Eating, Dancing, and Courting in New York Black and Latino Relations, 1930-1970

Opie, Frederick Douglass

doi:10.1353/jsh.0.0044

Cited by 11 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…During the 1930s, African Americans and Latinos coalesced around shared challenges of factory work, class, and experiences of racism. The multi‐ethnic solidarity present amongst blacks and Hispanics for instance in Tarrytown, New York, demonstrates the various modalities of resistance employed to negotiate the racist cultural milieu (Opie ). Adding gender to the analysis, Boris (:96) argues that African American women were to present themselves as “neater, pleasanter, more cooperative than their white counterparts, to make whites feel more comfortable around them”.…”

Section: Introduction and Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

African American Cultural Technology: The Lindy Hop, the King of Pop, and the Factory Worker's Experience

Stovall

2015

Transforming Anthropology

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African Americans have been integral in shaping the aesthetics of modernity generally, and with respect to dance in particular. Through labor, art, cultural technology, and social life, African American aesthetics have breathed life into modern and contemporary American culture. The stress and fatigue of machines, labor, capitalism, and racism, imposed on bodies during the industrial revolution and in the post-industrial era have provided raw material for black artistic expressions during the mid-to-late twentieth century. Furthermore, this artistic expression, fueled by the angst of changing times generally and tensions facing African Americans in particular, has served as American catharsis through the creation of innovative cultural expressions. This article analyzes the dialectical relationships of industrialization, racism, and modern aesthetics, through the lens of the innovative African American social dance form, the Lindy Hop; and the virtuosic pop performances of Michael Jackson. The important contributions of the Lindy Hop as a dance style and Michael Jackson as a performer have had a profound impact on the aesthetics of modernity in American social and popular concert dance. To better understand the relationship between industrialization and the African American shaping of aesthetics of modernity, this article analyzes black experiences and embodiment of industrial labor and the ways that African Americans drew from their particular experiences of industrial labor toward the creation of critical cultural technology.The Negroes of the USA have breathed into jazz the song, the rhythm, and the sound of machines. -Le CorbusierMichael Jackson both incarnates and transcends the trope of the human motor, combining the virtuoso's seemingly mechanical exactitude with suprahuman charisma.-Judith Hamera

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Section: Introduction and Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%