Were You a Double Dutch queen as a child?
So you're still trying to figure out what "performance studies" is? Based on the great questions and responses I received from my post, "What is Performance Studies?", i've decided to start a new feature on this blog that highlights scholarship coming out of this field.
The first book I want to recommend all of you go out and purchase is Kyra Gaunt's brilliant new manuscript published by NYU Press earlier this year, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double Dutch to Hip Hop.
Professor Gaunt is a tenured Ethnomusciologist here at NYU whose work deals with African American popular culture and performance. Her book is a wonderful example of how performance studies scholars pay close attention to performative aspects of everyday life. Gaunt's book pays attention to how the age old practices of black girls playing double dutch and patty-cake on street corners actually tell us alot about the politics of power, gender, and sexuality in African American life. It's a truly fascinating study. The book is a revision of her dissertation, which she completed at the University of Michigan in 1997 under the direction of award winning Black historian Robin Kelley.
Take a minute to read Matthew Somoroff's review of the book, which Professor Mark Anthony Deal of Duke University features on his blog this month.
The first book I want to recommend all of you go out and purchase is Kyra Gaunt's brilliant new manuscript published by NYU Press earlier this year, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double Dutch to Hip Hop.
Professor Gaunt is a tenured Ethnomusciologist here at NYU whose work deals with African American popular culture and performance. Her book is a wonderful example of how performance studies scholars pay close attention to performative aspects of everyday life. Gaunt's book pays attention to how the age old practices of black girls playing double dutch and patty-cake on street corners actually tell us alot about the politics of power, gender, and sexuality in African American life. It's a truly fascinating study. The book is a revision of her dissertation, which she completed at the University of Michigan in 1997 under the direction of award winning Black historian Robin Kelley.
Take a minute to read Matthew Somoroff's review of the book, which Professor Mark Anthony Deal of Duke University features on his blog this month.
The Games Black Girls Play (NYU Press 2006)
*Review by Matthew Somoroff
*Review by Matthew Somoroff
With a focus on the handclapping and rope-jumping games of young African American girls, Kyra Gaunt asks some provocative and original questions in her new book The Games Black Girls Play. What if we entertained the possibility of considering handclapping games such as “Miss Mary Mack” and jump rope games like “Double Dutch” a form of black popular music? What if we not only considered these games popular music, but thought about how they have been sampled, borrowed and appropriated by commercial male artists in genres such as hip-hop? What if, in considering the games of black girls, we considered how these games transmit and express notions about race and gender as mutually inclusive factors of African American identity formation not only through their musical sounds, but also through their physicality and embodied movement? What if we took “gender studies” in music to refer not just to the study of musicking by women, but an investigation of how men and women interact through and around music?
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It is to Gaunt’s credit that her book follows through on these questions, giving the reader an insight into the meaningfulness of “everyday” activities like the girls’ games, and showing how popular culture is made on the ground, albeit in continuous dialogue with mass-mediated music and culture... continue reading here.
I feel that the African-American culture is developed without focus or with longevity to pass to future generations.
Posted by
Anonymous |
6/29/2006
If anything...African American culture has been the measuring stick by which popular american culture (and increasingly the world) in general has proceeded....Let's take popular music for example....hip hop is the most recent folk tradition of ours to become a billion dollar phenomenon...let's talk about disco and funk that preceded it, rock and roll that preceded that..the blues and gospel that preceded that..negro spirituals that preceded that...and the MOTHER OF IT ALL..The music created by our peoples traditionally with the afircan drum...it's all OURS..and of our TRADITION.
We have a rich legacy that will continue to be pssed down for generations to come...NOW we can talk about American Capitalism and how that system has sacrificed the purity of our cultural legacies...and to suggest that it has may just be accurate...
But to also suggest that our culture is "developed without focus or with longevity" is to miss the point in my HUMBLE opinion..Without our culture, which is informed by the struggles of living in a system that has been designed to destroy you, there would be no AMERICAN CULTURE that, by the way, we continually, intentionally, and Imperialistically, export to the rest of the world.
Needless to say our culture is here to stay...Now we as a cummunity have to act responsibly with such power. And that is a different topic...lol
Posted by
Quaheem |
6/29/2006