Sidewalk Dancing

Sidewalk Dancing
Author: Letitia Lehua Moffitt
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Families
ISBN: 9780984040599

"Sidewalk Dancing is a careful exploration of a diverse family's dynamics told with" the subtle wrist bends and brush strokes of a perpetual outsider. Multiple narratives told by a gifted multi-ethnic artist create a beautifully crooked mosaic. Miranda McGee, the daughter of shy, pragmatic Grace Chao and globetrotting dreamer George McGee, feels like a social pariah. She is a factory original, not bound to one land, nor one people. Miranda knows she doesn't entirely belong anywhere. She doesn't understand how her parents ever married, how they picked up and moved to Oahu. How, despite their cultural differences, they could start a new life, build a house, raise a child, and run a popular local diner. Miranda may feel like an outcast in Hawaii or New York, but it is her alienation from her family environment and her own identity that makes her realize that some people feel like outsiders no matter where they are, and this alone may be the one thing her family members have in common.

Dancing the Politics of Pleasure at the New Orleans Second Line

Dancing the Politics of Pleasure at the New Orleans Second Line
Author: Rachel Carrico
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2024-10-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 025204715X

On many Sundays, Black New Orleanians dance through city streets in Second Lines. These processions invite would-be spectators to join in, grooving to an ambulatory brass band for several hours. Though an increasingly popular attraction for tourists, parading provides the second liners themselves with a potent public expression of Black resistance. Rachel Carrico examines the parading bodies in motion as a form of negotiating and understanding power. Seeing pleasure as a bodily experience, Carrico reveals how second liners’ moves link joy and liberation, self and communal identities, play and dissent, and reclamations of place. As she shows, dancers’ choices allow them to access the pleasure of reclaiming self and city through motion and rhythm while expanding a sense of the possible in the present and for the future. In-depth and empathetic, Dancing the Politics of Pleasure at the New Orleans Second Line blends analysis with a chorus of Black voices to reveal an indelible facet of Black culture in the Crescent City.

Made in NuYoRico

Made in NuYoRico
Author: Marisol Negrón
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2024-09-06
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1478059877

In Made in NuYoRico, Marisol Negrón tells the cultural history of salsa, tracing the music’s Nuyorican meanings over a fifty-year period that begins with the establishment of Fania Records in 1964 and how it capitalized on salsa’s Nuyorican imaginary to cultivate a global audience. Drawing on interviews with fans, legendary musicians, and music industry figures as well as analyses of songs, albums, films, and archival documents, Negrón shows how Nuyorican cultural and social histories became embedded in and impacted salsa music's flows during its foundational period in the mid-1960s and its boom in the 1970s. Salsa’s Nuyorican aesthetics challenged mainstream notions of Americanness and Puerto Ricanness and produced an alternative public sphere through which New York’s poor and working-class Puerto Ricans could contest racialization and colonial power. By outlining salsa’s complicated musical, cultural, commercial, racial, gendered, legal, and political entanglements, Negrón demonstrates its centrality to Nuyorican identity and subjectivity.

The Fool of New York City

The Fool of New York City
Author: Michael O'Brien
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2016
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1621640736

Set in present day Manhattan, The Fool of New York City is the tale of two souls who are considered to be "fools" and "idiots" in the eyes of most people they encounter. One is a literal giant, the other an amnesiac who believes he is the 17th century Spanish painter Francisco de Goya, hundreds of years old, aging more slowly than the rest of the human race. Billy the giant has also briefly suffered from amnesia years ago, and he understands the anguish of those who have lost their identity. He is an apparently simple person, a failed basketball player with an enormous good heart who takes Francisco under his wing after they meet through a seeming coincidence. Together they undertake a laborious search to discover Francisco's true past. The trail leads them to numerous adventures, into the shrouded realm of hidden memories, the ironies and complexities of human character and destiny, of catastrophic evil and of redemption. It is a journey into the mysterious dimensions of the mind. It is about trauma and remembrance in America.

Dancing in the Street

Dancing in the Street
Author: Suzanne E. Smith
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2001-05-02
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0674043839

Detroit in the 1960s was a city with a pulse: people were marching in step with Martin Luther King, Jr., dancing in the street with Martha and the Vandellas, and facing off with city police. Through it all, Motown provided the beat. This book tells the story of Motown--as both musical style and entrepreneurial phenomenon--and of its intrinsic relationship to the politics and culture of Motor Town, USA. As Suzanne Smith traces the evolution of Motown from a small record company firmly rooted in Detroit's black community to an international music industry giant, she gives us a clear look at cultural politics at the grassroots level. Here we see Motown's music not as the mere soundtrack for its historical moment but as an active agent in the politics of the time. In this story, Motown Records had a distinct role to play in the city's black community as that community articulated and promoted its own social, cultural, and political agendas. Smith shows how these local agendas, which reflected the unique concerns of African Americans living in the urban North, both responded to and reconfigured the national civil rights campaign. Against a background of events on the national scene--featuring Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes, Nat King Cole, and Malcolm X--Dancing in the Street presents a vivid picture of the civil rights movement in Detroit, with Motown at its heart. This is a lively and vital history. It's peopled with a host of major and minor figures in black politics, culture, and the arts, and full of the passions of a momentous era. It offers a critical new perspective on the role of popular culture in the process of political change.

Dancing Aztecs

Dancing Aztecs
Author: Donald E. Westlake
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2011-10-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1453228306

The hunt is on for a valuable statue in this comic crime thriller from “the funniest man in the world” (The Washington Post). A small South American republic has decided to capitalize on its national symbol: a prized gold statue of a dancing Aztec priest. The president asks a sculptor to make sixteen copies of it for sale abroad. The sculptor replaces the original with one of his fakes, and ships the real one to New York City for an under-the-table sale to a museum. The statues travel to America spread out among five crates, labeled to ensure that delivery goes as planned. But it doesn’t work. Asked to pick up the crate marked “E” at the airport, delivery man Jerry Manelli, confused by his client’s Spanish accent, takes crate “A” instead. The statue disappears into the city, leading him on a baffling chase, which—if he comes up with the wrong Aztec—could cost him his life.

Tap Dancing America

Tap Dancing America
Author: Constance Valis Hill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 462
Release: 2014-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190225386

Here is the vibrant, colorful, high-stepping story of tap -- the first comprehensive, fully documented history of a uniquely American art form. Writing with all the verve and grace of tap itself, Constance Valis Hill offers a sweeping narrative, filling a major gap in American dance history and placing tap firmly center stage.

Che's Chevrolet, Fidel's Oldsmobile

Che's Chevrolet, Fidel's Oldsmobile
Author: Richard Schweid
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2004
Genre: Transportation
ISBN: 9780807828922

A car-centered history of life on Cuba over the past century explores how vintage U.S.-made cars long extinct in the U.S. and held together with mechanical ingenuity and willpower provide a common representation of Cuba.

Dancing in the Streets

Dancing in the Streets
Author: Unger, Steven
Publisher: Anaphora Literary Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2015-03-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1681140691

Now and then, you still can see the tattered remains of a bumper sticker exclaiming: “If you remember the ’60s, you weren’t there!” But Steven P. Unger is an exception to the rule—he took notes. As a result, his novel Dancing in the Streets is replete with unforgotten and unforgettable images of events and scenes that have long been lost in a smoke-filled haze. From the Merry Pranksters’ Wavy Gravy teaching breathing lessons outside Nixon’s first Inaugural Ball to a near-fatal encounter with Charles de Gaulle’s Republican Guard in Paris, there are compelling scenes from beginning to end no less cinematically vivid for the fact that they’re real. And while the story-chapters of Dancing in the Streets have more than just a ring of truth to them along with generous helpings of riotous comedy, there is also a compelling mystery haunting Unger’s alter ego, Steven Strazza: a deathbed revelation that leads to the discovery of long-buried secrets of murders affecting families on three different continents.