Lily Kind

Oh, look, a reference list…

Black Dance & American Popular Dance Resources

This is not comprehensive by any means! A lot of these are texts I find myself re-visiting as well what I most often suggest to friends / curious undergrads. A lot of these are oldie-but-goodies you can find second hand. There’s a couple of ‘readers’ or ‘handbooks’ that are compilations of articles from peer-reviewed journals; these are gunna be expensive as they’re essentially ‘textbooks.’ But you can often search the table of contents for free and purchase a single article on databases like JSTOR. There’s a few films in the mix that pretty easy to find/access. Items with a * are personal faves.

Albert Murray, & Paul Devlin. (2017). Stomping the Blues. University of Minnesota Press.

Banes, S. (1994). Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism. University Press of New England.

Brooks, D.A. (2006) Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910. Durham: Duke University Press Books. *

Brown, J. (2008). Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Duke University Press. *

Brown, W. (1994) Darktown Strutters. 1st edition. New York, N.Y: Cane Hill Pr. [Fiction] *

Chang, J. (2007). Can’t Stop Won't stop: A History of The Hip-hop Generation.

Ebury. DeFrantz, T. (2002). Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance. University of Wisconsin Press.

DeFrantz, T. (2004). Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture. Oxford University Press.

DeFrantz, T., & Gonzalez, A. (Eds.). (2014). Black Performance Theory. Duke University Press.

Dehn, M. (2011) The Spirit Moves: A History of Black Social Dance on Film, 1900-1986. Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Sold as Set. Dancetime Publication. [Film] *

Dils, A. (2001). Moving History / Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader (A. C. Albright (Ed.)). Wesleyn University Press. *

Dodds, S. (Ed.). (2019). The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition. Oxford University Press.

Douglas, K.B. (2005) What’s Faith Got to Do with It?: Black Bodies/Christian Souls. Orbis Books. *

Duval Harrison, D. (2000) Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s. 4th edn. Rutgers University Press.

Ehrenreich, B. (2007) Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. Granta Books. *

Emery, L. F., & Emery, L. F. (1988). Black Dance: from 1619 to today (2nd rev. ed). Princeton Book Co.

Fogarty, M., & Johnson, I. K. (Eds.). (2022). The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies. Oxford University Press.

Golden, E. (2007) Vernon and Irene Castle’s Ragtime Revolution. 1st edition. Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky.

Gottschild, B.D. (1998) Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, Conn, London: Praeger. *

Gottschild, B. D. (2000). Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era. St. Martin’s Press.

Gottschild, B. D. (2005). The Black Dancing Body: A Geography From Coon to Cool. Palgrave Macmillan.

Guarino, L., & Oliver, W. (Eds.). (2014). Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches. University Press of Florida.

Hazzard-Gordon, K. (1990). Jookin’: the Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture. Temple University Press.

Hersch, C.B. (2016) Jews and Jazz : Improvising Ethnicity. Routledge.

Hurston, Z.N. (2001) Zora Neale Hurston : Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings : Mules and Men, Tell My Horse, Dust Tracks on a Road, Selected Articles. Edited by C.A. Wall. The Library of America. *

Jackson, Gale P. (2020). Put Your Hands on Your Hips and Act Like a Woman. University of Nebraska Press.

Jackson, J D. (2002). The Social World of Voguing. Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement, 12(2), 23–42.

Jonathan J.D. (2001). Improvisation in African-American Vernacular Dancing. Dance Research Journal, 33(2), 40–53. *

Jones, B. and Hawes, B.L. (1972) Step it Down: Games, Plays, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage. University of Georgia Press.

Lindsay Guarino, Carlos R. A. Jones, & Wendy Oliver. (2022). Rooted Jazz Dance. University Press of Florida.

Livingston, J. (2009). Paris is Burning. Second Sight. [film]

Lomax, A. (2002). The Land Where the Blues Began. New Press. *

Lott, E. and Marcus, G. (2013) Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. 20 edition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Malnig, J. (2009). Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: a Social and Popular Dance Reader. University of Illinois Press.

Malone, J. (1996). Steppin’ on the Blues: the Visible Rhythms of African American dance. University of Illinois Press.

Mann, R. (1992). Twist - The Evolution of Rock & Roll Dance. [film]

Miller, N. (2006) Stompin’ at the Savoy: The Story of Norma Miller. Candlewick Press. *

Neal, M. A., & Forman, M. (2004). That’s the Joint: the Hip-Hop Studies Reader. Routledge.

Osumare, H. (2007). The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves. Palgrave Macmillan.

Osumare, H. (2018). Dancing in Blackness: a Memoir. University Press of Florida.

Photography Archive - The Gordon Parks Foundation. Available at: https://www.gordonparksfoundation.org/gordon-parks/photography-archive. [Okay, it’s a website but photo books are expensive.]

Silver, T. (1983). Style Wars. [Film]

Stearns, M. W., & Stearns, J. (1994). Jazz Dance: the Story of American Vernacular Dance. Da Capo Press. *

Thompson, R.F. (2011) Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music. First printing edition. New York, NY: Periscope. *

Taylor, Y., Austen, J. and Watkins, M. (2012) Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Thompson, R. F. (1984). Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1st Vintage Books ed). Vintage Books.

Walker, R. (2012) Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness. Original edition. Edited by H.L.G. Jr. New York City: Soft Skull.

Wells, C.J. (2021) Between Beats: The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance. Oxford University Press.