Provides biographical and historical information on a group of African-American artists who worked during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to legitimize dance of the African diaspora as a serious art form.

Africans brought as slaves to North America arrived without possessions, but not without culture. The fascinating elements of African life manifested themselves richly in the New World, and among the most lasting and influential of these was the art of African dance. This generously illustrated history follows the dynamics of African dance forms throughout each generation. Early chapters discuss the African continent and the heritage of African American dance; the discrimination and marginalization of African Americans and the fortitude with which their dance forms survived; and black dance in the slavery era and later in the nineteenth century. Remaining chapters outline ten major characteristics that have consistently marked African American dance, and describe the various styles of black vernacular dance that became popular in America. The book concludes with a discussion of African dance at the end of the twentieth century and its important role in the flowering of African American arts. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

He also addresses concerns about how dance performance is documented, including issues around spectatorship and the display of sexuality, the relationship of Ailey's dances to civil rights activism, and the establishment and maintenance of a successful, large-scale Black Arts institution."--Jacket.

In this ground-breaking collection of literary biographies, many with pictures, authors Lorraine Elena Roses and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph chronicle the lives and works of 100 black women novelists, short-story writers, playwrights, poets, essayists, critics, historians, journalists, and editors writing in the United States between 1900 and 1945. Here are insightful portraits of famous black women, among them Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Angelina Weld Grimké, Mary Eliza Church Terrell, and Ida Bell Wells-Barnett. Here, too, are many thoughtful profiles of neglected writers--their works deserving to be rescued from obscurity. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with the writers and their families, The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond traces its subjects' contributions to literature, their concerns about race and gender, their common themes, their relationships with artistic contemporaries, and the influence of these early writers on their modern-day counterparts in American literature.

Two traditionally divided strains of American dance, Modern Dance and Negro Dance, are linked through photographs, reviews, film, and oral history, resulting in a unique view of the history of American dance.

National Dance Education Organization Ruth Lovell Murray Book Award UNCG | Susan W. Stinson Book Award for Dance Education An African American art form, jazz dance has an inaccurate historical narrative that often sets Euro-American aesthetics and values at the inception of the jazz dance genealogy. The roots were systemically erased and remain widely marginalized and untaught, and the devaluation of its Africanist origins and lineage has largely gone unchallenged. Decolonizing contemporary jazz dance practice, this book examines the state of jazz dance theory, pedagogy, and choreography in the twenty-first century, recovering and affirming the lifeblood of jazz in Africanist aesthetics and Black American culture. Rooted Jazz Dance brings together jazz dance scholars, practitioners, choreographers, and educators from across the United States and Canada with the goal of changing the course of practice in future generations. Contributors delve into the Africanist elements within jazz dance and discuss the role of Whiteness, including Eurocentric technique and ideology, in marginalizing African American vernacular dance, which has resulted in the prominence of Eurocentric jazz styles and the systemic erosion of the roots. These chapters offer strategies for teaching rooted jazz dance, examples for changing dance curricula, and artist perspectives on choreographing and performing jazz. Above all, they emphasize the importance of centering Africanist and African American principles, aesthetics, and values. Arguing that the history of jazz dance is closely tied to the history of racism in the United States, these essays challenge a century of misappropriation and lean into difficult conversations of reparations for jazz dance. This volume overcomes a major roadblock to racial justice in the dance field by amplifying the people and culture responsible for the jazz language. Contributors: LaTasha Barnes | Lindsay Guarino | Natasha Powell | Carlos R.A. Jones | Rubim de Toledo | Kim Fuller | Wendy Oliver | Joanne Baker | Karen Clemente | Vicki Adams Willis | Julie Kerr-Berry | Pat Taylor | Cory Bowles | Melanie George | Paula J Peters | Patricia Cohen | Brandi Coleman | Kimberley Cooper | Monique Marie Haley | Jamie Freeman Cormack | Adrienne Hawkins | Karen Hubbard | Lynnette Young Overby | Jessie Metcalf McCullough | E. Moncell Durden Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This ground-breaking work brings dance into current discussions of the African presence in American culture. Dixon Gottschild argues that the Africanist aesthetic has been invisibilized by the pervasive force of racism. This book provides evidence to correct and balance the record, investigating the Africanist presence as a conditioning factor in shaping American performance, onstage and in everyday life. She examines the Africanist presence in American dance forms particularly in George Balanchine's Americanized style of ballet, (post)modern dance, and blackface minstrelsy. Hip hop culture and rap are related to contemporary performance, showing how a disenfranchised culture affects the culture in power.