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

by 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. Christopher J. Smith spans centuries, geographies, and cultural identities as he delves into a wide range of historical moments. These include the God-intoxicated public demonstrations of Shakers and Ghost Dancers in the First and Second Great Awakenings; creolized antebellum dance in cities from New Orleans to Bristol; the modernism and racial integration that imbued twentieth-century African American popular dance; the revolutionary connotations behind images of dance from Josephine Baker to the Marx Brothers; and public movement's contributions to hip hop, antihegemonic protest, and other contemporary transgressive communities’ physical expressions of dissent and solidarity. Multidisciplinary and wide-ranging, Dancing Revolution examines how Americans turned the rhythms of history into the movement behind the movements.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

Published May 15, 2019

About the author

Born in Detroit, Christopher J. Smith had street cred before it was cool. His stay in Motown only lasted a few short years. After some thieves used the ladder in his own garage to steal a TV out of the second story window, Smith's parents decided it was time to move to the suburbs.

At the age of 8, a cross country move took him to Tucson, Arizona. Already having written such classics as "The Bird and the Worm" and "The Man and the Tree," Christopher moved his talents into homemade comic books illustrated with horrible drawings.

Smith eventually went to school for Film Studies where his professors included a screenwriting teacher that labeled himself as brilliant but was absolutely crazy, while a Hollywood blacklisted Cinematographer taught him about film.

After these years in film school, Smith made his way to Los Angeles to tackle the lifelong desire to be a screenwriter.

It wasn't until recently that Smith tried his hand at a novel. It was "Abby Linford and Her Imaginary Friend" where he found his stride. In the first novel devoted to the 9-year-old girl that was too mature to be nine, he opened readers up to fantastic worlds filled with mythical creatures, endangered animals, magical powers, and lands that were on the verge of ruin.

Reviews

[Sounding History]

I'm the author! DANCING REVOLUTION is a study of 400 years of movement and noise--street dance and "rough music"--as tools by which minoritized peoples, across many moments in New World cultural history, have sought to create freedom.