New Titles in Dance Studies

We aren’t able to attend the 2019 Dance Studies Association Conference but you can still get a discount on our new and forthcoming dance books! Use promo code DSA30 to get 30% off! Offer ends August 18.

Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham: Dances in Literature and Cinema

Hannah Durkin

Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham were the two most acclaimed and commercially successful African American dancers of their era and among the first black women to enjoy international screen careers. However, difficulties in accessing and categorizing their works on the screen and on the page have obscured their contributions to film and literature. Hannah Durkin investigates Baker’s and Dunham’s films and writings to shed new light on their legacies as transatlantic artists and civil rights figures.

Hot Feet and Social Change: African Dance and Diaspora Communities

Edited by Kariamu Welsh, Esailama G. A. Diouf, and Yvonne Daniel

Concentrating on eight major cities in the United States, this collection of essays challenges myths about African dance while demonstrating its power to awaken identity, self-worth, and community respect. These voices of experience share personal accounts of living African traditions, their first encounters with and ultimate embrace of dance, and what teaching African-based dance has meant to them and their communities.

Available November 2019

Back to the Dance Itself: Phenomenologies of the Body in Performance

Edited by Sondra Fraleigh

Sondra Fraleigh edits essays that illuminate how scholars apply a range of phenomenologies to explore questions of dance and the world; performing life and language; body and place; and self-knowing in performance. Some authors delve into theoretical perspectives, while others relate personal experiences and reflections that reveal fascinating insights arising from practice. Collectively, authors give particular consideration to the interactive lifeworld of making and doing that motivates performance.

Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History

Christopher J. Smith

Throughout American history, patterns of political intent and impact have linked the wide range of dance movements performed in public places. Groups diverse in their cultural or political identities, or in both, long ago seized on street dancing, marches, open-air revival meetings, and theaters, as well as in dance halls and nightclubs, as a tool for contesting, constructing, or reinventing the social order. Dancing Revolution presents richly diverse case studies to illuminate these patterns of movement and influence in movement and sound in the history of American public life.

A Guru’s Journey: Pandit Chitresh Das and Indian Classical Dance in Diaspora

Sarah Morelli

An important modern exponent of Asian dance, Pandit Chitresh Das brought kathak to the US in 1970 and has since become an important art form within the greater Indian diaspora. Yet its adoption outside of India raises questions about what happens to artistic practices when we separate them from their broader cultural contexts. Sarah Morelli, one of Das’s former students, investigates issues in teaching, learning, and performance that developed around Das during his time in the US.

Available November 2019

Read on JSTOR from the Journal of Aesthetic Education, edited by Pradeep Dhillon