Dance as Activism: Questions for a Little Black Girl

What is community art activism as it relates to the embodied discipline of dance in 21st Century America? In this paper, I query whether dance can be used as a pedagogical tool to unmask racist, colonialist, sexist and classist practices; inform revolutionary identities; and reinvigorate communities to build and/or resurrect foundational structures that honor, dignify and empower the community as a whole and each individual member wholly. I focus on girls and women of African ancestry (Black or/and African-American girls and women) in their encounter with dance in the social-justice and community-activist initiatives. My concerns are: (1) the intensification of the hypersexualization of the Black female body in contemporary United States cultural discourse; (2) the new and pervasive forms of cultural humiliation and violence exacted upon the Black female body; (3) the implication of both for the formation of Black female individual and community identity. Using critical social/cultural theories, womanist methodologies and performance-studies approaches, and drawing on interviews conducted with M’Bewe Escobar, C. S’thembile West, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, I examine case studies of community arts activists who employ dance as a primary tool for critical social/cultural interrogation and community building. As a dance artist, an African-Caribbean woman and a social/cultural activist who uses dance as a critical tool, I am situated in the midst of this conversation.

Intertwined in and interpenetrating through the concerns put forth in this paper are the questions that stirred at the 2008 National Community Arts Convening & Research Project Conference. Responses to questions such as where do you come from, where are you rooted, what is your passion for this work, and why are you here, inform encounters, curriculum, expectations, notions of power, beauty, and justice. These and other pertinent questions are explicitly and implicitly addressed in this paper.

The notion of community, broad and controversial as it is, is in this paper used to denote gatherings of persons with shared interests and investment in the maintenance of a collective in which honor, dignity and human flourishing are diligently upheld and the notion of revolutionary love is infused in all aspect of public and private encounter (hooks 2000, xv; Phillips 2006). With this in mind, it is impossible to have a community in which private or public denigration of self or others is a prerequisite for belonging (Guijt, Shah 25). In such instances, other terms such as club, group, fraternity, sorority, neighborhood, town, city and even society (where there is no prerequisite for dignity or consciously engaged living) are likely more applicable. Hence, in this paper it is understood that sitting at the same table (living in the same neighborhood, attending the same public gathering) is not a marker that a community has been or has the intention of being formed; shared space does not organically imply community (Guijt, Shah 25).

The methodologies used in this paper were chosen for their tendency to privilege lived experience. Critical social/cultural theories facilitate a reflexive examination of the ways in which social and cultural discourses are formed, informed and impact the lives and life possibilities of persons within a given society (Feagin 5).

Womanist methodologies draw on tools from various disciplines but its center of gravity is the lives and concerns of ordinary Black women. The feminist agenda has not always valued the lives and concerns of women of color. On numerous occasions, in the attempt to access and exercise power, feminists have consciously worked to the detriment of the lives and concerns of women of color: womanism offers a corrective to addressing structures of oppression without architecting additional displacement of the oppressed. With its center of gravity in the daily lives of ordinary Black women, ethics and spirituality are at the core womanist methodologies. Hence, it offers alternative modes and lenses for locating and negotiating power and oppression, while it holds the affirming of dignified lives, individual and community reflexive self-evaluation, ethical and spiritual responsibility, and the building up of holistic communities at the center of its praxis (Phillips).

Performance-studies approaches, because the focus on what actually takes place in the negotiation of life, offer the opportunity to explore the way in which Black women’s encounter with dance in community-building, community activism and social-justice work can empower, undermine, inform, transform, silence and/or frustrate possibilities for voice (Turner 40).

The artists interviewed for this paper are Black women who facilitate encounters in community building and social/cultural activism. They are dance professionals who have (or have had) extensive performing careers and are active social/cultural activist, community builders and cultural practitioners with more than 30 years of experience. M’bewe Escobar, a teaching artist, is affiliated with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater/Ailey Camp. She works largely with elementary and secondary school children. C.S’thembile West is a professor in the Women’s Studies Department at West Illinois University and dance writer. She works chiefly with young adults and women. Jawole Willa Jo Zollar is the founder and artistic director of Urban Bush Women Dance Company. She works primarily in multigenerational community settings.

Dance as a pedagogical tool is ripe with possibilities. Dance brings the troubling question of embodiment to the center of conversation and keeps it there. Since it requires the use of the body, it can offer up occasions for persons to act as subjects who name and define themselves and their environment. Dance calls on the practical-use multiple intelligences (including kinesthetic, music, intra- and interpersonal, spatial, logic, linguistic and nature intelligences), thus it offers up options for cultivating critically engaged social actors and cultural producers. Dance involves the calling forth of steps/movement sequences from cultural and social activities of the immediate and distant past, thus it can offer the chance for affirming, questioning, re-interpreting and re-visioning social memory. Dance offers a way of learning that etches deep into bones and expands beyond the horizon of dreams.

Educators Paulo Freire, Joanne Kilgour Dowdy, Lisa Delpit, Donaldo Macedo and Lilia I. Bartolome point to freedom as essential to education: They point to the formation/re-formulation of individual and community understanding of self, society and the world as necessary to the process and goal of education. Dance as a pedagogical tool provides opportunities for this type of deep learning encounter, a liberating process (Freire 16).

Contemporary United States culture, with its embrace and appropriation of the misogynistic aspects of hip-hop culture, reveals some of the ways dance can be used to stifle freedom. Young people (Black, white, brown and others) are. through the guise of entertainment, indoctrinated into this oppressive system (Hobgood 2000, 4). Coerced by the “hype” and the desire to be “with it,” young people, and those who seek to align themselves with youth culture, perpetuate the oppression of themselves and others (Mullins 2005, 684). By inscribing and symbolically infusing Black bodies with derogatory messages that announces as innate degrading ways of being in the world, contemporary United States culture circumscribe the Black person’s possibilities for experience and expression in the world (Sharp 2000, 290). Moreover, the Black female body is displaced from familial and community love, honor and safety and re-positioned as commodity on the grand capitalist marketplace that resembles, all too closely, the slave auction block.

In “Society and the Dance: The Social Anthropology and Process of Performance,” anthropologist Peter Brinson identifies dance as an important tool in the analysis of society (207-215). Long before Brinson, Zora Neale Hurston used dance as one of her primary tools for critical social and cultural inquiry of the United States’ South. Since then cultural practitioners, including anthropologists, artists and educators, have drawn on dance to construct a lens through which to interrogate social, cultural and popular society and thought. Artists and educators such as Lavinia Williams, Pearl Primus, Eleo Pomare, Joe Nash, Alvin Ailey and Katherine Dunham were part of cultural movements that, through dance, queried the universalistic aestheticism of dance in the West and the implication of such aestheticism for social, cultural, gender and racial politicking. Why was aesthetics so critically important to these scholars, artists, community activists and social-justice workers? How does aesthetics relate to the crucial topics of social justice and community building?

Aesthetics is at the foundational core of every society. It informs the ways in which a given society embraces and understands itself and encounters others. Hence, it informs the construction of community and family, concepts of justice and honor, notions of responsibility and trust (Hobson 10; Reischer, Koo 298). A culture’s aesthetic sensibility is in performance in every crease and crevice of individual and community life. Yet, aesthetic sensibilities are so common places, so taken-for-granted within the culture of a given society that it becomes invisible, unquestionably “real” and unquestionably “logical.” It remains so until the questions bubbling within the undergirth of the unquestionable slide through the society’s fissures.

Nowhere is aesthetics more visible, more provocatively apparent, more performative than in the places/spaces in which a society is at odds with itself, and consequently at odds with those it labels “Other” (Yancy). It is in these places/spaces that taken-for-granted understandings are unmasked, latent questions hungry to be articulated explode from their hiding place, and the unquestionables are asked to account for themselves. These spaces/places are fertile ground for hitherto unimagined possibilities; possibilities for encountering the world in innovative ways, possibilities to discover, rediscover and/or reconfigure old formulas in order to respond to, inform and/or challenge new circumstance, or old circumstance in new guise. In most societies the arts play the crucial role of making visible, nurturing and promoting the culture’s aesthetic sensibilities, articulating its most deeply held beliefs about itself and others and passing on to each new generation the society’s aesthetic sensibilities (Hobson 9).

In contemporary western societies the Black female body is positioned at thresholds: She stands on the pulse between animal and human sinner and divinely burdened, reproached and deeply desired. She is gendered and raced, raced with sexualized violence, gendered with racialized brutality. She is the recipient of a sacralized hostility that endorses relentless cultural violence (Burton 8; Gilkes 242).

Forcibly displayed naked on public auction blocks during the time of enslavement, Black women were the first women in the United States to endure socially and culturally sanctioned public sexual exploitation, sexual humiliation, sexual abuse and sexual violence (Gilkes 242). Notions of her sexual availability and sexual appetite, a legal system that support and promoted enslavement and a society that did not apply its moral barometer to its encounter with the lives of the enslaved resulted in the unquestioned use and abuse of her body (West 66). Slaveholder were neither legally nor morally culpable for the treatment exacted on Black women’s bodies (Hill 56). The end of the slavery did not bring ease to the derogatory images and myths inscribed on the Black female body. It can be argued that these images and myths were, instead, intensified (Hobson 119).

In June of 2007 at the closing exchange ceremony for the two-week trial Alvin Ailey Dance-Camp in Atlanta, Georgia, an elementary-school girl of African ancestry delivered the above line of her poem. In her statement she flipped the conversation around race, Black femaleness and power: She imagined that knowledge (not usability or instrumentality) of her being was somehow desirable; she imagined that the desire was fueled with passion that could (and certainly did) catalyze commitment, investment and patience; she imagined that the local knowledge of herself (Low, Lawerence-Zuinga 79), which she possessed in consciousness and in ancestral knowing systems, is valuable; she imagined that she has the power to orchestrate whether or not and under what circumstance and manner this knowledge of herself is let known to those outside of herself, regardless of color, gender, class, ethnicity or religion; she imagined that within the landscape of the contemporary United States she is a person in her own right. This little Black girl, in her audaciousness, follows in an honorary line of truth tellers, performing herself in much the same way Sojourner Truth did when she flipped the script, articulated a definition of herself and her place in the world, and forced her white audience to, for a revolutionary moment, see her as she saw and lived herself (Brooks 50).

This little girl of African ancestry, a little Black girl living in the big white United States, vocalized a power and presence that much of hip-hop culture and Don Imus and much of the contemporary United States have built hegemony against (West 66). When this little girl breaks into her dance, with her twists, whines, spins, jumps, falls, convolutions and counterrevolutions, bounces and ripples and breezes, she is, for herself, intermingled in conversation with the revolutionary spirit of her present and ancestral selves, carving through the past, present, and future and creating dynamic presence through informed performed performance.

On April 4, 2007, Don Imus, a controversial national radio host, referred to the group of young Black women who made up the successful Rutgers University women’s basketball team in racial and sexual derogatory terms. In his defense, he claimed the ordinariness of such statements within present-day United States culture. The young Black women, the recipients of Don Imus’ verbal attack, were asked to endure the burden of living lives as Black women in the United States. They were expected to, and did, carry this unearned burden of normalized cultural humiliation and violence with the stoic grace of “the strong Black woman” and play their already scripted roles on the national and international stage (Hobgood 4).

Mainstream United States culture has normalized the public denigration of Black girls and women. Don Imus was not speaking against the grain when he expressed his “controversial” thoughts in April 2007 (Feagin 14). His reinstatement back onto the airwaves in the latter months of the same year speaks more of the okay-ness of his popular gesturing than to any equity in the judicial system of popular and legal thought and culture. I would not deny that there is always, somewhere, a resistance to vulgar displays in popular culture. Such resistance to this aspect of contemporary United States culture is at best cursory, emanating from the whispers of tired older women and men or the quivering utterances of shell-shocked middle-aged professionals. My question here is: What happens when vulgar displays and, what Joseph Conrad called the corruption of human conscience, become normative, accepted as central to the culture’s understanding of itself?

Troubling the performativity of Don Imus’ gesturing, a little Black girl defines herself and her world, effectively trumping the Imus script. Who is this little Black girl who professes knowledge of the complexities of her hair as the requirement for knowing her, of knowing how she understands herself and her place in the world? Who is this little Black girl, whose complicated and tenacious hair — much like her cocoa-brown body — has throughout United States history been the object of ridicule, derogation and confusion? Her hair, identified as “a problem,” requires a multimillion-dollar industry to solve it. Her hair, a symbol of both her grace and her curse, is hair that dares to be regardless. Her hair, much like her dancing body, which she refuses to pathologize, is, indeed, an icon of her present and future selves; daring to be regardless (Phillips 9; Yancy).

But, who is this little Black girl for those who have been drilled daily, from birth to the grave, to carve up her body and negate her personhood (Macedo, Bartolome 4; Phillips 9)? Her breasts (not yet formed), her thighs, her womb, her lips, neck, hair and eyes and the space between her thighs are all eroticized, exotized, instrumentalized and commercialized (Gilkes 242). She is what Fred Moten calls the “commodity who talks” (Moten). In this case, she is the commodity who “talks back” through her dance and her vocal capacity. Anna K. Perkins points to the Black woman’s voice as her primary and perennial weapon against injustice. A Black woman may not posses economic strengthen, social status or political power but her voice (embodied and spoken) is always hers; and her inherited legacy of resistance requires her to “talk back” to protect herself and her family, to make visible and interrogate society’s unquestionables, to declare words and deeds unacceptable, to challenge and unmask the various mutations of isms the society is vested in, and to assert and affirm her dignity, honor and integrity.

Implicit in what all three artists shared about their experiences in community arts activism is the notion that community is, and should be, a space in which dignity, honor and individual and communal flourishing are upheld, a place where revolutionary love drives each and every interaction, a place where no individual’s sense of belongingness is predicated upon the denegation of self and/or other.

Interrogating popular hip-hop culture, M’Bewe Escobar views the tight clothing young girls are encouraged to wear as binding not only to their bodies but also to their minds, obstructing their ability to self-express, voice their presences and concerns in the world. By capturing the imaginations of young Black girls, popular culture indoctrinates the girls into patterns of social constraints. Limitation on the ways in which young Black girls are allowed to define, identify and assert themselves, are promoted through a one-dimensional view of Black womanhood (Emerson120). This view of Black womanhood is hypersexualized and morally tenuous (Hobson 10). As Escobar points out, the nudity promoted by popular hip-hop culture is not “benign nudity; it is very sexual.” This sexual objectification, where sexuality, sensuality and spirituality are violently torn apart from one another and sexuality is highlighted at the cost of personhood and holistic beingness, is a repetitive pattern in United States culture’s dealing with regards to Black femaleness.

For Escobar, young women are taught to bind themselves in tight clothing that simulates the nudity of their popular hip-hop idols. This carries negative consequences for voice; it carries negative consequences for young Black girls’ ability to self-express, their ability to “talk back.” In essence, it negatively impacts young Black girls’ ability to assert themselves in defense of themselves against various forms of injustices.

In her workshops, Escobar engage young girls about their clothing, help them to identify types of clothing that would allow them the greater movement possibility. In so doing, Escobar helps young Black girls to give themselves permission to experience presence, voice and personal growth within the space of the dance studio with the hope that this will propel the freeing of their imagination, the embracing of opportunities to experience, explore and engage the world in new and transformative ways.

Highlighting the body as foundational to the experience of life, C. S’thembile West notes: “When we self-identify we begin to find out who we are in our bodies. We become aware of how our bodies feel, and become aware of what others feel.” Conscious engagement in the body is essential to an individual’s personal development and growth, and crucial to the ways in which individuals encounter others, build community and build societies. The body as a site of “social commentary” is a provocative space. West points to a history of African Americans’ use of the body though its popular dances to comment on, contest and resist dominant white society’s script about their identities and lives (West 68). In her work, West encourages young women to explore and develop movement vocabulary that speaks of all aspects of their lives, to choose when sexuality is the topic of conversation/commentary, and to be informed by justice in their voice and actions (West 2005, 66). West notes: “In the context of movement, each encounter with another dance provides an opportunity to distill learning and to ‘try on’ new kinesthetic clothing: nuance, insinuation, attitude, feeling, sense and intelligence” (West 66).

For this reason, West does her homework, not wanting to “turn students off” on their first visit to the dance studio, West judiciously employs music from popular hip-hop culture, choosing the artist and message with care. Sifting through popular hip-hop music to find the right artist or songs is not easy: “I wince because it [the messages in the music] just go through me. I am not trying to validate it, but I at least have to hear it. It's like I need to know what the porn is, but I don't have to sanction it.” In this way, West is able to make herself available to extend a genuine invitation to young Black women, meeting them where they are. But also meeting them in a space where she is safe, hence tending to the essential activity of self-care while working on the project of building community. Building on an initial encounter in which she and her young adult participants are honored, West introduces spirituality and justice into the movement and verbal conversation. She encourages young Black women to expand their expressive vocabulary, so that they empower themselves to move beyond the confines of popular hip-hop culture and contemporary United States cultural rhetoric about their bodies, their lives, their power and their voices. West speaks from a deeply rooted African-American spiritual base that she hopes will be passed on to the young Black women she encounters.

In her multigenerational community arts encounters, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar applies a three-pronged method: (1) Research/Prep Work, (2) Listening together and (3) Debriefing.

Research/Prep work is the time taken before entering the community to find out about the community’s current situation, its history, its identity. By making contact with designated community leaders, insight is given into where the community sees itself going.

Listening and creating together requires work from all participants. It is through deep listening that members of the community come to know each other better, engage in the building of art that reflects the interests/concerns of the community, and develop or rediscover skills that promote the community’s well-being. Zollar notes, “The building of community is through this art-making experience together.” This moment of collaboration is potentially transformative. Collaboration, whether it is with dance-company members or with members of the site community, the requirements are the same: respect for the views and ideas of others, and willingness to engage in the discovery and creativity necessary for bringing ideas together. For Zollar, collaboration does not find its center in compromise, it finds its center in pure dialogue.

Debriefing takes place after the artwork has been exhibited. It is here that community participants discuss what they have learned, what was not brought into discussion, and how the community will continue on. Calling attention to the finitude of the workshop, Zollar reminds the site community: “We are going leave. What will you carry forward? How can we assist you?

Zollar’s community-building work allows participants to engage in deep learning and bonding with others in the community through the shared experience of art making. By providing common ground in which respect and dignity of each community member is upheld and equally valued, individuals are more likely to voice their interests and concerns. In so doing, Zollar’s notion of “pure dialogue” is made possible. Pure dialogue becomes the instrument for the creation of an authentic community artwork. In the art-making space facilitated by Zollar and her company, the youthful voices of young people are as valued and honored as the seasoned voices of their elders, the potential for shared experiences, knowledge and wisdom is made possible. Such a space offers possibilities for the “unearthing” of that which stirs in the undercurrent of the community, opening up the hope for healing and transformation. Having engaged in a model of deep collaboration informed by pure dialogue, these skills now become a part of the community’s local knowledge base, tools to call on in order to carry on the necessary healing and building work outside the workshop space.

Based on the insights put forward by Escobar, West and Zollar the little Black girl in performance in Scene One, the young Black woman in Scene Two, and the little Black girl in Scene Three can, when paired with facilitators conscious of the world Black girls and women are asked to negotiate, 1) find, in the embodied practice of dance, space/place to discover themselves, locate and articulate their voices, and engage in embodied critical social commentary; 2) learn the skills necessary for the building up of a spiritual foundation that ultimately informs notions of justice and empowers Black girls and women to live in ways that honors their spiritual foundation; and, 3) experience the powerful affirmation of having a voice, equally valued, in a community made up of those invested in the maintaining of a collective in which honor, dignity, and human flourishing are diligently upheld and the notion of revolutionary love is infused in all aspects of private and public encounter (hooks 2000, Phillips 2006).

Dance in social justice and community activism holds hope for providing young Black girls with the necessary skills for negotiating the onslaught of cultural violence they will encounter. Yet, how do we begin to build a world where this violence is not a part of their lives?

What are the questions for a Little Black Girl? The questions I have for a Little Black Girl — the Little Black girl in me and in the mothers, aunts, friends and other women of age, the Little Black Girl who lives in the present and carves out the future with deep understanding of and responsibility to the past, present and future, the Little Black Girl who is the daughter and/or niece of Jesse Jackson, Lil Boosie, Clarke Howard, Colin Powell, Don Imus, Spike Lee, Plies, Tiger Woods and Barack Obama; the Little Black Girl who must speak - my questions are: Is it enough; is training young girls to deal with the onslaught of anticipated psychic and cultural violence enough? Is it enough to be ready with the right cutting words or brazen attitudes: is it enough to be skillfully trained in heart to heart, skin to skin, spirit to spirit, winner-takes-all vicious combat? Is it acceptable to train the innocence out of little girls’ hearts in order to protect her souls, enough? At what point is it unacceptable to continue this program of violence? At what point should demands for critical, thought-out solutions rupture the complacency of normalized violations? Is it possible to inspire this society, which at its core is not invested in the well-being a Little Black Girl or her community, to become true stakeholders in upholding the human dignity of a Little Black Girl? With Escobar’s assertion that popular hip-hop culture is “giving props,” rewarding boys and young men for their denigration of Black girls and women, is it possible to build a community that takes stock in a Little Black Girl, invested in her value, her honor, her power and her potential? Is it possible to become critically constructive architects of a future open to the honor, dignity and empowerment of the community as a whole and each individual member wholly? As West notes: “When we say justice, we are talking about change.” We are talking about embracing an aesthetic notion that resonates in the honor and dignity of each individual and community. We are talking about beauty reflected in culture and society, in politics and economy, in race/ethnic and gender relations. We are talking about the art of building, healing, and sustaining community.

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art. The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.

Carole Marie Webster is a dance/theater artist, a cultural anthropologist, and theologian. She uses dance/movement to engage communities in critical reflection and conversation on issues of gender, race/ethnic, disability and class justice.

[*] In order protect this young Black woman’s identity, the fictitious name Irene Black is used.

Asante, K.W. African Dance: An Artistic, Historical, and Philosophical Inquiry. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1996.

Bennett, M., and V.D. Dickerson. Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representation by African American Women. New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Rutgers University Press, 2000.

Brinson, P. Society and the Dance: The Social Anthropology and Process of Performance. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Byrd, A., and A. Solomon A. Naked: Black Women Bare All about Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips, and Other Body Parts. New York, N.Y.: Penguin Press Books. 2005.

Emerson, R.A. “Where My Girl At? Negotiating Black Womanhood in Music Videos.” Gender and Society 16:1 (2002): 115-135.

Feagin, J.R. Racist America: Roots, Current Realities and Future Reparations. New York and London: Routledge, 2000.

Freccero, C. “Unruly Bodies: Popular Culture Challenges to the Regime of Body Backlash: Two Live Crew and Madonna.” Visual Anthropology Review 9:1 (1993): 74-81.

Gilkes, C.T. “The ‘Loves’ and ‘Troubles’ of African-American Women's Bodies: The Womanist Challenge to Cultural Humiliation and Community Ambivalence.” A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil & Suffering. Ed. Emilie M. Townes. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1993. 232-249.

Guijt, I., and M.K. The Myth of Community: Gender Issues in Participatory Development. Rugby, U.K.: Practical Action Publishing, 1998.

Gray, H.S. Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation. Berkley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2005.

Habson, J. Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 2005.

Hanna, J.L. Dance, Sex, and Gender: Signs of Identity, Dominance, Defiance, and Desire. Chicago: University of Chicago Pres, 1988.

Healey, J.F., and E. O’Brien. Race, Ethnicity, and Gender. Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Pine Forge Press/An Imprint of Sage Publications, Inc., 2004.

Hill, C.P. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Hobgood, M.E. Dismantling Privilege: An Ethics of Accountability. Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 2000.

hooks, b. All About Love: New Visions. New York, N.Y.: William Marrow and Company, 2000.

Low, S.M., and D. Lawerence-Zuniga. Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

Macedo, D., and L.I. Bartolome. Dancing with Bigotry: Beyond the Politics of Tolerance. New York: Palgrave, 1999.

Mullings, L. “Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology.” Annual Review Anthropology 34 (2005): 667-693.

Moten, F. Between the Break: The Aesthetics of Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Perkins, A.K. “En/gendering Church in a Plural Society: A Jamaican Reflection.” Caribbean Theology. 7 May 2005. T13C Theology, Ethicanand Caribbean Literature. 20 Jan. 2008 <http://caribbeantheology.net/anna_perkins.htm>.

Phillips, E.N. “Ms. Annie Malone’s Poro: Addressing Whiteness and Dressing Black-Bodied Women.” Transforming Anthropology 11:2 (2004): 4-17.

Reischer, E.,and K.S. Koo. “The Body Beautiful.” Annual Review Anthropology 33 (2004): 297-317.

Sharp, L.A. “The Commodification of the Body Its Parts.” Annual Review Anthropology 29: (2000): 287-328.

Spencer, P. Society and the Dance: The Social Anthropology of Process and Performance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Turner, V. From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982.

Wade, P. Race, Nature, and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. London/Sterling, Va.: Pluto Press, 2002.

West, C.S. “Black Bodies in Dance Education: Charting a New Pedagogical Paradigm to Eliminate Gendered and Hypersexualized Assumptions.” The Journal of Dance Education 5 (2005): 64-6.

White, F.E. Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminist and the Politics of Respectability. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.

Yancy G. “Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19:4 (2005): 215-241.

Home

About CAN

APInews

Reading Room

Resources

Forums

Site Map

What's New

Search Site

Dance as Activism: Questions for a Little Black Girl

Comments