Anthea Kraut, Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston (Minneapolis, MN: U. of Minnesota Press, 2008) (From the Preface: "The roots of this project lie, in some respects, in the Chicago-area dance studios at which I spent much of my childhood and adolescence. Although i studied ballet and modern from an early age, jazz dance was my greatest love, something about the physicalization of rhythm always felt the most gratifying to me. While I soon noticed that different studios and teachers had different conceptions of what jazz dane entailed, the focus on articulating rhythm was a constant. The jazz class I attended shared another feature: none provided any historical context for the form. In these predominately white spaces, no mention was made of the African American origins of the idiom, although the recorded music that we used was more often than not opposed or performed by African American artists." "It was not until my junior year at Carleton College . . . when I took a course title 'Black Dance: A Historical Survey," that I confronted the racial dynamics that went unspoken in those suburban jazz dance classes. Using Lynne Fauley Emery's Black Dance from 1619 to Today as our main text, Professor Mary Easter led us through a survey of nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy (the first I had heard of this racist and popular form of entertainment), the social history of the Lindy Hop, the pioneering concerts dance efforts of Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus, and the more recent achievements of Alvin Ailey and Bill T. Jones. Like a news flash, it became clear just how much jazz dance, that quintessential American form, owed to African-derived traditions. Excited by this new knowledge, I realized that the same issues that interested me in my literature and history courses--the artistic and cultural implications of America's complicated and disturbing racial history--were woven into the very fabric of my extracurricular activities. At the same time, the fact that this was a revelation vexed me. Why had it been so easy to participate in and become passionate about a dance form without learning its history? How had my white body become the site for the continued erasure of black bodies from the received history of American culture?" Id. at ix-x. Food for thought . . . for all of us! How do we particulate in and contribute to the erasure of contributions blacks and other minorities make to American culture?).
Anthea Kraut, Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2016) (From the back cover: "Choreographing Copyright is a new historical and cultural analysis of U.S. dance-makers' investment in intellectual property rights. Stretching from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, the book reconstructs efforts to win copyright protection for choreography and teases out their raced and gendered politics, showing how dancers have embraced intellectual property rights as a means to both consolidate and contest racial and gendered power. [] Drawing on critical race and feminist theories and on cultural studies of copyright, Choreographing Copyright offers a fresh insight into the raced and gendered hierarchies that govern the theatrical marketplace, white women's historically contingent relationship to property rights, legacies of ownership of black bodies and appropriation of non-white labor, and the tension between dance's ephemerality and its reproducibility").
