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THE BLACK DANCING BODY: A GEOGRAPHY FROM COON TO COOL. By Brenda Dixon Gottschild. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003; pp. 352. $29.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.
Brenda Dixon Gottschild charts a "geography" that maps a unique, yet startlingly ever-present, region of influence in the history of American dance: the black dancing body. The author says on the front cover of the book, "[t]he black dancing body (a fiction based on reality, a fact based upon illusion) has infiltrated and informed the shapes and changes of the American dancing body." The Black Dancing Body is Dixon Gottschild's third installment in a series (after Waltzing in the Dark and Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance) considering and analyzing the influences and acculturation of Africanist dance movement-as the result of the African Diaspora-into the gestalt of American performance. It is a personalized cultural study in which she examines/questions/confronts the taboo references to the physical aesthetics of the ethnically African body.
Dixon Gottschild makes clear that this work is not meant to be read as a comprehensive study of black dance. It is, rather, a representative one, aiming to surface issues sorely absent from the heated debate about what is or is not "black dance" and when and where black dance and dancers enter the argument. She charts a segmented analysis of the black body, "which like the African continent, has a history of literal and figurative dissection" (xiv). The Black Dancing Body walks around its subject, looking at it from...