Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T14:24:41.399Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Dancing in the Past, Living in the Present: Nostalgia and Race in Southern California Neo-Swing Dance Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Eric Martin Usner
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Nostalgia is a revisionary act, emptying history of depth and texture, when having a manageable history is contingent on accumulation of time-trapped stuff. It's what people hold to, release into play, invent from, use for amusement and amazement, it's what and how people define their passage, their commonality and distinctiveness; a faith, a system of belief expressed in accumulated tokens and artifacts; a culture nourished on mythological narratives and seasonal events, by the passing of gods and goddesses, by stacks of packaged time renewed in changing formats; it's generality so resolutely particular to each adherent that often only myth and liturgy can serve as neutral rites of discourse. It's obviously the faith love invents to reassure its durability; a radical theology, a fusion of intensified sacred and secular yearnings and desires.

“Pre-Ramble” to Reading Jazz, David Meltzer (1993, 34)

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , Winter 2001 , pp. 87 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Combs, James. 1993. The Reagan Range: The Nostalgic Myth in American Politics. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.Google Scholar
Crease, Robert P. 1995. “Divine Frivolity: Hollywood Representations of the Lindy Hop, 1937–1942.” In Representing Jazz. Edited by Gabbard, Krin, 207–228. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Erenberg, Louis. 1998. Swingin' the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fusco, Coco. 1988. “Fantasies of Oppositionality.” Afterimage magazine. December.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. 2000. Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era. New York: St. Martin's Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture, the Meaning of Style. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Meltzer, David. 1993. Reading Jazz. San Francisco: Mercury House.Google Scholar
Smith, Ernie. 1988. “Films.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. Edited by Kernfield, Barry, 375–386. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Stearns, Marshall and Stearns, Jean. 1994. Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance, new ed. New York: Da Capo Press.Google Scholar
Stowe, David. 1994. Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tannock, Stuart. 1995. “Nostalgia Critique.” Cultural Studies 9(3): 453–463.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Raymond. 1980. “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Theory,” 31–49. In Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: Verso.Google Scholar