British Dance: Black Routes
- Submitting institution
-
De Montfort University
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 33022
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
10.4324/9781315691268
- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9781315691268
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
1
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This edited collection came from an AHRC-funded research project into British Dance and the African Diaspora for which Ramsay Burt was principal investigator. All the contributors to the book had been involved in this project. Some are established academics while others are independent scholars who have been key practitioners in the black British dance community. The book is the first collection of scholarly essays on black British dance. Until this book almost all available literature on the work of black dance artists was from African-American scholars It includes two co-written chapters by Christy Adair and Burt, and appendices co-written for an exhibition by the project at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and here revised and extended:
1 ‘Introduction: British Dance and the African Diaspora’, 1-14
2. ‘Chapter 8: Negotiating the Centre’, 149-166
3. Appendix 1 & 2. British Dance Black Routes Exhibition, & Timeline of significant events 1946-2005 for British-based dancers who are black.
The introduction includes an overview of the history of the work of black British dance artists and companies that goes beyond the few simple linear narratives of previous publications and raises methodological questions about how to counteract the processes of marginalisation and exclusion of black artists from canonical accounts of British dance history. It is informed by theoretical perspectives from postcolonial studies, including questions around representation, diaspora, and approaches to understanding the significance of black spirituality.
Chapter 8 challenges the way the history of black dance artists is assumed to be unconnected to the work of their white peers both within the centre ground of contemporary dance and its experimental fringes, and considers for the first time the meetings in 1970s and 1980s between dancers of Caribbean heritage with dancers and drummers from Ghana and Nigeria as a consequence of Britain’s colonial heritage.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -