Open Access edition of Black Power of Hip-Hop Dance: On Kinethic Politics by Naomi Macalalad Bragin

FAIN: DR-292393-23

Regents of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1015)
LeAnn Fields (Project Director: November 2022 to May 2024)
Sara Cohen (Project Director: May 2024 to May 2024)
Sara Cohen (Project Director: May 2024 to January 2025)

This project will allow us to publish the book Black Power of Hip-Hop Dance: On Kinethic Politics by Naomi Macalalad Bragin in an open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of five hundred dollars upon release of the open-access ebook

Associated Products

Single Publication (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Publication Type: Single Publication
Title: Black Power of Hip-Hop Dance: On Kinethic Politics
Year: 2024
ISBN: 9780472903825
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Author: Naomi Macalalad Bragin
Abstract: Kinethic California: Dancing Funk and Disco Era Kinships documents the emergence of new forms of black social and vernacular dance invented by youth living in 1970s California, who helped build the foundations of contemporary hip hop/streetdance culture. Naomi Macalalad Bragin weaves interviews and ethnographies of first-generation (1960s-70s) dancers of strutting, boogaloo, robotting, popping, locking, waacking, and punking styles, as it advances a theory of dance as kinetic kinship formation through a focus on techniques and practices of the dancers themselves. She offers that the term given to these collective movement practices is kinethic to bring attention to motion at the core of black aesthetics that generate dances as forms of kinship beyond blood relation. Kinethics reorient dancers toward kinetic kinship in ways that give continuity to black dance lineages under persistent conditions of disappearance and loss. As dancers engage kinethics, they reinvent gestural vocabularies that describe worlds they imagine into knowing-being. The stories in Kinethic California attend to the aesthetics of everyday movement, seen through the lens of young artists who, from childhood, listened to their family’s soul and funk records, observed the bent-leg strolls and rhythmic handshakes of people moving through their neighborhoods, and watched each other move at house parties, school gyms, and around-the-way social clubs. Their aesthetic sociality and geographic movement provided materials for collective study and creative play. Bragin attends to such multidirectional conversations between dancer, community, and tradition, by which California dance lineages emerge and take flight.
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11950963
Primary URL Description: University of Michigan Press
Secondary URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11950963
Secondary URL Description: JSTOR
URL 3: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/90007
URL 3 Description: OAPEN
Type: Single author monograph

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