Commentaire
With skill and candor Susan Manning disturbs the waters of our complacency and challenges entrenched assumptions about American dance. Her research is careful yet exhilarating, her conclusions exciting yet sobering. This work is sure to raise hackles in its canon-breaking interrogation of race and class in dance.
BRENDA DIXON GOTTSCHILD author of The Black Dancing Body, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, and Waltzing in the Dark
With unflagging literary drive and clarity, Manning delineates a history of American dance that rightfully places concerns of race, class, gender, and sexuality center stage. Sustained by scrupulous research and cogent analyses, this volume pays long- overdue attention to material and social circumstances surrounding the production and reception of twentieth-century modern dance in the United States, A breakthrough for dance studies that aligns dance history with critical race theory, Modern Dance, Negro Dance is of great importance to anyone interested in how to view, read, and think critically about dance and its effects across historical eras.