‘Black dance’: Navigating the politics of ‘black’ in relation to ‘the dance object’ and the body as discourse

Abstract

This paper in seeking to engage dance as a valuable area of academic enquiry, assumes an interdisciplinary stance. Using the multifocal framework of cultural studies and its associated concerns with the politics of identity contained within contested notions of race, class, gender and sexuality, this paper assumes its starting point through a problematisation of the concept of ‘Black Dance’ within contemporary dance literature/criticism/practice. This framework is used in relation to discourses on constructed norms as they relate to and preside over existing marginal discourses. For the purposes of this particular study, bell hooks's radical black feminist writings are used. The purpose of this usage is to illustrate the interconnections between discourses of race, class, gender and sexuality. What emerges is a politics of performance practice. This emergence is an important one, as it situates embodied cultural practice/production (in this instance contemporary dance) within theoretical debates, thus opening up the discipline to a myriad of critical and analytical concerns which it is so often divorced from. Finally, it is important to state my engagement with these concerns – as a white woman. The intention here is to engage marginal discourses through concepts of race and gender – and to explore the idea that marginal discourses are not monolithic. In this instance, the idea of a global sisterhood as promoted by second-wave feminist writers is taken as one starting point that prompts investigation into the interconnections of race and gender.