Circling the Underground: Transnational Movements in Urban Dances and Literatures

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of formations of gender, race, and sexuality in urban/street dances and the writing of dancers.

It focuses on how dancers engage a kinesthetic aesthetic taken from dance in both the form and content of their poetry and autobiographical writings.

For example, stories by breakdancers in collectively written texts such as WE B*GIRLZ by Martha Cooper et al., and Yes Yes Y'all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop's First Decade by Jim Fricke et al., are assembled in a conversational style that reflects the aesthetics of participation in a dance circle.

All of the texts I analyze are positioned at the intersection of orality, textuality, and kinesthetics, and give insight into the interconnected logics of race, gender, and desire.

My research develops a richer analysis of minority forms of cultural praxis by building bridges between emergent discourse on popular dance and traditional textual paradigms in academia.

I focus on the work of writers who adopt black diasporic forms of cultural expression to articulate self identifications, in the fabric of African American, Native American, Caribbean American, French, and Brazilian communities.

I suggest that the authors I analyze all engage with the trope of the circle as a key aesthetic concern and formal determinant, as well as a way to negotiate the expression of individual style as a process of community formation.

My dissertation title makes reference to a methodological question and also a prominent trope of analysis in my project: the circle.

In order to circle the underground, or make prominent subcultural expressions which are marginalized by textual paradigms, I use both a transnational and an interdisciplinary perspective.

Frantz Fanon notes the significant socio-cultural function of the dance circle, and insists that dance must be studied in order to understand the processes of colonialism and revolutionary activity.

However, postcolonial scholars have rarely considered the role of dance culture in history or now.

My work fills this gap by creating disciplinary connections between postcolonial studies, literary, and performance studies.