Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship

by Aimee Meredith Cox

In Shapeshifters Aimee Meredith Cox explores how young Black women in a Detroit homeless shelter contest stereotypes, critique their status as partial citizens, and negotiate poverty, racism, and gender violence to create and imagine lives for themselves. Based on eight years of fieldwork at the Fresh Start shelter, Cox shows how the shelter's residents—who range in age from fifteen to twenty-two—employ strategic methods she characterizes as choreography to disrupt the social hierarchies and prescriptive narratives that work to marginalize them. Among these are dance and poetry, which residents learn in shelter workshops. These outlets for performance and self-expression, Cox shows, are key to the residents exercising their agency, while their creation of alternative family structures demands a rethinking of notions of care, protection, and love. Cox also uses these young women's experiences to tell larger of Detroit's history, the Great Migration, deindustrialization, the politics of respectability, and the construction of Black girls and women as social problems. With Shapeshifters Cox gives a voice to young Black women who find creative and non-normative solutions to the problems that come with being young, Black, and female in America.

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthropology, Race, Theory, Sociology, School, Academic

296 pages, Hardcover

First published July 24, 2015

About the author

Aimee Meredith Cox is a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor of performance and African and African American Studies at Fordham University. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan where she also held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Center for the Education of Women. Dr. Cox is currently completing a book entitled, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (under contract with Duke University Press) is on the editorial board of The Feminist Wire and on the founding editorial board of Public: A Journal of Imagining America. Aimee is also a choreographer and dancer. She trained on scholarship with the Dance Theatre of Harlem, toured extensively as a professional dancer with the Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble/Ailey II, and is the founder of The BlackLight Project, a youth-led arts activist organization that operates in Detroit, MI, Newark, NJ and Brooklyn, NY.

(from http://anthropology.as.nyu.edu/object...)

Reviews

[Darnell Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Black girls are often written about as subjects in texts —subjects (and not complex human beings) who maintain the ability to articulate their lived experiences, to read the world, to analyze the range of structural conditions that shape their lives. Cox, a cultural anthropologist whose ethnographic prose is as gorgeous as it is deft in its analyses, centers Black girls from Detroit and Newark in her texts as livable beings who, along with her, co-articulate a theory of Black girlhood and becoming. It’s an ethnographic text, a choreographed dance between critical theory and embodied practices of survival, that is long overdue. It’s a text all readers within the academy, and without, should read.

[Lydia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow... another amazing book. This was so great, I can't even list all of the reasons why I think this is a wonderful book. However, one of the main things that I found super powerful was how the author is a former dancer, which informed her writing and ethnography in a very beautiful and moving way (and spoke to me personally).

[Sara Salem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. Feel very emotional having finished it.

[Rafael Munia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite the low rating, it is not that I disliked this book.
It is just that I see it as weak anthropology.

It reads as a very interesting diary, as we read about the experience of the author and the girls that comprise her list of informants. The stories are fun, interesting, and written in a very caring way.

So I wouldn't say I dislike the experience of reading it. That being said, as an anthropological work, it really didn't earn its spot as a good work.

It doesn't really engage with theory as much as it should, and when it does, it conceptualizes what I would pretty much consider a very common device of the everyday human experience (the act of shifting oneself according to the situation and how you wish to be perceived by the group you are talking to) as somehow a uniquely "black girl" strategy of resistance. And even then, for something that holds the title of the book, you would think she would give this concept more importance, but that never happens.

In conclusion, a good enjoyable read as story telling, not really a good read as ethnographical work...

[Nina Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most enlightening and thought provoking books I have ever read. Cox provides insight, theory, and folklore and storytelling to stories about young Black girls and women. She allows readers to look into the lives of Black girls (whether Black or not), using ethnography in a way that was not meant to probe and consume someone's life, but rather feel like you are a part of it. Not only does she provide important insight on the ways in which we might use fieldwork and ethnographic field methods, she critiques the use of it and engages with her own theory and praxis within the very fieldwork she is doing. Amazing book.

[Annelie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A moving story about the black girls who stayed at Fresh Start, a homeless shelter that was devoted to improving the lives of homeless men and women as they sought to secure stable employment.

Conflicted. While Cox ix a great writer, her decision to write in a style that only seems accessible to her fellow academics seems counterintuitive to her message. Moreover, she struggles to interweave her captivating narratives with her more muddled analyses, and especially struggles to weave them together on the larger level into a coherent narrative.

[Bryson Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dr. Cox’s unflinchingly honest peek into the interior lives of Black girls and women is equal parts grounding, inspiring, humorous, and heartbreaking. Ethnographic storytelling can often feel too academic, but Dr. Cox’s approach feels oddly familial and warm. Her ability to weave narrative with the requisite background context is fascinating and skillful — she is truly one of the best to do it!

[Ieva Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. Read for an anthropology class but would have enjoyed it either way.

[Alek Sigley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good blend of memoir and ethnography.

[Devin Moran · Rating 5 out of 5]

an ethnographic masterpiece that rivals other arguable ethnographic narratives. I necessary read for doctoral coursework especially Black girls/ Black women.

[aimee paetz · Rating 5 out of 5]

PHENOMENAL. i chose to read it for a university project and it turned out to be so impactful and an amazing read, i would def recommend to others

[Nia Paz · Rating 4 out of 5]

cried so good

[Eunice · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of my favorite ethnographies of all time. so beautiful written and approached with extreme empathy, awareness, and friendship

[Sydney Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

very well written for an ethnography, however, this interrupted my reading of PJO for an anthro class and was surprisingly very prosaic.

[Maddie Pedurand · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for school, is a good ethnography on a girls home in Detroit.

[Timea Jarosova · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for my anthropology class. It was pretty interesting, but not life changing to me.

[Brinlie Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this entire book until it came to the ending where they had their dance performance. I know it was trying to express that all of the girls needed room to figure out their identity but I felt like this was not that interesting and was probably the weakest way she could have ended this book. She should have ended it with the kidnappings or with the 'bleach' section. Or even with the part about the high school girls standing up for themselves was bigger news than the rapes -that part I'll remember and taught me something. Their dance performance? Not so much.

[Mike Mena · Rating 5 out of 5]

I highly recommend this to anthropology students (undergrad-phd). This is the kind of informant centered approach we should all learn to do.

It is also gut wrenchingly sad, funny, inspiring...all without sensationalizing black girlhood. Absolutely accessible to any reader but offers insight up to phd level. Buy this one.

[Shelby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aimee Cox is incredibly self-reflexive in her book. She allows these girls to teach her, instead of remaining an untouchable observer. Cox's "Shapeshifters" brings a human face to the economic disaster that is Detroit, showing us how young black girls survive and thrive in uncertain circumstances.