Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History by Christopher J. Smith (review)

In this ambitious study Christopher J. Smith traces more than two hundred years of street music and dance in the United States, from the public performances of the First Great Awakening to Josephine Baker's banana dance (1926) and the dances in the Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races (1937) and beyond. This "participatory dance culture" was political (p. 2). Through unregulated movement, ordinary people temporarily reclaimed public space, challenged European norms of bodily movement, and expressed "resistance to dominant control" (p. 13). Sometimes the "'rough dance'" was part of political protest; other times it was performed at a festival, a religious event, or a dance hall (p. 32). Running through these different settings was the distinctive "akimbo" style: "to dance with bent arms or twisted torso" to a syncopated rhythm (p. 32). The style grew out of the mixing of races and nationalities in the United States, particularly the transatlantic encounters of Africans and Europeans. Smith's work pushes the boundaries of cultural history and canons of dance to include street dance and encourages readers to see the political significance of dance throughout the history of the United States.

Resistance through dance took many different forms. For example, in eighteenth-century New Orleans, black and white people danced together despite official segregation. The Native American Ghost Dance spread across the northern Great Plains in the late nineteenth century as resistance to poor living conditions on reservations and changes to reservation policy. Lakota leaders refused to end the Ghost Dance, despite fearful white people's demands. White misunderstanding of the meaning of the dance played a role in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. In the twentieth century, the distortions, crossed eyes, and bent knees and arms of Josephine Baker, who became a civil rights activist, were acts of "self-liberation" (p. 100).

These examples of resistance clearly diverge. Some dancers broke the law; in other cases, the rough dancing does not seem to have attracted the attention of lawmakers at all. Some dancers risked extreme violence, while some dancers' transgressions were the basis of global stardom. Some dances were solos; other dances involved groups. Smith's approach, however, tends to flatten out difference by asserting that all examples are instances of "subaltern resistance" (p. 3). More detailed analysis would help readers understand the significance of different styles and contexts for reaching particular goals. Smith theorizes that dances that do not enact permanent change are still worthy of analysis as "subaltern tactics" (p. 57). Yet Smith's series of case studies invites the question: Which dances were effective protests?

The sheer variety of dances included here has some advantages, such as showing how contexts of racial mixing shaped dance over a long period, but it also has drawbacks. Some case studies seem out of place. Smith offers a detailed reading of the blackface minstrelsy in Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2000), comparing it with dance in Malcolm X's Autobiography (1965) because both demonstrate "dance-based cross-racial attraction," but Smith does not explore the distinct contexts and audiences for these texts (p. 103). Other examples also lack detail. While Smith breaks down the dance steps of the Lindy Hop in conjunction with musical lyrics and a tin whistle in A Day at the Races, his discussion of Malcom X's dancing lacks detail. He notes that Malcolm X's balletic white partner drew attention to the duo, but Smith does not describe how their contrasting styles might have worked together. In addition, although Smith considers sexual objectification in Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" (1992), he does not draw this layer of gendered analysis into his discussion of Josephine Baker. For the most part, this cultural history presents dance as simply resistance, not as a contradictory practice...