So You Think You Can Dance: Black Dance and American Popular Culture

Abstract

Stuart Hall asserts that “by definition black popular culture is a contradictory space. It is a site of strategic contestation.” Therefore, “it can never be simplified or explained in terms of the simple binary oppositions that are still habitually used to map it out: high and low; resistance versus incorporation; authentic versus inauthentic; experimental versus formal; opposition versus homogenization.”1 Thus, there is cause for a new and broader assessment tool than traditional prognosticators allow. Cultural scholar Harry Shaw links all black popular culture to black culture. “Black popular culture in America holds a peculiar status in that, unlike Western popular culture in general, it has no counterpart in Black high culture.” Moreover Shaw concedes that all of African American “culture is to a great extent Black popular culture, for there is no identifiable Black culture that cannot be or is not readily embraced by the wide spectrum of Black society. Black culture is popular culture partly because it continually looks toward the roots of the common Black experience and draws from those roots for its creativity.”2 Finally he correctly posits that as black creativity continues to proliferate, popular forms move out of the community to be adopted and appropriated by the larger mainstream audience.