Chicago Footwork: Re-Imagining Community and Interrogating the Politics of Home through Dance

FAIN: FT-278947-21

ShaDawn D. Battle
Xavier University (Cincinnati, OH 45207-1035)

Research and writing for the first chapter of a larger book project examining the practice of Chicago footwork, a contemporary dance form.  

Chapter 1 of my book project is titled “Footwork was My Sanctuary”: Toward an African Diasporic Spiritual Heritage. Chicago Footwork is a cultural practice endemic to Chicago and performed by Black youth on the South and West sides. As cultural critic and former practitioner, I will examine Footwork's potential for nation-building, "homemaking," and self-actualizing, in response to structural inequities and repressive power structures in Chicago. But this chapter, specifically, achieves this goal by situating Chicago Footwork culture within an Afro-Diasporic spiritual heritage, dating back to prehistoric Africa and transatlantic slavery. As a humanities research project, it examines a cultural formation birthed from interlocking systems of oppression, as well as the artform as an embodied vernacular dance of liberation. Thus, I locate Chicago Footwork as part of the Black expressive tradition ripe for interdisciplinary study in fields such as African American and Cultural Studies.