Cultural Memory and Popular Dance: Dancing to Remember, Dancing to Forget

by Clare Parfitt (Editor)

Overview

This book focuses on the myriad ways that people collectively remember or forget shared pasts through popular dance. In dance classes, nightclubs, family celebrations, tourist performances, on television, film, music video and the internet, cultural memories are shared and transformed by dancing bodies adapting yesterday’s steps to today’s concerns. The book gathers emerging and seasoned scholarly voices from a wide range of geographical and disciplinary perspectives to discuss cultural remembering and forgetting in diverse popular dance contexts. The contributors ask: how are Afro-diasporic memories invoked in popular dance classes? How are popular dance genealogies manipulated and reclaimed? What is at stake for the nation in the nationalizing of folk and popular dances? And how does mediated dancing transmit memory as feelings or affects? The book reveals popular dance to be vital to cultural processes of remembering and forgetting, allowing participants to pivot between alternative pasts, presents and futures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030710835
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	12/02/2021
Series:	Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Clare Parfitt is an interdisciplinary dance scholar and PhD Supervisor at the University of Chichester, UK. She is Chair of PoP Moves, an international network for popular dance research. From 2014-2016, she was Principal Investigator for the AHRC Leadership Fellowship project ‘Dancing with Memory’, which led to this edited collection.

Table of Contents

1.    Introduction.- 2. Mother Tongue: Dance and Language, an Autobiographical Excavation.- 3. From danzón to salsa. Archives, dancing body and cultural memory in Cuba.- 4. Feeling With, Moving Toward: Empathetic Attunement as Dance Reconstruction Methodology.- 5. The tanda and Afro-Argentine memory: Remembering Black Buenos Aires through tango.- 6. Salsa con “Afro”.- 7. Dancing the Gone-Too-Soon, Re-Membering Slavery’s Persistent Wound: Young Black Ghosts in Popular American Performance.- 8. Embodying and transmitting cultural memory through tap dance: Shuffling with my dancestors.- 9.    Recognizing sources, not being copies: Constructions of cultural memory and “ownership” by French urban dancers.- 10.  Learning dances, forgetting borders: Embodied national remembering and the role of the ethnographer in the Hungarian táncház revival.- 11. Limbo like me: ‘limberness’ and refugee experience.- 12. From Colonial Subject to Independence: Cariñosaand Tinikling.- 13. Youthful Bodies as Mnemonic Artifacts: Traversing the Cultural Terrain from Traditional to Popular Dances in Post Independent Ghana.- 14. Dance Performance and Memory in Post-War Peru.- 15. Beyond the hips: The Afro-Ecuadorian dance of Bomba in Chota-Mira Valley as an affective space to remember.- 16. “What When I Yearn to Dance Along!?” – The Transmission of (Be)Longing and Nostalgia in Popular Screendance.- 17.  Parading the Past, Taming the New: Popular Dance Excursions.- 18.  Speaking the Unspeakable: the cancan and the classical canon.- 19. Dionysus meets neoliberalism: Zumba Fitness as an example of Zorbitality.- 20. Bent History? The Late-Modern Uses and Abuses of Historical Imagery Showing Men Dancing Tango with Each Other.- 21.  Conclusions.