating the relevance of regional Mexican music and dance within the U.S. context.
In the mid-1990s several articles appeared in the dance literature calling for a greater alliance between dance scholarship and cultural studies. More recently, dance scholarship has come to be labeled “dance studies,” suggesting that such a link has occurred. Since interdisciplinarity is a key element of cultural studies, it is appropriate to investigate interdisciplinarity in dance studies by examining dance's relationship to cultural studies. This genealogical task, though, is not as straightforward as it might seem. Cultural studies' relationship to the disciplines has not been stable over its half-century of existence. Interdisciplinarity, tied so closely to cultural studies' idea of its own freedom and political mission, has proved difficult to hang onto—so difficult, in fact, that today some consider the field to be in crisis. To complicate matters further, dance and cultural studies developed along different paths; consequently, interdisciplinarity within dance studies is not always conceptualized in the way it is in cultural studies. Cultural studies was initially meant as a political and social intervention that purposefully avoided creating theories of its own, while dance research, long tied to the disciplines of history and anthropology, not only adopted many of the theories and methods of these fields but also developed theories and methods of its own as an aid in analyzing the human body in motion. Where and how, then, do dance and cultural studies meet on the grounds of interdisciplinarity? This is not an idle question; cultural studies has had a major impact on arts and humanities scholarship, and as cultural studies reaches a critical moment of reexamination, new questions arise as to the role of interdisciplinarity, both in cultural studies and in the fields it has so profoundly influenced.
Prompted by the late twentieth-century, and still growing, interest in World Dance evidenced by the emergence of this rubric in US college circles (including courses in Dance departments and newly developed academic jobs), bookings in performing venues (including World Dance festivals and shows), the support offered through funding agencies invested in arts and cultures, and the attention devoted by dance critics and scholars, as by dancers and dance lovers, I propose to consider some questions related to the discursive formation of this field. These questions are entangled with ethico-political concerns. What does ‘world dance’ actually represent at this historical conjuncture? What is the effect of imposing the ‘world,’ as a qualifying categorization, on ‘dance,’ as a set of aestheticized movement practices, in the era of so-called globalization? How does this totalizing framing (the ‘world’) work to supplement and expand the dance field as it fixes differentiations within it? How are dances from ‘out there’ selected to be included or excluded from ‘world dance’? What kinds of institutional investments, technical knowledges, economic interests, aesthetic and ethical assumptions, political arrangements, pleasures and desires participate in the process of worlding Dance?
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2000. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 419-438).
Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos
- Olga Nájera-Ramírez
- Norma E Cantú
- Brenda M Romero
Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnationalism, and Harem Fantasy
- Anthony Shay
- Oliver
- Sloat