Table of Contents

Preface Acknowledgments 1. Dancing Under the Lash The Middle Passage The Plantation Environment Bals du Cordon Bleu 2. Shoddy Confines: The Jook Continuum The Great Transition Jook Houses, Honky-Tonks, After-Hours Joints Rent Parties, Chittlin' Struts, Blue Monday Affairs 3. Upper Shadies and Urban Politics Monday Night at the Paradise Ballroom Bells, Buzzers, and Air of Legitimacy Night Clubs, Show Bars, Cabaret Parties Dancin' in the Streets Black Elite Affairs Postscript Notes Index

Promotional Information

The first analysis of the development of the jook and other dance arenas in African-American culture

About the Author

Katrina Hazzard-Gordon is Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, Camden, and the founder and director of the Diaspora Dance Theatre and Research Group.

Reviews

"We glean just how rich the black dance tradition is from this vibrant, engaging social history, which hops from the decks of slave ships to honky-tonks, membership clubs and cabarets... [It] takes us inside Reconstruction-era jook houses where food, gambling, drink and fellowship were offered, and where dances...crystallized into cultural forms." oPublishers Weekly "An excellent study of black dance... A well-done and readable account of how black Americans brought their dances with them from Africa, adapted them to the music of urban honky-tonks and jook joints, and created a unique art form." oJazztimes "An important part of the growing body of African American mass culture literature addressing issues of concern to black people." oThe Philadelphia New Observer "Jookin' analyzes an underexplored aspect of the black American experience. In the larger sense, the book is a study of social change that depicts how one aspect of African-American culture has been affected by racial oppression and the process of urbanization." oAmerican Journal of Sociology "Here's a book I've longed forohistorically rich, empirically inspired and, above all, reverent to the funk and drive and moral spirit of the Grand Atlantic Black Dance Tradition." oRobert Farris Thompson "This is an excellent idea for a book. A dance/social history book of this order has been called for Jo these many years. Dance history has been very slim on Black dance, and information about its forms is hard to come by. Hazzard-Gordon has given us not merely an accounting of the venues of Black dancing in America, but also their evolution." oJohn F. Szwed, Professor of Anthropology and Afro-American Studies, Yale University "Hazzard-Gordons' brief, informative, sprightly, and thoroughly enjoyable volume draws on a wealth of published scholarship, interviews, and personal experience to trace the evolving varieties of African-American dance forms." oChoice